Military With Bob Morrison
The two-part look back at the British Army use of the armoured Land Rover concludes
LAST MONTH I commenced this two-part look back at British Army use of the armoured Land Rover in response to an email from one of our readers, who spotted an interesting article mentioning the Defender 110 Snatch penned by the Director of Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute. This vehicle, designated the CAMAC Composite Armoured Vehicle (CAV) 100 by its manufacturer, was effectively only the second armoured Land Rover procured specifically for the British Army.
Prior to the introduction of the Glover Webb Armoured Patrol Vehicle, or APV, based on the early One Ten chassis, armoured body Land Rovers used in Northern Ireland had primarily been procured for the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Indeed it was RUC workshop personnel who conceived the first of these, which evolved into the boat-tailed Shorland from which almost every other design could be said to have evolved. The original 1960s Shorland Armoured Patrol Cars were withdrawn from RUC service following the 1969 Hunt Report and later handed over to the newly-formed Ulster Defence Regiment of the British Army, but most still regard those as being Police rather than Army Land Rovers.
Introduced from 1986 and refurbished in the mid-90s with the addition of supplementary armour, and where necessary a new chassis, this roughly 150-strong fleet of steel-bodied APV Land Rovers remained in service until 2000, when the much larger and better-protected Tavern (see panel opposite) entered frontline service. This small fleet of more heavily-armoured Rovers, which mostly patrolled areas with the highest threat level, only represented about one tenth of the total number of Land Rovers used by the Army in the Province and from 1992 on the remainder were what would become know as the Snatch.
Prior to the introduction of the CAV 100 / Snatch, lightly protected converted Series IIA/III 109-inch and, to a lesser extent, 88inch wheelbase conventional military Land Rovers were used by the Army in Northern Ireland. Although these offered a degree of protection from hurled missiles, pipe bomb fragments and low-velocity pistol rounds, they could not really be described as armoured. By the early 1990s these VPK (Vehicle Protection Kit) and HV VPK (High Velocity Vehicle Protection Kit) conversions, making up almost 90 per cent of the Army’s light and medium utility fleet, were so badly over-matched by the threat that a vehicle offering a better degree of troop protection had to be procured.
As this was in the pre-internet era, more than five years before the Google search engine was born, online tender bulletins and procurement contract awards did not exist and it is very difficult to discover if any other manufacturers submitted proposals to the UK MOD, though it is possible Short Brothers may have put forward a Shorland variant. I first photographed the CAV 100 in the early summer of 1992, on the Courtaulds Aerospace stand at Eurosatory in Paris, but at the time I saw nothing to indicate they had just sold almost 1000 vehicles to the MOD.
The original British Army CAV 100 was actually designated the TRUCK UTY MED (HT) W/ VPK LAND ROVER 110 V8 PTL; UTY being the abbreviation of Utility, MED meaning Medium, HT denoting hard topped, W/ VPK standing for With Vehicle Protection Kit and PET showing the engine was petrol
“The Snatch gave soldiers protection from threats posed by sub-machine gun rounds and crude blast bombs”
driven. However, once in service one of its primary roles became to snatch ringleaders during urban disturbances, so it quickly became nicknamed the Snatch.
Although described as being a Land Rover fitted with a Vehicle Protection Kit, the pressure-formed, fibreglass and resin composite armour rear body pod, cab, bulkhead and doors of the CAV 100 are a quantum leap ahead of the almost Heath Robinson lightweight appliqué fibreglass panels conceived primarily by Major Reg Pearce REME at the start of the 1970s. At the time it entered service in the early 1990s this lightweight Courtaulds vehicle offered better protection than any similar circa 3.6 to 4.2 tonne vehicle with an armoured steel body and as its bodywork was also 20 per cent lighter than steel it offered better handling characteristics and payload capacity.
The CAV 100 was not designed to protect soldiers in an all-out war zone though where anti-armour missiles and explosively formed projectiles (which were still in their infancy) would regularly be used against it. The Snatch was intended to give soldiers wearing body armour and ballistic helmets additional protection from the relatively low level threats posed by 9 mm pistol and sub-machine gun rounds or crude blast bombs manufactured primarily from an agricultural fertiliser mix packed into lengths of lead pipe – that was the weaponry used by the IRA, and occasionally loyalist terrorist groups.
Hardly had the Snatch been issued to troops serving in Northern Ireland than a small number were withdrawn from reserve stocks and issued to British Army personnel deployed to Bosnia & Herzegovina in the Former Yugoslavia on peacekeeping duties under the United Nations umbrella. Initially only a few were sent out, primarily for the protection of senior officers crossing the frontline between warring parties to negotiate. By late 1995, however, when the Dayton Accord had been signed and NATO started to take over peace-enforcing duties as IFOR, the British Army was relying on a fair number of the CAV 100 for command and liaison duties. In fact, within three weeks of Dayton, I personally undertook two long road journeys across inter-ethnic boundaries in Snatch Land Rovers and welcomed the protection they afforded in a still strife-torn land.
In Ulster the Snatch would protect troops for well over a decade, from some of the most dangerous times in The Troubles right through to the 2005 declaration by the Provisional IRA that its campaign had ended. Since the ending of the Army’s Operation BANNER in 2007, the only time these vehicles have been seen on the streets of Northern Ireland in any quantity was the 2013 G8 Summit, though on this instance they were repainted white and used by Police reinforcements drafted in from the UK.
The CAV 100 / Snatch was originally intended to have a ten year service life, meaning it should have been withdrawn in 2002, but as the situation in Northern Ireland had not quite been resolved it was kept on strength. In September 2003, six months after the invasion of Iraq, it was recommended that troop protection would be improved by the deployment of armoured 4x4 vehicles in place of soft skin Land Rovers, but as the 1998 Strategic Defence Review had not identified any need for light or medium armoured 4x4 vehicles for future expeditionary use the only stopgap available was the over-matched CAV 100; 180 of the fleet were despatched.
Although insufficiently armoured to cater for the increased threat level, the Snatch would not only have to serve in Iraq for several more years but would also be deployed to Afghanistan where it met improvised explosive devices, often of the projectile type, and rocket propelled grenades capable of disabling tanks and tracked armoured personnel carriers. These vehicles would be upgraded with electronic counter measures, air conditioning, 300Tdi engines and heavier chassis, but unfortunately it was impossible to significantly increase their protection levels.
It would take the MOD procurement chain three years to order the 23 tonne Mastiff to replace some Snatch Land Rovers and five more years to replace them all in Afghanistan with the 7.5 tonne Foxhound. Incidentally, the Snatch was deployed by the British Army to Bosnia are recently as October 2016.