Home Europe British Army takes delivery of first of new MGB bridges

British Army takes delivery of first of new MGB bridges

New British Army medium girder bridge
Photo: WFEL

Military mobile bridge specialist WFEL has delivered the first of several new medium girder bridge (MGB) systems to the British Army’s Royal Engineers, under a contract awarded in October 2020.

The new MGB bridging sets can be configured in several different ways to provide flexibility to the Commander on the ground.

The first bridge configuration will allow the Royal Engineers to build a 31 meter double story and a five-bay single story MGB, to be used to cross both wet and dry gaps in a variety of operational and emergency disaster relief scenarios.

This is the first of the 17 sets of MGBs to be supplied by WFEL, following a review of the UK MoD’s modular gap crossing capabilities (MGCC), to draw together existing in-service capabilities into a single coherent capability.

Mike Batty, Team Leader for the Operational Infrastructure Team for Defence, Equipment and Support, the procurement arm of the MoD, said: “The MGCC bridges provide a bedrock of essential support to troops on both military and disaster relief operations. Receiving them ahead of schedule gives us confidence that our delivery partners understand how vital this equipment is to our armed forces.”

The British Army has been a user of MGBs since the early 1980s and the new bridging systems to be supplied by WFEL will provide new, lightweight, medium gap-crossing capability to very high readiness forces and form an element of the maneuver support capability for the British Army’s STRIKE Brigade.

The complete MGB contract will be fulfilled by Dec 2025.