Why This ‘Linked’ British Vehicle Couples Two Trucks To Cross Afghan Minefields –  Hw

October 2010, Helmand Province, Afghanistan. A column of tracked vehicles crawls through an irrigation ditch that would swallow a Mastiff to its axles. Each vehicle is not one machine, but two. A front cab and a rear cab coupled by a hydraulic joint, bending and flexing independently like the spine of some armored reptile.

The troops riding inside call it the Warthog. To the Royal Armoured Corps crews driving them, it looks wrong. Two separate tracked boxes bolted together by a pivot. No turret, no cannon, no resemblance to the Challenger 2 tanks they trained on. But the Warthog is not here to fight tanks. It is here to cross minefields.

And over the next 4 years, across roughly 30 direct IED strikes, not a single British soldier will die inside one. That record did not happen by accident. It happened because British soldiers were dying inside the vehicle the Warthog replaced. The BvS 10 Viking was a Swedish-designed, British-built articulated tracked carrier operated by the Royal Marines Armoured Support Group from 2005.

It shared the Warthog’s twin cab concept, a front unit and rear unit joined by a steering pivot. Originally designed for Arctic warfare in Norway, the Royal Marines took about 33 Vikings to Helmand in autumn 2006. For the first year, they performed adequately. Then the Taliban learned to build bigger bombs. By 2008, the Viking’s flat-bottomed hull had become a death trap.

The vehicle had reached the physical limit of how much additional armor it could carry without crushing its suspension and drowning its engine. The IED threat had outgrown the engineering. Corporal Damien Mulvihill of 40 Commando was killed on February 20th, 2008. Lieutenant John Thornton and Marine David Marsh, both of 40 Commando, died in a Viking near Kajaki on March 30th.

Marine Dale Gostick was killed at the Sangin Crossing on May 25th. The losses accelerated through 2009. Then came the death that forced the Ministry of Defence’s hand. On July 1st, 2009, Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, commanding officer of the 1st Battalion Welsh Guards, was killed alongside 18-year-old Trooper Joshua Hammond of the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment when their Viking was destroyed by what witnesses described as a massive IED south of Lashkar Gah during Operation Panchai Palang. Thorneloe was the most

senior British officer killed in action since the Falklands War. The political pressure became overwhelming. Defense Secretary John Hutton had already announced a 700 million pound urgent operational requirement package in October 2008. The competition came down to two vehicles. BAE Systems offered an upgraded Viking Mark II with a proper V-shaped hull, but it would not reach production before late 2009.

ST Kinetics of Singapore offered the Bronco All Terrain Tracked Carrier, already in series production with over 600 in Singaporean service. The Bronco was heavier, starting at 18 tons, which meant it could accept thicker armor without sacrificing payload. On December 18th, 2008, the Ministry of Defense signed a 150 million pound single source contract with ST Kinetics for 115 vehicles.

The British designation was Warthog. This is where most people get confused. The Warthog is not an upgraded Viking. It is a completely different vehicle from a completely different manufacturer in a completely different country. The Viking comes from BAE Systems Hägglunds in Sweden. The Warthog comes from ST Kinetics in Singapore.

They share the articulated twin cab concept, two tracked units joined by a hydraulic pivot, but they share no parts, no hull design, and no production line. The Warthog’s heart is that articulated joint. Two hydraulic actuators sit between the front and rear cabs, pivoting one unit relative to the other in the horizontal plane.

The joint also permits independent vertical pitch and some roll, so each cab follows the ground contour separately. There is no skid steering. A turning Warthog does not gouge soft earth the way a conventional tracked vehicle does. The rubber tracks distribute weight across four bogie units, producing a ground pressure of roughly 60 kilopascals.

That is about a third of what a Mastiff exerts per tire, and lower than a Warrior’s 80 to 100 kilopascals. The Warthog’s footprint on the earth is barely heavier than a standing soldier’s. Power comes from a Caterpillar C7 turbocharged six-cylinder diesel producing 350 brake horsepower paired with an Allison automatic transmission driving all four tracks sprockets.

Top speed on roads reaches 65 kilometers per hour. Range is approximately 400 kilometers with auxiliary fuel tanks. A standard troop carrier seats 12, four in the front cab and eight dismounts in the rear. It clears vertical steps of 1 meter and trenches of 2 meters. It swims, at least in theory, though at 21 tons in Afghan combat fit, it had effectively lost true amphibious capability.

But, the Warthog did not arrive in theater ready to fight. The vehicles shipped from Singapore to Thales UK’s integration facility at Langennech, near Llanelli in South Wales. A former Ministry of Defense depot reopened specifically for this contract. There, Thales added the British theater fit, Bowman secure radios, electronic counter measures against radio controlled IEDs, bar armor for rocket propelled grenade defeat, spall liners, applique armor panels, energy absorbing blast protected seats, a protective weapon station mounting

either a 7.62 mm general purpose machine gun, a .50 caliber heavy machine gun, or a 40 mm grenade machine gun, and two four-barreled 66 mm smoke and grenade dischargers. The first Warthog rolled off the Singapore line on September 28th, 2009, and arrived in Britain on November 19th. It failed acceptance trials on armor grounds.

The entire fleet was delayed by nearly a year while Thales redesigned and refitted the protection package, troops did not see Warthogs in Helmand until October 2010, almost 2 years after the contract was signed. Lieutenant Colonel Thorneloe had been dead for 15 months. Now, before we get into the combat record, if you are finding this interesting, a like on this video genuinely helps more than you would think. The algorithm notices.

Now, back to the Warthog in Helmand. The first Warthogs deployed with D Squadron of the Royal Dragoon Guards on Operation Herrick 12. The second Royal Tank Regiment’s Squadron followed almost immediately on Herrick 13. From that point forward, a succession of Royal Armoured Corps Squadrons rotated through on 6-month tours.

The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, the Queen’s Royal Hussars, the King’s Royal Hussars, and back again. Every crew was a tanker or cavalryman, not a Royal Marine reassigned from Challenger 2s and Scimitars to a vehicle they had to learn from scratch. According to Ministry of Defence operational reports, the full Warthog fleet covered over 480,000 km in Afghanistan, roughly the circumference of the Earth 12 times over.

The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards alone covered 41,000 km in 80 days during Herrick 14, including a single continuous operation lasting more than 6 weeks, with crews living entirely out of their vehicles. The combat results validated the engineering. Warthogs took roughly 30 confirmed IED strikes across the war.

According to surviving crew accounts, Lance Corporal William Reeks struck an estimated 50 kg IED in December 2010. His family publicly credited the Warthog’s heavier armor with saving his life, where a Viking would not have. Trooper Murray Hambro of the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment lost both legs below the knee when his Warthog hit a device in a plowed field along the Helmand River, while supporting the 2nd Battalion Parachute Regiment. He survived.

The most prominent fatality connected to the Warthog was Craftsman Andrew Found of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers killed on June 16th, 2011 in the Greshk Valley. But Found was dismounted assessing damage to a Warthog already struck by one IED when a secondary device killed him. He was outside the vehicle, not inside it.

The distinction matters. Inside the cab, the Warthog’s record held zero killed in action. Where the articulated design proved its worth most clearly was not on roads, but off them. The Mastiff, Britain’s six-wheeled mine resistant ambush vehicle, was the dominant platform on prepared routes. It had a proper V-hull and could dash at 90 km/h, but it could not leave the road.

Its per tire ground pressure exceeded 400 kilopascals. In the saturated agricultural belt of Central Helmand, where irrigation ditches cut the landscape every 50 to 100 m, the Mastiff simply bogged down or could not enter at all. The Warthog went where the Mastiff could not. As Major Johnny Williamson of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards put it, the Warthog was used exactly as crews would use a Challenger 2 or a Combat Vehicle Reconnaissance.

Firepower, mobility, and protection allowed them to close with the enemy in areas where the Taliban had previously moved freely. Captain George Matthews of the King’s Royal Hussars called them the only vehicle that could get over all the difficult ground in Afghanistan. The articulated joint let each cab follow terrain independently, climbing ravines, crossing wadis, and traversing ditches that would strand any wheeled vehicle in the British inventory.

Against American MRAPs like the MaxxPro and Cougar, the comparison was simple. Those were superior road vehicles with worse cross-country performance. Against Russia’s DT-30 Vityaz, the only comparable articulated twin tracked carrier in service, the Warthog occupies a different category entirely. The Vityaz is a 30-ton payload, largely unarmed Arctic logistics tractor, not a protected troop carrier.

The Warthog was quietly retired in October 2015. The Ministry of Defense had briefly planned to keep 100 vehicles in the core fleet as ground mobility platforms for Watchkeeper drone units with the 32nd and 47th regiments Royal Artillery. That plan was reversed within 2 years. The official explanation was that the capability could be delivered by other vehicles. The real reason was simpler.

Sustaining a Singaporean specification fleet with no NATO commonality and a 12,000 km supply chain was uneconomic outside a shooting war. The story has one more chapter. Germany acquired surplus British Warthogs and donated 25 of them to Ukraine. 10 ambulances, 10 command vehicles, and five repair and recovery variants.

The ambulance Warthogs reached Ukraine first. By March 2024, the German government confirmed the full complement had been handed over. A Singapore-designed, Welsh-armored, Afghan-blooded vehicle now hauls Ukrainian wounded and commands Ukrainian artillery cells. The BAE articulated tracked concept continues to evolve. BAE Hägglunds won a joint 600 million pound order from Sweden, the UK, and Germany in November 2022 for 436 BVS10 Mark II vehicles, the Warthog’s effective successor in NATO service.

The unarmored Beowulf variant won the United States Army’s cold weather all-terrain vehicle competition in August 2022. A $278 million order for 163 vehicles. Britain’s Warthog was not the most heavily armored vehicle in Helmand. It was not the fastest, the most comfortable, or the easiest to maintain. What it was, according to every metric that matters in a counterinsurgency fought over irrigation ditches and buried bombs, was the right vehicle at the right time.

Two cabs, a hydraulic pivot, four rubber tracks, and a Welsh-fitted armor package. Enough to cross Afghan minefields. Enough to bring its crews home alive.

QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.

Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.

Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.

The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.

Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.

Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.

Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.

that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music

industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.

The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.

Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.

Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.

The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.

Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.

Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.

Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.

Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.

The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.

Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.

The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.

Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.

Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.

The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.

Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.

The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.

Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.

They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.

She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.

She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.

She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.

She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it

well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.

Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.

What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.

The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.

They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.

Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.

Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and

Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.