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