'If you hit a landmine, the CD player skips'
Tony Allen-Mills test drives the Cougar, a US behemoth just bought by the British Army that makes the Humvee look limp-wristed
Emmanuel Katsoulakis checked the strap on my seatbelt and looked me straight in the eye. “If you understand what RND stands for, you can drive this vee-hickle,” he said.
Happily I’ve spent enough time in American vee-hickles to know that RND stands for reverse, neutral and drive on any automatic gearbox. I nodded sagely at Katsoulakis and resisted an impulse to salute. He is ex-military now, but he looks as though he spent most of his army career ripping the heads off insurgents barehanded.
I was all set to roar down the road in the latest addition to the British Army’s fleet of high-tech armoured vehicles when I noticed a potentially embarrassing snag.
This was no ordinary belt pinning me to the driving seat of the Cougar H Series 6x6 Urban Fighting Vehicle, a $500,000 (£265,000) armoured behemoth that can drive over an Iraqi roadside bomb — also known as an improvised explosive device (IED) — with little more than a shudder.
My belt was a four-point aviator’s harness attached directly to the frame of the vehicle and confining me to a seat that was heavily padded with bullet and shrapnel-proof stuffing. “If a bomb goes off beneath you,” said Katsoulakis, “you don’t want to be flying around the cabin.”
But here’s the snag. I was so tightly strapped to my bombproof cocoon that I couldn’t reach the dashboard. I couldn’t press the yellow knob that releases the air brakes, and I couldn’t reach the button marked D for Drive. When this behemoth reaches British troops in November, they are going to need drivers with very long arms.
In every other respect this vehicle is a wonder and the British Army’s top brass — who have ordered 108 — are likely to be fighting off regular soldiers clamouring for a ride in what has proved the sturdiest, safest and quite literally the coolest vehicle to be deployed by US forces in Iraq. I drove the Cougar in soggy 90F South Carolina heat and barely broke a sweat as a powerful air-conditioning system cooled the sealed cabin.
“Since late 2004 until today there have been over 1,000 IED explosions against this vehicle without a single fatality,” boasted Mike Aldrich, a former US artillery officer and now vice-president at Force Protection Industries, the Charleston-based defence contractor that has won the £30m British order.
That record, and Britain’s need for a troop carrier that can withstand the deadly onslaught of IED attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, had brought me and an American photographer colleague to Charleston to check the Cougar’s claims. But first there were one or two minor security matters to resolve.
I had been promised a test drive of the six-wheel 16.5-ton vehicle, but then someone realised I was a British citizen. This was a couple of days after an alleged plot was uncovered to blow up half a dozen planes en route from London to America. British citizens were not exactly in good odour in US security circles. There was a brief hiatus while company officials established my bona fides. “Sign here,” one of them eventually told me, presenting me with a document longer than the US constitution. I didn’t have time to read every clause, but I hope I didn’t swear not to tell a soul about what it’s like to drive the Cougar.
Eventually Aldrich appeared and escorted us to the car park, which was filled with the usual American assortment of pick-up trucks, Lexuses and Hondas. And there at the end, parked sideways across four spaces, towering above every vehicle, was the 23ft 3in long, 9ft tall Cougar 6x6, bristling with armoured protrusions. My heart skipped a beat as I realised I was going to drive this beast, preferably without crushing someone’s Honda on my way out of the car park.
My photographer immediately went to work, prompting an instant “Hey, no photographs!” from Katsoulakis. Another hiatus ensued as we established that it was okay to take pictures, provided these didn’t show in close-up some of the more sensitive aspects of the Cougar’s defences.
It was wisely decided that someone else should drive out of the car park while Aldrich briefed me in the back of the truck. The Cougar, it turned out, has its design roots in the notorious South African-built Casspirs that were used to control township rioting in the dying days of apartheid.
The V-shaped frame of the Casspir and other similar vehicles was designed to deflect the blast of landmines, but it had one significant flaw. “You couldn’t blow them up,” said Aldrich. “But they were top heavy. You could tip them over.”
When Force Protection was founded in 1997, it signed a design deal with the South African manufacturers and initially set about producing a version of a mine-resistant troop carrier with a more stable U-shaped frame. Known as the Tempest, it was deployed in Kosovo in 2001.
Then the attacks of September 11 transformed the US defence industry. After the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, quickly discovered that the Humvee armoured cars used by US troops — and the Snatch Land Rovers used by their British colleagues — offered little protection to the improvised bombs of the resistance.
The insurgents also learnt to wait in ambush for rescue teams to arrive once Humvees had been disabled. In late 2003 US units were losing two soldiers a week to ambushes following IED attacks.
Although attempts were made to re-equip existing vehicles, “up-armouring Humvees was never going to help as a counter-blast protection”, said Aldrich. “Rumsfeld gets beaten up a lot for all the crazy things he’s done, so I’ll give him credit for one good thing. The Humvee and the Stryker (another US combat vehicle) took 10 years to develop, but he said he couldn’t wait another 10 years. They developed a new solution very aggressively.”
By late 2004 the first Cougars were reaching US marines in Iraq. The exact number is classified but at least 200 are known to have been deployed. They have been used to ferry VIPs along the notoriously dangerous road from Baghdad airport to the green zone; they routinely take the lead in operations into hostile areas; and they respond wherever there is a threat of ambush.
Their effectiveness duly impressed British officers who have lost at least 18 men in IED attacks. So good is the Cougar at withstanding blast damage, the makers claim, that when it drives over a landmine the CD player skips — and that’s all.
So what is the British Army getting for the large wedge of cash it is investing? First the technical specs — the 330bhp diesel engine is made by Caterpillar, the US manufacturer of bulldozers and other heavy vehicles.
The tyres are bullet and bomb resistant run-flat Michelins with an inner core that Aldrich called “virtually indestructible”. A Cougar that has run over a bomb can still travel at 25mph even if its tyres are ruined.
Cruising speed is 55mph with an “operational sprint” maximum of 65mph.
It has twin 85-gallon fuel tanks with an operating range of about 500 miles. The vehicle runs off a standard truck battery and comes with the usual factory options — overhead weapons mount, blackout lighting and window-mounted firing ports.
The 6x6 version carries eight passengers plus the driver and co-driver. The rear cabin is comfortably equipped with leather clad seats and rifle clamps.
“Anything not secured becomes potential shrapnel,” Aldrich noted. He also advised me not to sit so primly, with my legs tucked below my knees. “Spread them out,” he said. “You don’t want the shock of a blast to travel up your legs.”
Finally it was my turn to sit in the driver’s seat. Visibility isn’t great through the narrow, divided windscreen, but that seems a small price to pay for immunity from rockets and gunfire up to .50 calibre. Once I’d loosened my straps to put the monster in gear, I was ready to burn some rubber.
The good news is that driving the Cougar is really no different from any HGV. You have to swing out a bit at turns (perhaps not as wide as I did on my first corner, judging by the look of horror on the face of the unfortunate Toyota driver who was coming the other way). And the softness of the brake pedal belies the size of the vehicle — as my passengers discovered when on my first try I stamped a little too hard.
But it wasn’t hard to see why Aldrich called it “the nicest ride in Iraq”. It’s a little prone to bumpiness — as we all noticed when I failed to slow for a railway hump — but on a straight, flat road you can tool it up to a decent speed and watch those Honda drivers scatter.
For some reason they wouldn’t let me drive over a landmine, but if I was a British soldier in Iraq, I would feel a lot more comfortable sitting in a Cougar than any number of Land Rovers or Humvees.
I also quite fancy it for a camping holiday down the local interstate. As many will know, US vehicle manufacturers have successfully exploited the military cachet of vehicles like jeeps and Humvees and turned them into popular civilian vehicles — with celebrity owners such as Arnold Schwarzenegger promoting sales. Could the Cougar become the next recreational vehicle? It may prove a little too cumbersome to be used on public roads, but Force Protection is already at work on a smaller prototype known as the MOV-R, or “Mover”. I happened to spot a test version parked outside a warehouse, and Aldrich confirmed that the 90mph super-jeep would enter production soon. Imagine an armoured Range Rover on steroids. I’ll definitely go back to test drive that one.
