December 1988, a British shipyard in Barrow in Finesse, Cumbria. The yard had built submarines for the Royal Navy for over a century. It had launched the Royal Navy’s first submarine, Holland 1, back in 1901. Now, three British engineers working inside that same complex, Harold Leslie Surl, David Andrew Eaglestone, and James Bone filed a patent for something that had nothing to do with ships.
They had designed a 155mm howitzer. Not just any howitzer built largely from titanium. The lightest 155 mm field howitzer ever produced. The patent was assigned to Vicar’s ship building and engineering limited. The company that owned the shipyard. Today the world calls that gun American. Russia hunts it across every front line in Ukraine.
It carries a designation beginning with the letter M, the standard American prefix for ordinance. It is built and assembled in Mississippi. But the M777, the artillery piece Russia fears most in Ukraine, was conceived, designed, and patented inside a British shipyard. This is how Britain quietly created the weapon that defined a war and then handed the badge to America.
In the early 1980s, the standard NATO heavy howitzer was the American M198. It fired the 155 mm shell. It worked, but it weighed 7,154 kg. Moving it required a heavy prime mover. Airlifting it required heavy lift helicopters that could only carry one gun at a time. The Cold War threat had been a slow, grinding battle in central Germany.
By the mid1 1980s, NATO planners were looking ahead to faster wars. Expeditionary deployments, rapid response. They needed a heavy howitzer that could be sling loaded under a single medium helicopter, flown into a clearing, fired, and pulled out before counter fire arrived. The M198 was too heavy for that. Every existing attempt to solve the weight problem traded firepower or range.
Build the gun shorter and you lose range. Build it from lighter steel alloys and you lose structural integrity under the stress of repeated firing. The engineering challenge looked impossible. A full caliber 155 mm howitzer with the range of the M198 but drastically lighter. Most artillery engineers across NATO believed the laws of physics were against them.
Vicar’s ship building and engineering limited VSEL did not. Their armaments division at Barrow infess had been studying the problem privately since 1982. They believed that techniques developed for aerospace, light, strong alloys, titanium structures, investment castings could be applied to land artillery. Nobody else in the world was attempting it.
According to Defense Procurement International, VEL set out to create a weapon approximately 3,000 kg lighter than the existing American gun. The project definition was completed in the spring of 1987. In September of that year, the VCEL mainboard approved building two prototypes. The work would be self-funded, no government contract, no customer waiting.
VCEL was betting its own money that titanium could change artillery forever. The patent filed in December 1988 tells the story in dry engineering language. It states that titanium and its alloys would be used wherever the stress levels permit. It describes designing structures on aerospace principles of combining lightness and strength.
For the first time in history, a 155mm field howitzer would be built using investment cast titanium alloy. The metal of choice was titanium 6 alu minium yum 4 venadium. 29 titanium structural castings in total. Hot isostatic pressed to remove internal voids. Heat treated for fatigue strength. The technique had been pioneered for aircraft components.
Now, VSEL was applying it to a weapon that would absorb the recoil of a 155 mm charge thousands of times. Firing trials began in June 1989. The gun worked, the recoil structure held, the barrel held, the chassis held, but there was a problem. The United States was the only realistic customer with the budget to buy at scale.
An American federal law prohibits the US Army from buying foreignade weapons. Vicers needed an American partner. They found Textron Marine and Land Systems. Vicers would design and build the core. Textron would be the prime contractor on paper. The British design entered the US Army’s competition for a lightweight 155 mm howitzer.
It went to Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona for an 11-month shutoff against rival designs, including a competing British submission from the Royal Ordinance Facility at Nottingham. The Vicar’s gun won. On March the 17th, 1997, the engineering and manufacturing development contract was awarded worth $138.9 million. By 1999, BAE Systems had acquired VEL.
6 years later, in 2005, BAE acquired United Defense, the American firm handling final assembly. The British company now owned both ends of the production line. That was the moment the gun became, in the eyes of the public, American. B AE Americanized the supply chain. Today, according to Wikipedia and Global Security, the M777 uses about 70% Americanbuilt parts, including the M776 barrel made at Waterl at Arsenal in New York.
Final assembly happens at Hattisburg, Mississippi, but the core titanium structures, the most complex investment castings, the recoil components, these remained under British management at Barrow. Commentators on British defense forums have noted that even for guns labeled American, the really complex titanium parts were still made in the United Kingdom.
The finished gun weighs 4,200 kg in firing trim, 41% lighter than the predecessor. Crew of 8 against the older guns 9 range 24 km with standard rounds up to 40 km with the M982 Excalibur GPS guided round. Setup time 2 to 3 minutes. According to BAE’s published figures, Ukrainian crews would later cut that to under 90 seconds.
The US Marine Corps fielded the first guns in May 2005. First combat use with Canadian gunners in Afghanistan came in early 2006. Quick moment here. If you’re finding this story interesting, hit subscribe. The channel is built for people who want the real history behind the headlines. Now, back to what happened when this British gun met the Russian army.
The first guns arrived in Ukraine in late April 2022. Within days, footage confirmed them firing in the Donbus. The United States supplied around 142 systems. Canada sent four. Australia sent six. Enough to equip roughly eight battalions. Ukrainian artillery crews trained for weeks before being given the weapon. Within the first month, 74 of the initial 90 American guns were forward in the fight.
The British designed howitzer became central to the Ukrainian counteroffensive at Kharkiv in autumn 2022. According to Ukrainian press reporting, General Alexander Cerski’s plan supplied every attacking brigade with at least eight of these guns. The liberation of Kersonen followed the same pattern. At Vuladar, Ukrainian batteries firing remote anti-armour mine shells and Excalibur precision rounds shattered Russian mechanized columns trying to advance across open ground.
Ukrainian marine gunners of the Almazovv brigade gave their assessment to the Ukrainian defense outlet Militani. They called the gun precise and menacing, maneuverable and long range. A gun commander identified only as O said the system was easy to operate and the lightweight made all the difference in how fast they could leave a firing position before Russian counter fire arrived.
A left tenant with the call sign Wasp told the same outlet. The gun was much more accurate than anything they had used before. Being closer to the ground, it was easier to camouflage. He said it raised the fighting spirit of Ukrainian soldiers the same way it demoralized the enemy. Russian forces made destroying these guns a priority.
Lancet loitering munitions made by Zala Arrow of the Kalashnikov group became the main threat. Cued by Orland 10 reconnaissance drones, they hunted the howitzers across every front. Crashnipole guided shells and counter battery fire from 2S5 Gatsint and 2S3 Aatsia. self-propelled guns added to the toll. According to the Orex Open Source Intelligence Project, which counts only photograph or video confirmed losses as a conservative baseline, at least 100 1M777s had been lost by April 2025.
55 destroyed, 44 damaged, two captured. About 1/3 of the entire fleet sent to Ukraine. The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed much higher figures. Defense Minister Serge Shooyu told a video conference in April 2023 that Russian forces had destroyed 59 of these guns since the start of that year alone.
The Pentagon through acting spokesman Todd Briil called an earlier Shyu claim of 33 guns destroyed patently false. Russian destruction tallies are propaganda and routinely inflated. The Orics count remains the verified baseline. There were other problems. Ukrainian land forces logistics commander Brigadier General Vladimir Carpeno told National Defense Magazine at Urusatri in Paris in June 2022 that for every six gun battery, two pieces had to be sent back for maintenance after every artillery engagement because subsystems were damaged by shrapnel. The
titanium structure was light but less forgiving of fragment hits than heavier steel. Barrel wear was punishing. One Ukrainian crew reported firing 6,000 rounds through a single howitzer across four barrel changes. Every barrel swapped before reaching the official 2500 round service life because accuracy had already degraded.
Canada promised 10 replacement barrels. Waterfleet Arsenal struggled to produce more than 30 barrels per month. The Excalibur precision round was devastating in 2022. Hit accuracy under 10 m, often under 2 m. Then Russian electronic warfare systems learned to jam GPS guidance. According to two classified Ukrainian assessments seen by the New York Times, covering roughly 3,000 Excalibur shells fired between December 2022 and August 2023.
The confirmed strike rate fell from a peak of 55% in January 2023 to 7% in July and 6% in August. The Washington Post reporting in May 2024 cautioned that the later month data was incomplete. The collapse was real, even if the exact percentage is disputed. Former Ukrainian commander in Chief Valeri Zillusni cited Excalibur as the prime example of a GPS weapon defeated by Russian jamming.
Ukrainian crews gave the gun a nickname. They called it the three axes, a play on the 37s in the designation. The main intelligence director at artillery unit nicknamed it the three axes of retaliation. One famous photograph from the front shows the words from America with love written in marker on the barrel. The phrase made it into a Ukrainian highlight reel praised by Zelusni himself.
The historical irony that the gun was not actually American but British was lost on almost everyone watching. In November 2024, BAE Systems announced something significant. The company would open a new artillery factory in Sheffield. Production of complete howitzers would resume on British soil. Production of titanium structures was already restarting.
Deliveries of major components would begin in 2025 and 2026. BAE executive John Borton, managing director of weapons systems United Kingdom, framed it as safeguarding what he called a critical specialized British industrial capability. The gun was coming home, not as a marketing exercise, as a strategic decision driven by the demands of the Ukraine war and the recognition that no other country could match what VEL had achieved at Barrow nearly four decades earlier.
Compared to the Russian 2065 Mr. Betoed Howitzer, the British design is lighter, longer ranged with precision rounds and equipped with a digital fire control system, the Russian gun cannot match. Compared to the Russian TUS19 Must self-propelled gun, it trades mobility for accuracy and the ability to be airlifted into terrain no tracked vehicle can reach.
The French Caesar has a longer barrel and longer maximum range, but Ukrainian crews note the British gun displaces faster from a firing position and is more reliable in mud. The German PZH2000 outclasses it in rate of fire and survivability under armor, but costs over five times as much per unit. No other towed 155mm howitzer in the world combines air mobility, precision, and concealment the way the British design does. December 1988.
Three British engineers at a shipyard known for submarines filed a patent that nobody outside the artillery world noticed. Sir, Eaglestone Bone. They had built the first 155 mm field howitzer with a titanium structure investment cast hot isostatic pressed designed on aerospace principles a weapon that nobody else in the world believed was possible.
Today that gun is in Ukrainian hands. It is the artillery piece Russia hunts above all others. It is the weapon that helped retake Kharkiv that broke Russian armored columns at Vular that earned a Ukrainian nickname stencled on barrels across every front. The branding says American. The build sheet says Mississippi.
The patent says Barrow and Finesse. British engineering did not get lucky. It solved a problem that defeated every other artillery designer in NATO. And it solved that problem because three engineers at a submarine yard refused to accept the conventional wisdom that heavy howitzers had to weigh 7 tons. The gun the world calls American.
The gun Russia hunts across Ukraine. designed.
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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