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The Land Rover has been in British military service for over six decades, first seeing action in a combat zone during the Korean War and then nudging the purpose-designed Austin Champ to one side in the mid-sixties. Other than the WWII jeep, from which it was conceptually derived, few other light utility vehicles are so iconic as the military Land Rover or have such a reputation for longlivety, to use Peter Hobson’s favourite phrase.
Peter, whose company Hobson Industries bears his name, knows all about keeping Land Rovers on the road as that has been his livelihood since the former Weapons Engineering Officer left the Royal Navy in the eighties. Today, after a great many years of refurbishing both the armoured police fleet for Northern Ireland and military vehicle batches for UK and overseas Ministries of Defence, Hobson are Land Rover’s military strategic through-life support partner tasked with extending the service life of ageing military fleets in as cost-effective and environmentally sound a manner as possible.
Until the nineties the UK Ministry of Defence periodically cast large quantities of military Land Rovers which had reached the end of their perceived economic life and replaced them with new vehicles off the Solihull production line. This new for old system was accepted practice until climate change and associated ozone layer depletion reared its ugly head in the late eighties, forcing governments to show unprecedented international solidarity by signing the Montreal Protocol to hopefully limit the effect of greenhouse gases and global warming.
At the time of the Montreal agreement Britain had only just introduced the coil sprung Ninety and One-Ten Land Rover fleet for military service and it would be another decade before emissions and recycling issues had a major impact on fleet replacement, with the introduction of the 300Tdi diesel engined Defender ‘Wolf’ TUL/TUM HS (or XD in Land Rover nomenclature) for military service. During the Wolf procurement phase it was clearly stated that the new vehicle would need to have an in-service life of at least fifteen years with manufacturer support to match, though even then there was talk of twenty or more years before replacement being likely and, unlike with previous Land Rover purchases, it was decided from the outset that the new vehicle would be a battlefield asset like a tank or personnel carrier effectively meaning it was likely that it’s life cycle would be extended through upgrades rather than it just being replaced when tired as had formerly been the case.
In the past Battlespace has looked at how Hobson Industries were involved in producing asset-managed military Land Rovers, the Green Machines, to help extend the life of the UK Ministry of Defence fleet with schemes like Project Hermes. Initiated by Hobson Industries and Land Rover, this project led to the asset-management and conversion of over one thousand soft top 12-Volt Wolves, which had already seen eight years of service, into 24-Volt hard top versions to better suit UK MoD operational requirements.
Last year Peter Hobson took us further into his confidence over an evolving project which was leading to his company becoming Land Rover’s approved military strategic through-life support partner responsible for supporting both UK Ministry of Defence and foreign government existing military vehicle fleets through to the end of their projected service life. At the time we were asked not to probe to deeply into what was taking place due to contractual sensitivities, but Peter promised us first bite at the cherry as soon as he was able to talk more freely and recently he granted both the author and editor a day of his valuable time to go into the current process in some detail at his Lincolnshire operations centre.
With the Hobson Industries and Land Rover partnership now fully implemented Peter and Gary Brain, Land Rover’s Military Parts Manager, briefed us on how asset-management is not only assisting extend the life of British and foreign military Land Rover fleets in a major way, but is also helping the UK Government to live up to its Montreal Protocol commitments. Through the use of a high quality asset-management programme, which is the reconditioning and refurbishment of existing vehicles and their components rather than simply replacing them with new, not only are environmental concerns addressed but the fleet owner, the government, can make major cost savings and the manufacturer can maintain the integrity and reputation of the brand so that when part of the fleet does eventually have to be replaced the company name remains in good standing with the buyer.
In the past, both at home and overseas, the use of what the industry terms ‘spurious parts’, i.e. components offered to do the same job as genuine or OE (Original Equipment) parts without any of the guarantees that one would expect from the company which actually manufactured the vehicle, have caused reliability problems and tarnished the good name of both Land Rover and other military vehicle brands. In Land Rover’s case spurious parts are more of a problem than most, as the strength of the brand worldwide means that counterfeiting is an attractive proposition and the longevity, or what Peter terms the longlivety, of vehicles bearing the green oval badge plus the constant evolution of the Land Rover over decades means that former OE components which have been superseded by similar but better or stronger parts on later models are still on offer at lower prices than their higher specification or higher quality replacements.
Asset-management is not refurbishment, as Gary Brain explained: “It is a refurbishment cycle, but with ordinary refurbishment you will find there are engineering companies that won’t use genuine products; not just on Land Rovers but across the board. Sometimes I feel that certain buying decisions are made with slightly clouded judgement on that particular score.”
An asset-managed part, which is mostly recycled but in the case of assemblies may have certain sub-components replaced with genuine parts or be remanufactured, is usually about half the price of a new Land Rover part simply because all the engineering has been done. Peter gives the A-frame upper trailing arms of a Defender’s suspension as a typical example. These components have evolved over the quarter century plus that the coil sprung 110-inch wheelbase Land Rover models have been in existence but outwardly they are essentially very similar. Indeed even the original basic casting is the same, though today’s military Defender 110 WMIK variants have been reengineered to allow a design gross vehicle weight that is a full one third higher than was ever anticipated when the original military specification One-Ten model, the TUM (Truck Utility Medium), was conceived in the early eighties.
When a UK MoD fleet Land Rover reaches the end of its military life, either because a particular variant is surplus to requirements or a specific vehicle has been accident or battlefield damaged beyond economic repair by REME workshops, Hobson Industries take it apart, recondition the individual components and put them back on the shelf in a quality controlled and as-new condition to give a second, and hopefully a potential third life, at considerable cost saving over the supply and manufacture of a new part or assembly. This process is now so streamlined that seemingly complete vehicles can be assembled and reissued to the troops in such good condition that at times receiving inspectors at storage depots have actually confused Hobson asset-managed vehicles as being new and queried why accessories like pioneer tools are missing from the equipment schedule.
Any reader who has seriously maintained or refurbished their own Land Rover, a brand which is often described as being like an overgrown Meccano set, will be well aware of why asset-management is so easy, but Peter explains for those who have not gone down that route: “Land Rover design a vehicle to be arduous. It is over-engineered. Nobody can weigh what soldiers will put on it in the field. If it will go on, it will go on. It may have a tare weight on it but generally Land Rovers in the field are overloaded, well overloaded. Six and a half tonnes for an SF vehicle, one [Chinook] loadmaster told me; and he put it on the aircraft and it came back. So although we have all of these weight limits on them generally with a Land Rover, because it is over-engineered and it was designed to be rugged and it was designed to last for a very long time, most of the components on it are more robust than perhaps they would need to be in a situation where it was just a purely commercial use vehicle used for a short period and then thrown away.
“On the battlefield the soldier wants it to be reliable. He wants to know when he gets in it, even if its got a puncture or a wheel blown off, if he can get it in four wheel drive it will drive. That saves his life. Land Rover looked at all of this and so although the military Land Rover may be more expensive than some other vehicles you get more bang for your buck. Because where with a normal vehicle a ten year lifespan might be its limits, the military Land Rover fleet in MoD is already over ten years old and there’s another ten to twenty years in them. Through the partnership between ourselves and Land Rover we’ve addressed the parts package which, in commercial terms, usually equates to if you don’t use a part for ten years you don’t stock it any more.”
That Defender A-frame upper trailing arm helps illustrate this inbuilt longlivety and how comparatively simple it has been for Hobson Industries and Land Rover to provide UK MoD with a life extension for fleet vehicles which are already twelve to twenty-five years old, dependent on model. In the civilian world it is unreasonable for any customer to expect a vehicle manufacturer to stock original parts for more than ten years just in case replacement might be needed one day, but in the world of military vehicles twenty or even thirty years of service is now not seen as excessive if the vehicle can still do the job required of it. Not only is much of Britain’s mid-eighties military One-Ten fleet still in existence, but Project Tithonus has already seen fourteen hundred of this batch asset-managed and upgraded to hopefully keep it in service until at least 2018, by which time some could be two or three years past their thirtieth birthday.
The A-frame arm casting used on the British military Defender 110HS, the Wolf, of the late nineties is essentially no different from that of the mid-eighties One-Ten as asset-managed for Project Tithonus and, due to Land Rover’s life-long tendency to reuse generic components or derivatives wherever possible on newer models, it is little different from that used on other variants from short wheelbase utility vehicles through to specialist versions like the long wheelbase Composite Armour Vehicle or Snatch. This means Hobson Industries are able to strip A-frames from say 1987 Nineties or 1992 CAVs, inspect and test them for integrity, shotblast them back to bare metal, powder coat to prevent corrosion and then if necessary drill larger diameter fulcrum bracket holes to turn them into heavier duty Wolf spares; all at a fraction of the cost of setting up new production facilities to produce short run components last ordered in bulk over twelve years ago and in original form a quarter century ago. But not only can Hobson Industries do this with simple components, as they can asset-manage whole engines and power train assemblies too.
Explaining how Hobson have the knowledge and experience to take an unneeded ‘in-stock’ part or assembly and change it to replace an ‘out-of-stock’ item, Peter told us: “What a lot of people don’t understand is the generic nature of the Land Rover. Most power trains and a lot of other items are generic throughout the range. They may be redefined and redistributed under various part numbers because the child part package is different but an LT230 transfer box is an LT230 transfer box. Under our arrangement with Land Rover we can take and re-homologate one part number LT230 transfer box into a completely different part number for another LT230 transfer box and that helps MoD because if they’ve got [excess] stocks of something they can send it back to us and have it re-homologated formally and officially to the next designation part number they actually want”.
For more than a quarter century military customers worldwide have purchased considerable quantities of Land Rovers for military, gendarmerie and police use and inevitably many of these are now reaching the end of their original perceived service life. However due to the very nature of their construction many could be given a second lease of life if only replacement engines, gearboxes, transfer boxes and the like were still available, though of course changes in permissible emission levels and drive train advances to give better fuel economy on new vehicles have meant that the manufacturers had no reason to keep producing these as new components. This is where Hobson Industries steps forward again.
Today Hobson are responsible to Land Rover for the supply of old design P4 and D4 petrol and diesel engines, 3.5 litre and 3.8 litre V8 petrol engines, R380 gearboxes and the range of LT77, LT95 and LT230 suffix transfer boxes which the original manufacturer no longer makes. These drive train assemblies can be supplied either through Land Rover or direct to the customer as either new product, which Hobson’s make, or as asset-managed product using various injections of new and used components; for example the engine may have a new block but not necessarily new rocker covers. They also produce asset-managed 300tdi diesel engine and R380 gearbox as used in the current Wolf fleet and derivatives for Land Rover direct supply to MoD customers and as a secondary line of support to their mainstream business.
Through this military strategic through-life support partnership with Land Rover, Hobson Industries hoping to help keep both the mid-eighties One-Ten fleet in UK military service for most of the next decade and three out of four of the already over twelve year old Wolf fleet in action until possibly 2030 at a fraction of the cost of new vehicles from the Solihull factory, as well as providing specialist support to the company to cover military requests for services which Land Rover cannot easily undertake itself without causing disruption to its mainstream production lines.
We’ll leave the last word on the partnership to Gary Brain: “On the specifically military side Peter Hobson actually offers quite an unique service that we haven’t really found with other companies and they certainly don’t have the same strengths and understanding of the brand and the product. We’re very pleased to have Peter on board.”
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