Under orders.

On 7 May 1952 the once-grand Belgian marque Minerva agreed with Rover to build Land Rovers for the Belgian Army. The 80-inch kits came from Solihull and were bodied in steel near Antwerp; because Minerva could not press the compound-curve wings it substituted folded sheet, giving the Minerva TT its sloping front. Rover records show 8,959 kits dispatched by 1956, and Minerva added station wagons, field ambulances and, around 1955, the armoured Blindé with quarter-inch frontal plate and machine-gun mounts for the parachute reconnaissance units.

Australia's army took its first Series 2s in December 1958 — 88-inch Command and Reconnaissance trucks in gloss Deep Bronze Green with only light militarisation — followed by 88 and 109-inch general-service fleets assembled from CKD kits by Pressed Metal Corporation in Sydney. The Royal Navy, meanwhile, was putting bomb disposal teams into dark blue 109 station wagons with red-masked wings.

The Series IIA 109 was the standard truck of the Commonwealth armies, and the decade's specialist vehicles were mostly conversions of it. Marshall's field ambulance arrived in 1961; the Australian SAS had 109s stripped of doors, roof, screen and tailgate and rebuilt in Perth as long-range patrol vehicles carrying 360 litres of fuel; RAEME's Broadmeadows workshop cut down 69 Series 2 88s into 'Gun Buggies' for the 106 mm recoilless rifle; and Pressed Metal built telecommunication repair shops on the 109. Britain trialled the amphibious, air-portable APGP in 1964, and in 1968 Marshall converted 72 Series IIA 109s into the SAS's 'Pink Panther' desert patrol vehicles.

Two answers to the helicopter came at the end of the decade. In November 1968 Rover began building the ½-ton Lightweight: narrowed by four inches on new axles, with demountable upper body, doors and screen so that a stripped FFR came under the Wessex's 2,500 lb underslung limit — 37,897 built through to 1984. Spain's Santana, building Land Rovers at Linares since 1958, developed its own squared-off Militar 88 ('Ligero') and Militar 109 for the Spanish forces from 1969. And in Belfast, Shorts' first Shorland armoured patrol car went to the RUC in 1966 and the UDR in 1970.

The 101 Forward Control was the V8-powered one-tonne cab-over built for the British military between 1972 and 1978, designed to tow the 105 mm Light Gun with its ammunition aboard; all 2,669 left Solihull as soft-top GS gun tractors. Demountable box bodies made it a signals vehicle and command post, and the rarest form, the Vampire, carried a roof antenna array for 14 Signal Regiment to direction-find Warsaw Pact transmitters from Germany. Marshall bodied the four-stretcher ambulance; 58 right-hand-drive tractors went to Australia with the Rapier missile system; and four early-production 101s made the first west-to-east crossing of the Sahara on the 1975 Joint Services expedition.

The Series IIB Forward Control that preceded it lived on in the Army Fire Service, bodied by HCB-Angus with a rear Godiva pump.

Land Rover's Stage One — the Series III 109 with the Range Rover's 3.5-litre V8 — gave converters a chassis with real power. The Sandringham Motor Company's Land Rover-approved 6×6 conversion sold as a two-ton load carrier and became the basis of Hotspur's Sandringham APC and a twin-20 mm anti-aircraft carrier; Shorts fitted the V8 to the Mark 4 Shorland and the SB401. Searle converted around 34 Series III 109s into elevating-roof Carawagon command posts for BAOR commanders, and New Zealand rebuilt four Stage One 109s on dual rear wheels for electronic warfare.

Elsewhere the Series III soldiered on in plainer forms: Denmark's 88 GS soft tops in three-colour camouflage from 1978, Belgium's 4×2 staff cars, the mine-protected 109s Britain supplied to the Commonwealth Monitoring Force in Rhodesia, and Santana's forward-control 2000, launched in February 1979 with the company's own 3.4-litre straight six, bodied as tray, soft-top and radio truck for the Spanish Army.

The coil-sprung One Ten of 1983 became the military chassis of the next thirty years. The SAS replaced its Pink Panthers from 1985 with Glover Webb's open V8 110 Desert Patrol Vehicle — still 'the Pinkie'; Land Rover Special Projects built the 127-inch Rapier tractor to take over from the 101; and RAF hard tops went to the Gulf in desert camouflage for Operation GRANBY. Hotspur's six-wheeled Hussar APC of 1984 went to Egypt and Sri Lanka, and Shorts moved the whole Shorland range onto the 110 as the Series 5.

Australia's Project Perentie was the biggest single order: Jaguar Rover Australia's militarised 110 4×4 from 1987 — 1,222 canvas GS utilities plus 314 with winch, FFR radio trucks, 231 Regional Force Surveillance Vehicles, a handful of Carryall wagons — and from 1989 the Isuzu-powered 6×6 as cargo truck, workshop, air-defence and Parakeet communications carrier, ambulance and the SASR's 27 Long Range Patrol Vehicles. In Turkey, Otokar took full licence production of the Defender family in 1987, mating Solihull kits to Turkish chassis for a quarter of a century of soft-top 90s, 110s and 130s, gunships with the 106 mm recoilless rifle among them.

Northern Ireland produced the Snatch in 1992: the heavy-duty Defender 110 chassis under an NP Aerospace CAV 100 composite armoured body, 991 built across six variants, named for the snatch squads that arrested riot ringleaders. Sent to Iraq from 2003 and then Afghanistan because it was available, it offered little against roadside bombs, and its 'mobile coffin' reputation drove the Vixen upgrade and the RAF Regiment's own Enhanced Protection Vehicle. A surplus Snatch became the Panama, a remotely driven mine-detection vehicle. The same years brought Land Rover Special Vehicles' Ranger SOV for the US 75th Rangers, the Pathfinder Platoon's cut-down 'Piggyback' 90, and the BIRST weapons platform.

In January 1996 the MoD ordered about 8,000 Wolfs — the Defender XD, a computer-redesigned, strengthened 300 Tdi Defender as Truck Utility Light and Medium HS, in soft-top, hard-top, FFR, air-portable, winterised-and-waterproofed and ambulance forms. Ricardo's Weapons Mount Installation Kit turned it into the WMIK from 1998: roof and doors gone, a roll cage, a rear ring mount and a front pintle, deployed to Macedonia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq and rebuilt as the E-WMIK of 2006 and the V-hulled R-WMIK of 2008. Older Ninetys and One Tens were refurbished with Wolf-style hard tops under Project Tithonus, and surplus Pulse ambulances became double-cab trucks under Project HEBE.

The Defender's final customers were the armies that joined or re-equipped for NATO. The Czech airborne battalions took 300 Tdi 90 and 110 soft tops from 1997, then SVOS of Přelouč armoured 110s for the Military Police and for the Uruzgan contingent, and built 79 open Kajman strike vehicles on the 130. Finland's Rapid Deployment Force ran civilian-spec 110 station wagons and a militarised FFR batch; Denmark issued NATO-funded 110 wagons to its deployable communications company in 2009; Poland's Żandarmeria Wojskowa deployed its raised-roof 110s to Norway on Trident Juncture 2018.

France's fleet came through the coachbuilder Durisotti of Sallaumines: convoy-escort station wagons with fold-down CONVOI EXCEPTIONNEL boards, a stone-coloured Special Forces JTAC car, a double-cab pick-up, the 130 ambulance, and TITAN Défense's helicopter hot-refueller on an Otokar chassis. Spain's last was the Santana Aníbal, sold from 2004 until Linares closed in 2011, in soft-top, military police and UME emergency forms. And Otokar's licence production, the longest of them all, only ended in the 2010s.