Why This ‘Linked’ British Vehicle Couples Two Trucks To Cross Afghan Minefields D
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.
