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xx'70s-'90s softskins with crew figures - asking for recommendations (and a bit of a rant).

Hi everyone!

This is gonna be a bit of a long post/rambling, so strap in - TL;DR at the bottom for those who don't want to read this wall of text.

Lately I've been itching to start a project depicting some sort of Cold War or modern (Gulf War/Chechnya is the most recent I'd like to go preferrably, just because I like the look of military gear around that time, maybe early War on Terror too) subject, preferrably as part of a small force for wargames (but not 100% necessarily).

Now, there's a lot of subjects I'd be interested in.
US or Soviet/Russian troops (possibly both, to fight each other?),
Sometime between the mid '70s and late '90s (Soviets in SSh-68 helmets, '73 or Afghanka uniforms, and possibly ballistic vests, for the latter end of this period. US troops in either M1s or PASGT helmets and ALICE webbing),
And as for scale, preferrably 1:72/20mm or 28mm, but I wouldn't be opposed to doing 15mm too.

Now, there's figure lines for basically all of the options I've described above. Empress (28), Eureka (15/28), Elhiem (20), Battlefront (15), Peter Pig (15), Underfire (28), Wartime (20), a bunch of 1/72 plastics (Caesar or Preiser Americans, Orion Russians), the list goes on. However, the issue is vehicles, and particularly vehicle crew, something I almost have to use when modelling softskins.

Tanks and APCs are cool, of course, I like them just as much as the next guy, but what I'm really interested in is trucks, jeeps, that sort of stuff - so, softskins.
Unfortunately for me, tanks and APCs are much more popular - in 1/35, you might find most softskins unless it's something really obscure, and a lot of the time you'll even be able to choose between a couple kits, in 1/72 you might not be so lucky, but don't even think about 1/48 to use with 28mm figures. For Soviet subjects, you tend to have fewer choices. More often than not, it's Russian companies making these kits, and especially with the war now, you can't find them anywhere really.

Now, even if you find vehicles (which I'll get to in a bit) you can't find vehicle crew at all!
Out of these figure lines mentioned, Elhiem makes seated Americans, as well as a couple fairly generic military driver figures, Peter Pig (bless them) make seated figures for every range they make, I'm pretty sure, and there's a couple of 1/72 resin figure sets (a few of them have disappeared/been discontinued) containing seated troops - Mig Productions makes one for Russians and one for Americans, although they don't have any figures driving!
But that's it! Finding one seated figure is possible, finding one driver figure is possible - finding a whole squad, sitting down, ready to be put on the back of a truck? Not happening. One set of Americans in a truck by Preiser only exists in 1/87 (for now) and a set of Russians for a truck by Alex Miniatures - but it's a Russian company so I'm out of luck.

At this point it's worth noting that tank crews tend to be far more widely available - probably has to do with the aforementioned popularity of tanks and APCs over softskins.

As for the availability of vehicles, here are some softskins I've taken an interest to (these are just some I've looked into scale model-wise, for some I haven't bothered checking if they exist in 15 or 28mm scale):

UAZ-469/Hunter: available in 15mm (Peter Pig) and 1/72 (MAC Productions), no 28mm seems to be available.
GAZ-69: only in 1/72, resin, by Gran (Russian company, currently unavailable, but was also ridiculously expensive), haven't found it in any other scales.
Ural-375, Ural-4320, ZIL-131: available in 1/72 (ICM, all seem a bit fiddly for wargaming and aren't the easiest of builds, from what I've heard).
GAZ-66: 1/72 by ACE, really detailed, seems complicated, probably overkill for wargaming (for me at least).

M151(A1/A2): in 28mm by Eureka, in 1/72 by S-Model.
M35: in 1/72 by Academy, seems to be...
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