SHP Engineering military programmes were initially implemented through a request made by the Private Office of His Royal Majesty King Hussein of Jordan. The first was to produce a replacement for the outdated Willy Jeep used by the JAF.

The request was for a cost effective lightweight vehicle produced in a two wheel drive configuration with an ability to work in a desert terrain. The vehicle needed to carry four people plus an acceptable amount of equipment with facilities for helicopter suspension. The request after SHP Engineering had produced an initial prototype vehicle was for Sonny Howard to enter into a contract of consultancy to develop a manufacturing facility in Jordan to produce the vehicles locally. This would assist the local economy and reduce shipping costs from the UK.

The vehicle produced was named the Black Iris. This was not only used in Jordan but by peace keeping forces in Sierra Leone, also evaluated by American Forces in the Middle East for their special forces and a large quantity were produced and sent to North Africa.

The success of this programme proved the ability of the vehicle but more importantly through the introduction of the manufacturing facility for military vehicles in Jordan a decision was taken to commission SHP Engineering to produce a second model named the Desert Iris.

This was a bigger and heavier vehicle more durable and fitted with a Toyota engine and four wheel drive system. The design was a tubular steel chassis clothed in a GRP Kevlar body composite material with steel panelling making up the bulkhead and floor panels. On the introduction of this vehicle SHP Engineering produced the first eleven in various colours and specification in the UK with all jigs, tooling and equipment to allow the vehicle to be replicated. The bigger plan was to introduce a specialised military vehicle production facility in Jordan. This operation was named Jordan Specialised Vehicle Manufacturing JSVM in short, a subsidiary of KADDB.

Over the next two and a half years 460 vehicles were produced by JSVM to a quality standard that gained the company ISO 9001: 2000 Certification. During this time Sonny Howard continued to act as consultant for training purposes and technical support.

The most recent military programme entered into by SHP Engineering was the Fox (Al'Thalab). The difference in this vehicle was that it was initially based on a Land Cruiser 79 with 500 hours of extensive work to engineer its conversion. SHP Engineering was initially only contracted to produce four prototype vehicles with all the jigs and moulds, supplying drawings and a procurement numbering system. SHP built 33 vehicles before the contract was completed. After receiving Special Forces approval the vehicles were sent to assist military operations in troubled areas of the world.

Again these vehicles went into production in Jordan followed by an additional evolution on the introduction of the new spec model by Toyota early in 2008.

Through the selection of vehicles developed by SHP, the company maintains intellectual rights to certain products which are still supplied to Jordan on a regular basis.

SHP Engineering has the ability to engineer military lightweight fast attack type vehicles using cost effective processes to meet the customer's requirements in a period of weeks as opposed to years.

This has been recognised by the industry, together with the option of the client having ownership of the product allowing them to self badge or assign the programme to whoever they wish.

SHP Engineering abilities are unique for a small engineering company in the fact that not only can they create the product with all relevant tooling and initiate the operation for the customer to self build the vehicles using the resources of the country from which the request was made.