Why This ‘Ugly’ British Supply Truck Became The Vehicle 5 Nations’ Special Forces All Chose –  Hw

Dunkeswell Aerodrome, Devon, 2001. A company that built forestry tractors just won a contract to supply vehicles to the SAS. Not BAE Systems, not General Dynamics, a firm of fewer than 50 people working out of a converted wartime airfield in the middle of nowhere. The vehicle they delivered looked wrong.

No roof, no doors, no armor plating. It resembled an oversized dune buggy more than a military platform. Senior officers who saw it assumed somebody had made a mistake. Nobody had. Within 5 years, that vehicle would be fighting in Helmand province. Within 10, special forces from five nations would independently choose it over everything the world’s largest defense contractors could offer.

And within 20, close to a thousand of them would be in service across nine countries on four continents. This is the Supacat HMT 600 Coyote, and it started life hauling logs. Nick Jones was an engineer from Somerset who had apprenticed at FJ Edwards of Chard before developing a prototype hover vehicle at the Portland Group in Bath.

Joint Forces News described him as much more at home pottering around the workshops on the Devon Somerset border with spanners and a cup of tea than attending defense trade shows. In 1981, he founded Supacat at Dunkeswell, Devon. A disused wartime airfield surrounded by rolling farmland. His first product was the 6×6 all-terrain mobile platform, a low-slung cargo carrier designed to drag timber out of forests and haul supplies across boggy farmland.

It could go places wheeled trucks could not. That caught the Ministry of Defense’s attention after the Falklands War in 1982, when the MOD needed an air-droppable logistics vehicle for the 5th Airborne Brigade. Jones demonstrated a variant he called the Jura, named after the Scottish island where trials took place. The military ordered six.

Over the next decade, versions of the ATMP served in Bosnia, both Gulf Wars and Afghanistan. The concept worked. A vehicle designed from the ground up for impossible terrain with no concessions to road comfort or conventional aesthetics could go places nothing else could. In 1997, a Supacat-based vehicle even served as the support platform for Thrust SSC, the first car to break the sound barrier.

By that point, Jones had spent 16 years refining the core engineering principle that would define the HMT. Build low, build wide, give every wheel its own suspension travel, let the machine flow over the ground instead of fighting it. By the late 1990s, British special forces needed a replacement for their aging Pink Panther Land Rovers.

The MOD issued a demanding specification combining surveillance, reconnaissance, and offensive action into a single platform. According to Defense Industry Daily, one competing company’s technical director reportedly joked that the only thing the required vehicle could not do was fly. When the requirement was reissued in 1999, Supacat entered the competition against firms many times its size.

Supacat won because, according to procurement records, the HMT ticked every capability box on vehicle performance. A contract for 65 vehicles was awarded under the codename Project MINACITY. They entered service with UK special forces, including the SAS and SBS, in Afghanistan between 2003 and 2004. Meanwhile, the regular British Army was losing Land Rover WMIKs in Helmand province at an alarming rate.

The WMIK, which stands for Weapons Mounted Installation Kit, was a lightly modified Land Rover with a machine gun bolted to the roof. Its narrow tires could not handle Afghan terrain. Its flat underside offered zero protection against buried explosives. Troops were dying. The Snatch Land Rover was worse. Soldiers called it the mobile coffin.

37 British personnel were killed in Snatch vehicles across Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army needed something fundamentally different. On July 28th, 2007, the MOD issued an urgent operational requirement for the HMT to equip regular forces. The military designated it the MWMIK, which troops pronounced M-Wimmick, and publicly named it the Jackal.

The first vehicles entered service in November 2007. The larger 6×6 support variant, the HMT 600, received the name Coyote. It was designed to keep pace with Jackal fighting columns while carrying fuel, ammunition, water, and supplies. The Coyote weighs 10,500 kg at gross vehicle weight and carries 3,900 kg of payload.

That is nearly 4 tons of supplies, enough to sustain a Jackal fighting pair for days without supply. A Cummins 6.7 L inline six-cylinder turbo diesel produces 180 horsepower and 700 Newton meters of torque, mated to an Allison 2500 five-speed automatic transmission. Top speed is 120 km/h on road and roughly 79 km/h off road.

Range is 700 km from a 200 L fuel tank. The vehicle measures 7.04 m long, 2.05 m wide, and between 1.88 and 2.44 m tall depending on suspension height. It carries two to four crew and mounts a ring-mounted 12.7 mm heavy machine gun or 40 mm grenade machine gun, plus a secondary 7.62 mm general-purpose machine gun.

Three design features set the HMT apart from every competitor in the world. The suspension uses independent double wishbone arms with laterally mounted commercial air springs and twin Fox Racing Shox absorbers at each wheel station. A hydraulic-pneumatic system allows crews to adjust ride height from 180 mm, low enough to fit inside a Chinook helicopter, to 485 mm, giving nearly 1 m of ground clearance for off-road driving.

According to Autocar, which tested the vehicle, it possessed a frankly unsettling ability to cross almost any terrain at almost any speed. The engine sits amidships, alongside the driver, not in front. This places the front axle directly beneath the driver rather than ahead, lowers the overall profile, and leaves the entire rear chassis open for mission equipment or cargo.

The chassis itself is a bespoke steel box section space frame built from scratch. No part of it comes from a commercial truck. The open-top design is the most controversial and most deliberate choice. The MOD stated that the cabin is left open for visibility, which affords protection through maneuverability and standoff distance from the main armament.

For special forces, this means 360° observation, instant weapons engagement in any direction, and immediate escape if the vehicle is hit. The philosophy is speed as armor. Avoid improvised explosive devices by going cross-country at 80 km/h rather than crawling along predictable roads in a heavy armored box.

Protection against mines comes from modular bolt-on Jankel armor panels underneath and Jankel blast attenuation seats that absorb and redirect blast energy upward, reducing spinal compression injuries. Orders escalated fast. Approximately 202 Jackal 1s arrived first, followed by around 120 Jackal 2s and 76 Coyotes in a 74 million pound contract in April 2009.

Another 140 Jackal 2s has followed at 45 million pounds in June 2010. Manufacturing partner Babcock at Devonport Dockyard in Plymouth achieved a production rate of one vehicle per day using pulse line assembly. Over 600 vehicles were built in a three-year sprint. Total UK contracts through the Afghanistan era exceeded 350 million pounds.

Now, before we get into the combat record, if you are enjoying this deep dive into British engineering, hit subscribe. It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Right, let us get into what happened when this vehicle met the enemy. The Jackal’s combat debut came on April 8th, 2008 in Helmand province with 16 Air Assault Brigade.

According to a Ministry of Defense report, Brigadier Buster Howes of 3 Commando Brigade called the vehicle a complete revelation. Units from the Household Cavalry, Light Dragoons, Parachute Regiment, and Royal Marines drove it through the irrigated farmland of the green zone and the open desert around Lashkar Gah, Sangin, and Musa Qala.

The standoff firepower of the .50 caliber heavy machine gun, engaging from beyond effective enemy range, proved devastating against Taliban positions in open terrain. Patrols that once crept along at 15 km/h in WMIKs now raced across open ground at 70 or 80, too fast for insurgents to trigger command wire IEDs, too mobile to ambush predictably.

The Jackal changed the geometry of the fight. Instead of driving into a kill zone and absorbing fire, crews could maneuver around it, engaging from multiple angles while the Coyotes kept pace with ammunition and fuel. But the human cost was real. By August 2009, 13 British soldiers had been killed in Jackal vehicles, primarily from IED strikes.

Among them was Trooper James Munday of the Household Cavalry, killed on October 15th, 2008 by a contact-triggered IED 2 weeks before returning home. The worst single incident killed three members of the Parachute Regiment and Special Forces Support Group on August 6, 2009 when an IED blast was followed by small arms fire.

Media outlets called the Jackal a death trap. Defense Minister Quentin Davies pushed back, maintaining that the Jackal remained one of the most favored patrol vehicles for British troops. The most dramatic Jackal action came on September 14th, 2012 at Camp Bastion. 15 Taliban fighters breached the perimeter at 2200 hours. Sergeant Roy Geddes of the RAF Regiment led a 12-man quick reaction force in Jackals into total darkness toward explosions and burning aircraft.

An RPG struck his vehicle, wounding the entire crew. According to his Military Cross citation, Geddes continued fighting and organizing his team to prevent the position from being overrun until reinforcements arrived. He refused medical evacuation until ordered to do so at first light. Geddes became only the second RAF member to receive the Military Cross for action in Afghanistan.

The vehicle’s range proved transformative in Mali from 2020 to 2022, where the Light Dragoons deployed as a long-range reconnaissance group under Operation Newcombe. They conducted patrols of up to 1,500 km in Jackals and Coyotes, self-sufficient for up to 30 days. The Estonian Special Operations Force operated four UK loaned Jackal 2s alongside them.

Against the Land Rover WMIK it replaced, the advantages are total. Double the range, vastly superior off-road handling, actual mine protection versus none, a more stable weapons platform that crews could fire accurately while moving at speed. Against the American M1114 up-armored Humvee, the Jackal wins on off-road speed, range, and situational awareness, but loses on enclosed ballistic protection.

American MRAP vehicles like the Cougar and MaxxPro offer incomparably better blast protection, but weigh two to three times as much and cannot go where Jackals go off-road. The most telling comparison is with the Oshkosh JLTV, America’s Humvee replacement. At similar curb weight, the JLTV offers MRAP-level enclosed protection and 400 horsepower versus the Jackal’s 180, but the Jackal remains faster at 130 km/h versus 113, and offers superior long-range self-sustainment.

Notably, UK special forces tested the American Flyer 72 under Project Westerly in 2014 as a potential replacement. They stuck with the HMT. Five nations special forces independently chose this vehicle. Each tested it against local and international alternatives. Each reached the same conclusion. The United States ordered 47 HMT 400s designated the Marauder for Delta Force in 2004, making Supacat one of the few foreign vehicle manufacturers ever to supply American Tier 1 special operations.

Australia acquired 120 vehicles for the Special Air Service Regiment and Second Commando Regiment under a 105 million Australian dollar contract. The Australian SASR variant was named the Narry after Warrant Officer Class 2 David Narry, killed in action in 2005. Denmark ordered 15 HMT Extenders for the elite Hunter Corps, the Jægerkorpset.

Norway’s Special Operations Command received 24 vehicles under a 23 million pound contract signed in 2015. New Zealand’s SAS ordered HMT Extenders to replace aging Pinzgauers at 14.4 million New Zealand dollars. Estonia, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic have since joined the list. In September 2025, Czech special forces signed for 18 HMT Mark 3 Extenders, the first export of the newest variant at approximately 83 million dollars.

The order book keeps growing, nine nations and counting. The open-top debate remains unresolved and may never be. It represents a fundamental divide in military vehicle design. Should you build to survive the hit, or build to avoid it entirely? Supacat chose avoidance. Critics, including bereaved families, argued the philosophy failed when to reinforce Jackals onto predictable routes in Helmand’s canal-laced green zone.

Drone warfare in Ukraine has added new urgency to the question. Supacat now offers an enclosed armored cab variant, but the British Army has not selected it. One innovation deserves particular attention. The HMT Extender is a modular concept that allows a 4×4 Jackal to convert into a 6×6 Coyote configuration in the field by adding a removable third axle module.

No other vehicle in the world offers this capability. A patrol can deploy light and fast, then reconfigure for heavier logistics tasks without calling in a different vehicle. The 2024 order for 53 Jackal 3 Extenders and the continued export orders suggest the military still believes mobility first holds for the missions this vehicle was designed to perform.

A Devon company of around 105 people outperformed BAE Systems, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin to deliver a vehicle now operated by nine nations militaries. Close to 1,000 HMT family vehicles are in global service. Total contracts exceed half a billion pounds. The vehicle’s real innovation was not any single technology, but a design philosophy.

For forces operating in open terrain, the ability to avoid a threat at 80 km/h matters more than the ability to survive it at a standstill. Every major Five Eyes special forces community, British, American, Australian, and New Zealand, independently reached the same conclusion. That is not coincidence. That is consensus.

And it started with a man who built forestry tractors in Devon. Nick Jones turned 80 in 2022. The company he founded from nothing remains independent, privately owned, and still building vehicles at Dunkswell. British engineering was not luck. It was innovation under pressure, producing a machine that worked when it mattered most.

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.