The Art of Armoured Vehicles

“The customer doesn’t care what it looks like.” That’s one of the first things that I was told when I started designing armoured vehicles over 15 years ago and threw a sketch of a military vehicle, with a swooping roof line, on to the table of a project review meeting. It wasn’t true then, just as it isn’t true now and my response challenged that assumption. “Great,” I said, “if they don’t care, then why can’t it look like this?” It was the naïve attitude of a young vehicle designer suddenly facing the realities of a very practical and engineering-led industry.

But looks are important. Historically there had always been a notion that warriors must project a particular image. The idea of battledress, of warpaint, goes back millennia. Ancient tribes knew that their appearance could affect the outcome of a battle. It can affect how the people facing you relate to you and can be the difference between an increasingly violent reaction or an enemy falling back. Yet for 100 years there was a single, ugly, image at the front line – rows of tanks, facing off across muddy fields and desolate deserts.

After WW2 they were joined by another category; lighter vehicles such as the venerable Jeep and Land Rover, patrolling the safer territory behind the line. The idea was that these vehicles didn’t need any armour and were often open-topped, allowing better situational awareness for the occupants and the ability to interact with the civilian population that they were there to police and protect.

These two mainstays, along with later rivals like the Puch-designed Mercedes G-Wagen and any number of indigenous small-j ‘jeeps’, were the epitome of form following function. These ‘functional forms’ each went on to become iconic designs in their own right and wrote a design language that lives on today in the SUVs that surround us. The ubiquity of those civilian off-roader on public roads has only helped to make the military off-roader seem less threatening, even when it is a raw piece of un-styled engineering such as the HMMWV (Humvee), with all the presence that its wide stance and no-nonsense appearance has.

But over the last 15 years or so, this paradigm of hard-edged, highly protected tanks up front and soft Humvees behind has changed dramatically. Almost overnight, the automotive hero of the first Gulf War became an incredibly vulnerable form of transport for soldiers in places where ‘front line’ had no meaning and they could be attacked from any direction, including underneath, without a moment’s warning. These light vehicles suddenly needed to be heavily armoured.

Early attempts were no more aesthetically successful than the tanks that had been operating largely out of sight and out of mind for a century. Flat slabs of square-edged armour panelling were bolted onto Humvees and other vehicles, and together with the small thick windows, any pretence of being a civilian vehicle was lost.

Initially, as I was told, nobody cared what they looked like. But in a short time, the operational and strategic drawbacks of driving these fortresses through civilian towns and villages became clearer. The distance that an aggressive-looking and often ungainly armoured truck puts between the soldier and the unprotected civilian population, who you might rely on to help weed out an insurgent mutual enemy, can send a very negative message – one of fear, distrust, selfish self-preservation, even cowardice.

There used to be an army recruitment advertisement shown in British cinemas in which a soldier was seen facing a hostile and angry local woman shouting at him in a language that he didn’t understand. But as soon as he removed his mirrored Ray-Bans and made eye contact she began to soften, and he went on to defuse the situation. The principle is clear, but an armoured vehicle with small dark windows is just a great big heavy pair of sunglasses that you can’t take off. You simply cannot roll into a village in a vehicle like that and expect to find a cooperative population which helps you find the militants in their midst.

Now, we mustn’t be under any illusions; the Taliban didn’t choose which vehicles to shoot at based on which ones looked less cool, and the Improvised Explosive Device (IED) at the side of the road certainly doesn’t distinguish, but when a child steps out of his father’s shop and sees the latest in a long line of foreign armies coming down the street, their appearance can make a huge difference to his attitude. If you can show that you are human, that you’ve come to help and aren’t just another one of ‘them’, maybe you can start to win over their hearts and minds. Gradually, in Western militaries at least, this ‘Hearts & Minds’ doctrine began to replace the ‘Shock & Awe’ principle that had exacerbated an already heated situation.

As Chief Designer of Plasan I have helped to design many vehicles fielded to Iraq and Afghanistan, such as the Navistar MaxxPro MRAP and Oshkosh M-ATV for the US, plus the Navistar MXT (Husky TSV) for the UK. These, which quickly replaced most of the earlier hastily-armoured Humvees and Land Rovers, were quite deliberately designed to project a cooler, more progressive image than the improvised vehicles that they superseded. The idea was to inject a bit of Hollywood, a bit of sci-fi, and to show the local populations that these were the good guys. If you’re going to wear mirror shades, at least try and look like Tom Cruise.

Yet still, most armoured vehicles look pretty awful. Why? Well, let’s look at some of the design constraints. Armour is heavy. That might be an obvious thing to say, but even the most advanced composite armour solutions can weigh upwards of 100kg per square metre of surface area. So the designer can’t waste material on frivolous styling features; the whole geometry needs to be optimised to offer the most useful internal volume for the smallest surface area.

Then there are numerous effects that angle of incidence has on ballistics; the angles of the surfaces can significantly affect efficiency. Armoured glass weighs two to three times as much as opaque armour, so the designer needs to be even more attentive to minimising window sizes, and it probably goes without saying that the glass must be flat.

The armour itself is limited by manufacturing constraints that would have most car designers throwing their sketch pads down in frustration. The multi-material sandwiches need to be pressed, usually on flat presses. A single straight bend may be possible but this sort of forming must be used sparingly and cannot be applied to all materials, so the design needs to be coordinated with the ballistic engineers working on the armour. Three-dimensional curvature is totally out of the question.

All this is before even working out how to prevent a bullet or fragment from weaving its way through a door seal. Every join is a ballistic hole that must be plugged, usually by overlapping the panels with complex ‘bullet traps’. For most companies that manufacture or develop armoured vehicles, the challenges of involving a designer in the process are simply too much to even consider, so the whole job is left to engineers who are experts in these issues, but have no sense of design or appreciation for aesthetics.

At Plasan, however, we have an in-house team of designers dedicated to this specialised field. All our projects start on the desk of a vehicle designer. From the inside out, the package is optimised and weight analysed to establish the most efficient basic geometry to answer any given requirements – and a lot of emphasis is placed on ergonomics.

Then, and only then, can we start to think seriously about the styling – but it is crucial that the aesthetics are dealt with at an early stage and on a deep level, because the tools at our disposal to design the appearance of a vehicle are few and fragile, easily spoiled by later additions of elements that weren’t considered and integrated elegantly from the start, such as the aforementioned overlaps and bullet traps.

I like to consider vehicle design as the treatment of proportions, then surfacing, then details – in that order. Get one wrong, or start working on the next before the previous one is resolved, and the design will not be aesthetically successful. The proportions, in broad terms, will have been set by the package, which must have an efficient geometry for stopping projectiles. But there is a little flexibility to stray slightly from the absolute optimum shape, and there are many visual tricks that can be applied to alter the way that the eye perceives the proportions of the vehicle. Glass can’t be wasted and shapes must be optimised for maximum visibility, but the DLO and door shut-lines are virtually the only graphic element available to break up what is invariably a slab-sided profile.

There is often a lot more freedom in the design of the ‘non-ballistic’ parts; wings, side-steps, perhaps the bonnet or an unprotected rear cargo area. When these are designed together with the passenger cell, it is usually possible to balance the proportions. You don’t need to see many military vehicles, though, to see how easy it is to get this very wrong.

Then comes the surfacing. Forget everything that you learned in the clay room or on Alias. Most of the surfaces are going to be flat. Again, there may be scope for a moulded wing or bonnet, but there’s a good chance that even those will need to be formed in low volumes with bent sheet metal. Even when the luxury of a curved bonnet is available, it still needs to work with the flat forms of the rest of the body.

I myself find a lot of inspiration in the folded-paper designs of the 1970s. If you look at the M1114GR HMMWV – one of my first military designs – the influence of cars like the Stratos Zero, Maserati Boomerang and Alfa Romeo Carabo will probably be evident to most readers. For this vehicle, the bonnet and rear wings of the underlying Humvee remained, but the rest of the body was designed to be manufactured from flat, armoured materials.

Initially I wanted a bend down the side to highlight the natural line that flowed from the bonnet to the rear wing tops but that wasn’t possible with the material chosen for the doors. So, the only tool that I had left (and this is where the third element, the details, come in) was to position the door handles on that line and cause the observer’s eyes to complete it.

Such a detail would be an obvious thing for most designers to do, but when the engineers took my drawings and drafted the first prototype they assumed that the 1.5º discrepancy between the door handle and the latch was a mistake… and straightened it. It was of course the first thing that I noticed when I entered the workshop – the door handles were off this critical imaginary line that balanced the whole design.

The mistake was rectified for the second prototype and so began a process whereby all our engineers learned the importance of these details, of why not all lines should be parallel and why not all dimensions can be rounded up. We put effort into a lot of details that on other armoured vehicles are things that just happen without any thought about how they look. For example, effort goes into the position of visible bolts, into learning from the Lotus Elise how beautiful a bracket can be, and into the ergonomics and tactility of lock mechanisms, to name a few. The details can really make the design.

The overall aesthetic of the vehicle needs to suit the mission to which it is being put. There is a difference between the visual message that a police or paramilitary team wants to send out and the one that an army might want to project. There is also a difference between the needs of an army involved in peacekeeping or guarding borders, and those of an expeditionary force in combat far from home.

One of the characteristics that has made our SandCat so successful is the inherent flexibility in its design, allowing it to be tuned to the specific needs of each end user. One version, used by the Israeli Border Police, has a softened appearance with added body mouldings and other details to give it, at least in part, a more civilian SUV aesthetic. A large part of its role is regular police work –traffic accidents and domestic disputes – and it would be totally counterproductive to arrive in a military-looking vehicle.

Another SandCat customer, though, requested the exact opposite. They wanted to deliberately project a more aggressive image, to send a clear message of “don’t mess with us” that worked for their particular mission. For us it meant designing a different grille and replacing the plastic wings with bent sheet metal to change the stance from light SUV to a squarer, more heavy-duty look.

The aesthetic of an armoured vehicle is based on a combination of strategic, cultural, and political factors, but ultimately it comes down to mission requirements: What is the job that the people inside are going to do? And how can the image of the vehicle help them achieve that?

Military and armoured vehicle design is highly niche and involves very close collaboration between designers and engineers. As a designer, you need a good head for the technical details. It is also, understandably, a field that most designers – perhaps especially car designers, many of whom grew up dreaming of designing sports cars – shy away from. It is very constraining, it isn’t glamorous, but the issues that military vehicle designers deal with about aesthetics and function are the same as for any other vehicle or product.

I am often asked why an armoured vehicle manufacturer needs designers, and my answer is simple; because our products have users. My job is to give them a vehicle that lets them do their job, do it in comfort, and to be able to go home to their families afterwards. And if just for the letters of thanks that we get from the soldiers who we have saved, it is worth it.

Nir Kahn is Director of Design at Plasan – www.plasan.com