Foxhound arrives in Afghanistan – five years too late

There was welcome news yesterday for our forces in Afghanistan, and for those who want to see them supplied with the best equipment, with pictures of the first ‘Foxhound’ patrol vehicles arriving in Helmand. Foxhound is the long-awaited replacement for the Snatch Land Rover, whose inadequate protection against Improvised Explosive Devices in Iraq and then Afghanistan became glaringly obvious as far back as 2005. In the intervening years, the Ministry of Defence has procured a number of vehicles offering much better protection, starting with the Mastiff in late 2006. However, the greater protection of these vehicles came at a price, in terms of weight and manoeuvrability (and air-transportability): the Mastiff weighs well over 20 tons — even the smaller ‘Ridgeback’ variant which arrived in Helmand in 2009 weighed 18 tons — compared to less than 5 tons for the Snatch.

For years after 2005, the MoD and the army insisted (internally as well as publicly) that this trade-off between protection on the one hand, and weight and mobility and air transportability on the other, was ineluctable.