2011, a defense exhibition hall in Paris, France. Milipol, the largest internal security trade show in Europe. Hundreds of European, American, and Israeli defense contractors lined the floor with armored vehicles, surveillance drones, and tactical communications platforms worth billions. And in one corner of the exhibition, almost unnoticed, a small Colombian company called Armor International rolls out something that nobody in the room has ever seen before.
It is a 4×4 armored truck. It weighs just over 9,000 kg. Its hull sits high off the ground on a reinforced chassis, and underneath, the belly is shaped into a sharp V, angled to deflect blast energy outward and away from anyone sitting inside. The armor is rated to stop 7.62 mm armor-piercing rifle rounds at close range.
A turret ring on the roof can mount a 12.7 mm heavy machine gun, a 7.62 mm general-purpose weapon, or a 40-mm automatic grenade launcher. It carries 12 people, a driver, a commander, and 10 fully equipped soldiers. And it can do all of this for a unit price of roughly $190,000. It looked like something a wealthier nation would have thrown together in a weekend. It looked improvised.
It looked like a country that had no business building armored vehicles had tried anyway. It would go on to become the only Colombian designed armored vehicle ever exported to a foreign military. It would be tested in live combat against guerrilla ambushes, roadside bombs, mortar attacks, and sustained rifle fire across some of the most difficult terrain on earth.
And according to its manufacturer, not a single occupant has ever been killed or seriously injured inside one. Its designation was the Hunter TR-12, and it was the product of a war that lasted over 50 years. A war that no foreign arms dealer ever truly understood, and a war that Colombia eventually had to solve on its own. To understand why the Hunter TR-12 existed, you need to understand the problem Colombia faced at the turn of the 21st century.
The Colombian armed conflict, which had begun in 1964 with the formation of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym FARC, had by the late 1990s escalated into something that resembled a full-scale civil war fought across terrain that defied every conventional military doctrine ever written.
Colombia is not one landscape, it is at least five. The Andes split into three separate mountain chains running north to south, creating corridors of altitude that climb from sea level to over 5,000 m. To the east lie the vast grasslands of the Llanos, and then the Amazon basin, some of the densest jungle on the planet.
To the west and northwest, the Pacific coast descends into lowland rainforests so thick that entire FARC columns could move for weeks without being seen from the air. And connecting all of this was secondary roads, unpaved, winding through mountain passes and river valleys, where a single improvised explosive device could destroy a military convoy and vanish the attackers into terrain that swallowed pursuit. Colombia had armored vehicles.
It had imported over 128 Brazilian EE-9 Cascavel armored reconnaissance cars and 56 EE-11 Urutu armored personnel carriers from Engesa in the 1980s. These were decent machines for their era, flat-bottomed, wheeled, built for open terrain and conventional engagements. But by the mid-1990s, two things had gone catastrophically wrong.
First, Engesa went bankrupt. The Brazilian manufacturer filed for protection in 1990 and was formally dissolved by a Brazilian court on October 18th, 1993. The spare parts pipeline died overnight. Colombian army mechanics were suddenly maintaining a fleet of nearly 200 armored vehicles with no manufacturer support, no replacement components, and no clear path forward.
Second, the FARC changed tactics. By 2000, the guerrillas had shifted decisively toward improvised explosive devices as their primary weapon against military movement. And the Iroquois two, with its flat hull designed for a different kind of war, was exactly the wrong vehicle to survive a blast from below. Colombia needed something new.
It needed a vehicle that could survive mine and IED attacks on unpaved mountain roads. It needed a vehicle light enough to cross bridges rated for civilian truck traffic because most Colombian rural infrastructure was never built for military loads. It needed a vehicle that could ford rivers, climb 60% gradients, and operate for extended periods in temperatures ranging from the freezing Andean highlands to the suffocating heat of the Amazon basin.
It needed a vehicle that could be maintained by ordinary army mechanics using commercial truck components available in Bogota, not specialized European or American parts ordered from a catalog and shipped across the Atlantic. And it needed all of this at a price that a nation spending most of its defense budget on manpower and helicopters could actually afford.
No major foreign manufacturer had ever designed a vehicle for this specific combination of requirements. The American M1117 armored security vehicle, which Colombia would later receive in large numbers through United States excess defense articles programs, was effective but cost roughly 10 times more per unit. The Canadian LAV III, of which Colombia purchased 24 in a 65.
3 million Canadian dollar contract in 2013, was a superb machine but was designed for a different doctrine entirely, conventional combined arms warfare on open terrain, not counterinsurgency on jungle roads. The South African mine-resistant vehicles that had emerged from the bush wars of the 1970s and 80s were closer in concept, but they were designed for the African savanna, not the Andes.
Armor International, a private Colombian firm founded in Bogota in 1984, had spent two decades armoring civilian vehicles, cash-in-transit trucks, executive sedans, and government cars for a country where kidnapping and assassination had been facts of daily life for generations. By the 2000s, the company had accumulated more practical experience in ballistic protection engineering than most boutique defense firms in Europe.
What it had never done was build a purpose-designed military vehicle from the ground up. The Hunter TR-12 changed that. The vehicle was built on a commercial Ford chassis using a 6,700 cubic centimeter Ford V8 turbo diesel engine producing 300 horsepower at 2,800 revolutions per minute and 660 pound feet of torque at 1,600 revolutions per minute mated to a six-speed automatic transmission and a permanent four-wheel drive system.
The choice of a commercial powertrain was deliberate. Every component, every gasket, every belt, every filter could be sourced from a Ford dealership in any major Colombian city. The vehicle did not require a specialized military supply chain. It required a phone call. The hull was welded steel rated to B6 under the European EN 1063 ballistic standard, meaning it could defeat multiple hits from 7.
62 by 51 mm NATO armor-piercing rounds at a range that simulated close-range ambush conditions. The V-shaped underbody was designed to channel blast energy from mines and IEDs outward and downward away from the crew compartment. The wheelbase measured 3,580 mm. Overall length was 6,500 mm. Width was 2,420 mm. Height was 2,600 mm.
Ground clearance was sufficient for the rutted washed-out tracks that passed for roads in Caquetá, Putumayo, and the Chocó. Now, before we get into where the Hunter actually fought and how it performed under fire, if you are enjoying this deep dive into Colombian military engineering and the story of a country that built its own answer to a war nobody else could solve, hit subscribe.
It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. The Hunter TR-12 entered Colombian Army service in December of 2012, just 1 month after the Army formally selected it in November of that year, but the initial procurement was not conventional. The first vehicles were not purchased through the Colombian Ministry of Defense.
They were donated to the army and the National Police by the state oil company Ecopetrol, by the Meta Departmental Government, and by the National Roads Agency known as INVÍAS. This was a pattern unique to Colombia, where civilian institutions operating in conflict zones, oil pipelines, highway construction projects, and agricultural cooperatives had a direct stake in military protection, and sometimes purchased the equipment themselves.
Deployments concentrated in southern Colombia in the departments of Huila, Caquetá, and Putumayo, where FARC dissident factions and ELN guerrilla columns remained active even as the broader FARC peace process advanced toward the 2016 Havana Accords. The terrain was exactly what the vehicle had been designed for: narrow mountain roads descending into jungle valleys, river crossings without bridges, ambush corridors where tree cover meters of the road surface, and IEDs buried in culverts, hidden under road surfaces,
and detonated by command wire or pressure plate. According to Armor International Marketing Director Cesar Castro, speaking in a January 2024 interview with Zona Militar, the Hunter TR-12 was tested in multiple real-world combat engagements across Colombia and demonstrated excellent performance, resisting attacks as promised.
According to the manufacturer, no occupant has been killed or seriously injured inside a Hunter during its more than a decade of operational service. Whether independent verification of this claim exists in Colombian military records remains unclear, as the Ministry of Defense does not publish disaggregated vehicle survivability data.
The vehicle also saw service with the Colombian National Police, which received four units for high-risk patrol and rapid response operations. And then came something no one in Bogotá had expected: export orders. Suriname purchased a single Hunter for its armed forces. And in 2024, Chile’s Carabineros, the national police force, took delivery of four Hunter TR-12s for public order and security operations, making Colombia an armored vehicle exporter for the first time in its history.
On paper, the Hunter TR-12 does not compare favorably to the vehicles that wealthier nations sent to Colombia. The Canadian LAV 6, 55 of which were ordered under a 418 million Canadian dollar contract announced in June 2023, is a vastly more capable platform with superior armor, a larger weapon station, amphibious capability, and full digital integration.
The American M1117, of which Colombia has now received over 269 units across four separate deliveries, offers heavier protection and a proven 40-year track record. The Israeli Plasan Sand Cat, also in Colombian service, brings cutting-edge composite armor technology that steel alone cannot match. But none of those vehicles were designed in Colombia.
None of them were built by Colombians. None of them can be maintained with parts from a commercial dealership in Bogota, and none of them cost $190,000. The Hunter exists alongside Colombia’s other indigenous armored programs. The Imdecocal family of prototype vehicles dating back to the Zipper of 1993, the ISBI Blindajes Meteoro and Kodiak conversions used in highway protection, and the army’s own BAMAN workshop-built Bufalo and Cobra conversions.
But the Hunter is the only one that crossed the line from prototype to sustained production, from domestic service to foreign export, from a sketch on an engineer’s desk in Bogota to a vehicle standing in formation with Chilean police halfway down the continent. At Expodefensa 2025, Armor International unveiled the Hunter TR-12 2026, an upgraded variant built on a Navistar Defense chassis with a reference combat weight of 10.
2 metric tons, designed to compete in international markets including Ecuador and the United States. 2011, a defense exhibition in Paris, a small Colombian company rolls out a vehicle that looks improvised, looks too simple, looks like it was built by a country that had no business trying. It had no composite armor.
It had no digital battle management system. It had no independent suspension or run-flat tire inserts. It had a commercial Ford engine and welded steel plates and a price tag that most European defense contractors would mistake for a rounding error. And yet not a single soldier has died inside one. It worked in the mountains of Huila.
It worked in the jungles of Putumayo. It worked on the shattered roads of Caquetá where billion-dollar foreign platforms were never designed to go. It was not elegant. It was not advanced. It was Colombian, built by a country that fought the longest internal conflict in the Western Hemisphere, built because nobody else was going to solve the problem, and built to keep 12 people alive on the worst roads on Earth.
That is not luck. That is what happens when a nation stops waiting for someone else to save it.
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.
