2019, the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Center, United Arab Emirates. A vehicle rolls onto the exhibition floor at the International Defense Exhibition and Conference. It moves on four wheels. It is not enormous. It carries no turret visible from a distance. It does not look like a weapon built to survive the modern battlefield.
It looks, by any reasonable European standard, like something assembled on a modest budget in a country that has never fought a serious war. It is 16 tons of welded steel. It seats a crew of two, a gunner, and eight fully equipped infantry soldiers. Its hull was certified three months earlier against a blast. No standard European wheeled infantry vehicle was required to survive.
Not 10 kg of explosive detonated beneath it. Not 20 50 kg of TNT detonated at 5 m from the side of the hull. Every seat intact, no hull rupture, every occupant by the test dummies positioned inside alive. The defense ministers and procurement officers walking past that morning saw a vehicle from Africa. They assumed it belonged in Africa.
They were wrong. Its name is the Bombay 4 built by South Africa’s Paramount Group. It is the most blast protrotected wheeled infantry vehicle poundforpound that any private defense company has ever offered to the world market. Six nations have now ordered it. One nation deployed it to the Himalayas along a live disputed border.
Another deployed it to a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Sudan. A third licensed it for domestic production under a separate name and it came from a country that European arms manufacturers have spent decades ignoring. To understand why the Bomber 4 exists, you need to understand the problem South Africa faced in the 1970s. In 1977, the United Nations Security Council passed resolution 418, a binding international arms embargo against apartheid South Africa.
Every major Western manufacturer, every government arms program, every conventional supply chain closed simultaneously. South Africa could not buy armored vehicles. It could not buy aircraft. It could not buy sophisticated military electronics. It was fighting a bush war across Angola and Southwest Africa, what is now Namibia and Mosamb beek across terrain littered with Soviet supplied anti-tank mines.
Its soldiers were dying, and it could not purchase the equipment to keep them alive, so it built its own. The Buffalo arrived in the late 1970s on a modified Unimog chassis, its hull angled to deflect mine blasts away from the crew compartment. The Casper followed in 1981, a V-shaped Monaco designed by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, the CSIR in Ptoria.
The Casper was the first vehicle in the world whose entire hull geometry was engineered specifically around the shape of a detonating landmine. Its crew compartment was lifted high above the blast. Its V-shaped floor directed energy outward. It was certified against a triple mind stack. More than 20 kg of TNT detonated directly beneath a wheel.
American engineers studied the Casper in the early 2000s as thousands of their own soldiers died to improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan. The entire United States mine reses ambush protected vehicle program. The vehicles that eventually protected coalition forces across two theaters of war traced its doctrine to that South African design.
The country that the world ignored had already solved the problem the world was desperate to solve. The Rattel arrived in service in 1976. According to multiple defense historians, it was the first wheeled infantry fighting vehicle to enter operational service anywhere on Earth. More than 1,200 were built. It fought in Angola.
It fought in Southwest Africa. It fought in operations that were for decades classified. It proved that a wheeled infantry vehicle could survive in contested terrain, sustain damage, and keep fighting. That lesson did not leave South Africa’s engineering culture. Paramount Group was founded in 1994, the year of South Africa’s first democratic election by businessman Iva Ichikowitz.
It began as a reseller of surplus South African defense equipment as the post-aparttheid government sharply cut military spending. Over the following two decades, it grew into the largest privately owned defense and aerospace company on the African continent, acquiring engineering teams and design talent from the disbanded apartheid era defense industrial base.
By 2012, it had absorbed the armored hull engineering specialists at industrial and automotive design, a firm with direct lineage to the mine protection philosophy of the Casper and Rattel programs. The Bombay family was a clean sheet design. The Bomber 6, a six-wheel vehicle, came first in 2010. The Bombi 8, an eight-w wheeled platform, was unveiled at Africa Aerospace and Defense in 2016.
The MOME 4, the smallest and lightest of the three, was prototyped in 2014, revised, and formally offered to the global market at IDEX in February 2019. Now, before this script gets into where these vehicles have been sent and what they have survived, if you are finding this examination of modern armored engineering worth your time, hit subscribe. It costs nothing.
It helps the channel grow, and there is a great deal more of this to come. The Mama 4 is built around a flat floor monocoke armored hull. This is a deliberate departure from the V-shaped floor of the Casper. Paramount’s engineers argue that modern composite armor layering and blast attenuating seat technology now deliver equivalent crew protection at a fraction of the height penalty.
The Bomber 4 stands under 2.4 m tall. A vehicle half a meter shorter than its rivals is harder to detect, easier to move through urban terrain, and more stable at high speed across broken ground. The power comes from a six-cylinder Cumins turbocharged diesel engine producing 450 horsepower mated to a six-speed Allison automatic transmission. Those two choices matter.
The Cumins engine family is among the most widely serviced diesel units on Earth. In the remote terrain where this vehicle was designed to operate. Finding a mechanic who can keep a Cumins running is realistic. Finding one who can service a bespoke European military power plant is not. The Allison transmission was chosen for the same reason.
Proven, serviceable, replaceable. The vehicle can reach 140 km/h on a paved road. It can travel 800 km on a single load of fuel. Its armor was independently tested and certified by the CSIR Landwood Sciences Division, South Africa’s National Scientific Research Body. In September 2019, the tests were conducted to STA4569 standards, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization benchmark by which all Western armored vehicles are evaluated.
The Mommy 4 achieved level three protection against ballistic threats as standard with level four protection available with applique armor packages. On mine and blast protection, it achieved level 4A, 10 kg of TNT detonated beneath the hull and level 4 B, 10 kg detonated beneath a wheel. Then came the test that no standard S tag requirement demands.
50 kg of TNT detonated at 5 m from the side of the vehicle. According to the CSIR test report, there was no evidence of hull ruptures. There were no injurious fragments formed internally. The anthropomorphic test dummies and the seats in which they were positioned remained undamaged and in place. No European wheeled infantry vehicle in the Bomber’s weight class was designed to meet that standard.
The CV90, the Pummer, the Boxer, the VBCI, all were engineered to survive threats beneath the hull. The threat that has killed the most soldiers in modern conflict. An improvised explosive device or a rocket propelled grenade detonated against the side of a moving vehicle was treated as something to be survived by luck and dispersal.
Paramount treated it as a specification. The United Arab Emirates was the launch customer in 2019. Togo placed an order for approximately 20 vehicles the same year and took delivery ahead of schedule. Toggaliss armored units operating against jihadist insurgents spilling across the border from Bkina Faso into the Savanz region placed those vehicles into active service almost immediately.
The most consequential early order came from India in February 2021 with Chinese and Indian forces in a live standoff along the line of actual control in eastern Ladak. The Indian army placed an emergency procurement order with Pirate Forge through its Kyani group subsidiary at a contract value of 177.95 crore rupees approximately $24 million.
The Indianbuilt version designated the Kalyani M4 was produced at the parrot forge facility in Pune. It was taken to high altitude trials at Lei in Ladak and at the ran of Cooch. In April 2022, then Chief of Army Staff General MM Naravan formally inducted the first Kalani M4 vehicles into Indian service.
16 of those vehicles were dispatched in October 2022 for United Nations peacekeeping duty. By April 2023, they were deployed operationally in Abay on the disputed border of Sudan and South Sudan under the UN interim security force for Abier, a South African-designed vehicle built in India carrying Indian peacekeepers protecting a UN mission in Africa.
The Democratic Republic of Congo received approximately 20 Mommy 4 vehicles in late 2023 and early 2024, acquired as part of an emergency armored vehicle procurement driven by the ongoing M23 conflict in the country’s east. Thailand signed a licensing agreement in August 2022 to produce the vehicle domestically, designating it the Dion.
Saudi Arabia concluded a memorandum of understanding for incountry production through the Scopa and NCMS consortium. On paper, the European alternatives look superior. The German Pummer infantry fighting vehicle achieves level six frontal ballistic protection in its fully armored configuration. The Swedish CV90 family carries a 35 mm cannon and integration options for active protection systems.
The boxer carries more dismounts and is built to higher ballistic standards across its full frontal arc. These vehicles are extraordinary machines. They also weigh between 30 and 43 tons. cost between5 and $8 million per unit and are built to supply chains that require European workshops and European spare parts in European logistics systems.
In Togo, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Abier, Sudan, in a mountain pass in eastern Leairc at 4,000 m above sea level, those supply chains do not exist. The Kyani M4 has a unit cost according to Indian procurement reporting of approximately 5 crore rupees roughly $600,000. For the price of one Pummer, you can equip a full armored company with Kyani M4s.
Each vehicle carries Cummins components available anywhere on Earth and Allison transmissions serviced in every major city in the developing world. That calculation is precisely why six nations have ordered a vehicle designed in Johannesburg. The MOM 4 has limitations that honest analysis demands acknowledging.
It carries no integrated active protection system against incoming missiles. Its standard arament of a 12.7 mm heavy machine gun in a remote weapon station. Does not compete with the 30 mm and above cannon carried by European tracked infantry fighting vehicles. It is not amphibious. Its frontal ballistic protection even with a ple packages does not approach the pummer’s level six maximum.
Paramount Group itself filed for United States Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in August 2024 through its Abu Dhabi holding entity. A financial dispute that the company stated had not disrupted vehicle production, but which raises legitimate questions about long-term sustainment for any government that has placed an order.
Return to February 2019, the exhibition floor in Abu Dhabi. A vehicle from a continent that builds worldclass armored hardware for the simple reason that no one else would build it for them when they needed it most. The Bomber 4 has no active protection. It has no sophisticated electronics. It fires no 35 mm round. It cannot swim a river.
It survived 50 kg of explosive detonated 5 m from its side. In Togo, facing jihadist ambushes, in Lead facing a disputed border, in Abier facing a fractured peace. Six nations decided that was what they needed. Africa solved the landmine problem 40 years before the world acknowledged it had one.
QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.
Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.
Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.
The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.
Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.
Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.
Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.
that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music
industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.
The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.
Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.
Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.
The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.
Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.
Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.
Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.
Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.
The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.
Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.
The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.
Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.
Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.
The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.
Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.
The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.
Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.
They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.
She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.
She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.
She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.
She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it
well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.
Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.
What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.
The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.
They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.
Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.
Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and
Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.
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Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
