The term 95th Percentile Male Soldier was bandied around a fair bit at DVD 2026 in relation to the UK LMV (or Light Mobility Vehicle) Programme, writes Bob Morrison.
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So what exactly is the 95th Percentile Male Soldier and why does he matter, you may well be asking. In simple terms he is most likely one of the big guys standing on or near the right when the military line is formed prior to marching and he matters because tactical vehicles have to be sized to ensure he can be comfortably accommodated. Size might not always matter but lack of it does if one is shoehorned into a small truck when fully kitted out for operating in a potential crisis or conflict zone.
The Ministry of Defence has set out a number of desirable criteria for its UK Light Mobility Vehicle programme, not all of which might be achievable if a COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) common base platform family of vehicles is to be supplied so compromises might inevitably have to be made. However the need to accommodate 95th Percentile Male Soldiers is unlikely to be dropped as not only it a necessity because of the make-up of Britain’s and NATO’s armed forces, but even they must comply with peacetime safety regulations. That cannot be compromised.
In an ideal world and with a bottomless purse a vehicle designed and produced purely to suit the military’s precise requirements, like say the Ocelot / Foxhound procured specifically for British operations in the near unique environment of Afghanistan, would be the route to go down but the cost would be prohibitive for such a high volume basic utility vehicle. Even a modified COTS vehicle could not easily be ‘tailor made’ as a special to meet the military’s unique internal capacity requirements if the integrity of the base vehicle as it rolled off the production line is to be retained.
In addition to meeting road safety requirements and passing specific crash tests based on realistic public highway conditions and accident statistics, civilian vehicles are primarily designed to accommodate the middle of the range user, that is Mr. and Ms. Average, because ensuring the maximum number of potential customers feel comfortable in a vehicle usually equates to higher sales. Military vehicles, on the other hand, have to be designed for ensuring maximum efficiency of a very wide range of body types and shapes representative of every type of soldier being transported in wartime as well as peacetime.
There is, after all, a very big physical difference between say a usually quite short British Army Gurkha and a Royal Netherlands Marine Corps 120mm mortar operator giant, though in the past I have been equally happy to have either standing alongside me in a potential conflict situation; both however need to be able to rapidly access and exit their vehicle without hindrance. These days female soldiers, who are generally shorter and less bulky than their male colleagues, also have to be catered for and this explains why the 5th percentile female also makes an appearance in military technical requirements alongside the 95th percentile male.
If you are tall and have ever spent any time wearing combat armour and ballistic helmet while sitting with a full complement of soldiers in the back of a last generation Land Rover / Pinzgauer / G-wagen, or for that matter a Warrior / Marder / Sisu Pasi armoured vehicle, designed in the second half of the 20th Century you will know they were a bit cramped. However those travelling in Warsaw Pact troop carriers from the Cold War era had it even worse, which is probably why so many Soviet Bloc infantry units seemed to be formed from or have a high quotient of conscripts drawn from the east of the Caucuses where average height was lower than those born on the European side.
My own uncomfortable experiences of travelling widely in military vehicles in the Former Yugoslavia when it was a conflict zone, wearing the basic combat vest and helmet of the day, even though I was far from 95th percentile for stature and probably closer to the 15th percentile, live on in my memory to this day. Reassurance patrols in ‘The Anvil’ with The Light Infantry, even though there were only four of us including the ‘terp’ when the lieutenant and sergeant were up in the Warrior turret, could be described as cosy and travelling from Gornji Vakuf to Banja Luka with three others in the back of a ‘Snatch’ Land Rover, where at least there was a bit more head height could best be described as “emotional”, even though it would be another couple of years before Vinnie Jones uttered that catchline.
Recently a number of manufacturers and consortia have publicly firmed up their proposed submissions for UK LMV and it is noticeable that various pickup trucks and SUV derivatives of vastly differing sizes are being offered. Traditionally the larger pickups have featured primarily in America and Arabia, where wide highways and vast open spaces are encountered, whereas the mid-sized pickup has been more popular in Europe and the highly developed Asian markets where denser populations and a need to trade off internal cab space for larger payload area in a more compact package have been the driving force for manufacturers. There’s a big difference between catering for the needs of a farmer and his dogs for whom in the past an old Landy (Britain), Bakkie (South Africa) or Ute (Australia) would suffice and the needs of today’s soldier.
Although UK Ministry of Defence lost much of its Crown Immunity against prosecution for personal injury claims at the end of the 1980s, in the early 1990s when the British Armed Forces were looking at a major Light and Medium Utility Vehicle fleet replacement programme the topic of Health & Safety was not quite the major consideration it became in the 21st Century. If H&S had been more to the fore at the time might inward-facing bench seats with simple lap restraints have been specified for the 1996 Defender purchase, would noise-reducing floor covering have been required from new rather than being retrofitted years later, and would internal ROPS (Roll Over Protection System) tubing have needed to be shoe-horned into the front cab thereby further reducing space for the larger soldier? Mind you hindsight is a wonderful thing and back then nobody expected utility vehicles would need to last over 30 years while simultaneously fighting distant wars on two fronts as well deploying in peacetime to other high tempo operational theatres. Was it politician or civil servant who coined the phrase ‘peace dividend’ following the lowering of the Iron Curtain? But I digress.
As the second quarter century of the third millennium marches onward, and the prospect of open warfare ceasing in Eastern Europe and the Middle East looks further away than ever, new threats to soldiers operating in what would have been seen in the last decades of the previous millennium as rear echelon areas, typically 20km or more behind Forward Line of Own Troops, mean cumbersome personal protection equipment must be worn even when travelling in utility vehicles and undertaking routine non-combat tasks. Quantum leaps forward in protective equipment weight reduction have been made in recent years, but in contrast NATO soldiers have grown in height and physique as a result of social and economic advances, so today’s male soldier when fully equipped is bulkier than his predecessors and this has to be catered for when replacing last generation vehicles that could effectively have been designed for his smaller and less well protected grandfather.
In case you are wondering, that NATO 95th percentile soldier has his origins in the original 1988 US Army anthropometric survey (ANSUR) of Soldiers expanded upon in the more recent 2012 survey (ANSUR II) conducted by the then Natick Laboratories, which directly measured almost one hundred human dimensions as well as recording three-dimensional body scans of each subject. For ANSUR II the sample, drawn from across the entire Army and all its bases, consisted of 7435 men and 3922 women of all ethnicities. The smallest soldier in the resulting tables is designated 1st percentile and the largest 99th percentile.
At this point in case your hackles are rising about my use of the masculine, the 5th percentile female also features in UK MoD requirements. Unlike Mr.95%, rather than measuring 187mm or roughly 6’2” the soldier who might be referred to as Ms.5% measures just 152.5mm or a fraction over 5’0”. She, of course, will not be as constrained by space restrictions as her tall and beefy male colleague, but other problems such as can she reach the pedals and see over the bonnet for example, raise their head so even though a large vehicle might prove big enough for that muscular giant on the right end of the line it also has to be configurable for that slim but perfectly toned little soldier at the left end.
That, in a nutshell, is why both the 95th percentile male and the 5th percentile female soldier now keep popping up in UK, and NATO, vehicle tender requirements. The smart Sports Utility Vehicle or the classic mid-size pickup truck designed for the comfort-loving, leisure-tripping European and Asian civvy customer might perform very well on motorways or autobahns, country lanes and backwoods tracks. However can you easily fit four big squaddies with all their gear into any of them, as well as chucking say a mortar with a shedload of ammo in the back along with a thermal spectrum camouflage net and poles to hide everything from drones when in a potential conflict zone?
Previously, with the in-service Land Rover, the user tended to tow a trailer to carry all of this gear, but the challenges of the 21st Century asymmetric battlefield forced that practice to be dropped, so for UK LMV everything will have to be carried inside and on the vehicle itself. If this is truly to be a commercial-off-the-shelf buy (a stated procurement priority), then I suspect the MoD may need to compromise on a requirement or two here or there, but will internal space and/or load capacity become one of those compromises? Will the user community demand that they are given as much space as possible and, under those circumstances, how do the UK LMV bidders line up against each other, when the size of the cab cannot be modified whist the common base platform remains an off-the-shelf product?
There’s a classic tale of one Middle Eastern military customer lining a number of potential vehicles up in the desert, producing a complete loading list, including combat supplies, all equipment and four fully kitted soldiers, then asking the bidders to demonstrate loading before driving a route. Not everyone could fit all the troops and equipment on board so they were instantly discounted, while others troops were unable to effectively navigate the route as their vehicle had become so overloaded. Yes, sometimes size really does matter.
¤ Taking photos of serving soldiers in the back of military vehicles in the field is not as easy as it was twenty or thirty years ago so my thanks to Team LionStrike for providing library images of four representative role-players in typical uniform and military kit to help illustrate this feature. The older images were taken by myself on military exercises between 2002 and 2019.
Footnote: This feature was supported by one of our Sponsors who is also part of the Team LionStrike consortia.
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