In the second in a two-part series on WMIKs, Craig Allen looks at the vehicle’s role in Afghanistan
The original WMIK Land Rovers were issued to 16 Air Assault and 3 Commando Brigades in 1999 and cut their teeth on early operations in Sierra Leone and Kosovo. The vehicle really came of age however with the deployment to Iraq in 2003. But it was also here during the insurgency following the war that its vulnerability to the increasing IED threat first became an issue. Deployed to Afghanistan in 2006, several WMIKs were soon lost to IEDs and small arms engagements. Something had to be done to address their vulnerability. An interim fix was to apply flexible Kevlar panels to vulnerable points, but a more convincing answer had to be found, and quickly.
