The record
The Rangers wanted a gun truck that a helicopter could carry. The Humvee was too big for the belly of an MH-47 Chinook; the M151 jeeps they had been using were worn out. In 1992 the 75th Ranger Regiment adopted a Land Rover, and the RSOV was built by Land Rover's special operations vehicle department on the Defender 110: a stripped, open body with a roll cage, a three-man crew of truck commander, driver and top gunner, and room for a four-man fire team in the back. Sixty were bought initially, to meet a requirement of twelve per battalion; each battalion's Alpha Company holds them, deployed in four platoons of two-vehicle sections.
The prototypes ran the 3.5-litre Rover V8. Production vehicles took a four-cylinder turbodiesel with a manual gearbox — for the date, the 200Tdi — chosen in part because a diesel makes less noise, which matters to a unit that arrives quietly. The weapons fit is a ring mount at the rear for an M2 .50 machine gun or an Mk 19 or Mk 47 40 mm grenade launcher, with M240 7.62 mm machine guns on the pintles; as a weapons carrier it can take up to 8,000 lb including six or seven armed Rangers. The vehicle measures 173.8 in long, 70.5 in wide and 76 in high without the gun mounts, at 7,734 lb.
Two variants serve alongside it: the MEDSOV, of which each battalion has two, with the rear gun mount removed to carry six litters, and the MORTSOV of the battalion mortar platoon, converted to carry thirty 120 mm mortar rounds. The RSOV remains in service with the regiment. Land Rover's own 1993 trials demonstrator for the requirement is in this registry as a separate record.
