I don’t know about you but I find the amount of 4 wheel drive vehicles that turn up for school drop off and pick up quite comical. The closest that these vehicles and their soccer mums will ever see to off-roading is when they run over the kerb when trying to parallel park!

The Landrover I wanted to talk about today, the WMIK (Weapons Mounted Installation Kit), is as far removed from the everyday 4 wheel drive of the “soccer mums” as possible.

The heavily armed WMIK continues to serve in this, its most recent incarnation, the R+, as an effective Special Forces and reconnaissance vehicle.

The vehicles have become a symbol of British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In keeping with their hearts and minds philosophy they were chosen for patrol duties instead of armoured fighting vehicles such as the Warrior infantry fighting vehicle. Following a spate of incidents, there has been concern that the unarmoured nature of the WIMIC exposes the crews to excessive danger, and they are being supplemented by more heavily armoured vehicles such as the Jackal.

In Afghanistan “an average of one of these vehicles a week” was lost to enemy action, and with replacements often arriving late a “fifth of the fleet” of WMIKs was currently “damaged or has been destroyed by enemy fire”.

I still have an 1/48th scale Airfix Jackal and a BAE Warrior to glue together but as these are not even started they will not be done as part of my April “get the bastards finished” campaign. Hanging around somewhere are some 28mm Empress Miniatures vehicle crews which I may add at some stage to the WIMIC and the Vikings, but you know what the Aladdins cave is like – lot’s of shiny stuff but you cannot find what you are really after.