Why US Special Forces Were ORDERED to Stand DOWN When British SAS Took Over

In January 1991, General Norman Schwarzoff sat inside his command bunker in Rayad, Saudi Arabia, and made one thing absolutely clear. He did not want special forces anywhere near his war. Schwartzkov had 750,000 troops at his disposal, the largest coalition force assembled since World War II. He had stealth bombers, precisiong guided missiles, and enough firepower to turn the Iraqi desert into glass. So when someone suggested sending small teams of commandos behind enemy lines, the four-star general had a

simple question. What can the British Special Air Service do that an F-16 cannot? It was a fair question and for a brief moment it looked like the British Special Air Service would sit out the biggest military operation in a generation. But Schwarz cop had a problem he did not yet know about. And within weeks, a group of fewer than 300 British soldiers would do something his entire AR force could not. [music] This is the story of how the SAS earned the grudging respect of American military commanders across three wars

and three decades. how they were denied missions, told to stand down, ordered to stay out of it, and how every single time the Americans eventually had no choice but to hand the operation over to the British. Because when everything else failed, the SAS did not. Before we get to the classified operations in Baghdad, that changed everything. We need to go back to where this rivalry started. The deserts of western Iraq, 1991. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the SAS was among the first

British units put on standby. Three full squadrons, AD and elements of B were mobilized. It was the regiment’s largest deployment since the Second World War. But there was a problem. The Americans had already assigned the reconnaissance roles to their own special forces teams. The SAS arrived in Saudi Arabia with no clear mission. They were essentially benched. The man who changed that was Lieutenant General Sir Peter Debilier. He was Schwarz cop’s second in command, the senior British officer in the entire

theater and he happened to be a former commanding officer of 22 SAS. He had led operations in Oman, Borneo, and the Faullands. He was the director of UK special forces during the Iranian embassy siege in 1980, the operation that put the SAS on the world stage. De Laabilier understood something Schwartzkoff did not. He knew that the coming war would need more than smart bombs. He lobbied Schwarzkoff constantly pushing for the SAS to be deployed behind enemy lines and fighting columns just like the regiment had done in North

Africa during World War II under its founder David Sterling. Schwars was not interested. He worried about diverting resources to rescue special operators if something went wrong. He saw them as a liability, not an asset. Then Saddam Hussein changed the equation overnight. On the second day of the air war, Iraqi Scud missiles started slamming into Israel. The weapons were inaccurate Soviet era rockets and militarily they were almost irrelevant. But politically they were a catastrophe. If Israel retaliated, the Arab members of the

coalition including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria would almost certainly pull out. The entire alliance would collapse. Saddam’s strategy was cynical and brilliant, and it was working. The US Air Force scrambled hundreds of sorties into the western Iraqi desert, searching for the mobile Scud launchers. They found nothing. The Iraqis were hiding the missiles under bridges inside barns and transporting them in vehicles disguised as school buses. From 30,000 ft, they were invisible. Schwarzoff was

getting frantic phone calls from Washington. The White House needed those Scuds neutralized. Satellite imagery was useless. Fighter jets could not find them. There was only one option left. He needed eyes on the ground. And that is when Peter de Labilier got his phone call. Within days, the SAS crossed the Iraqi border. A&D squadrons drove into the desert in heavily armed fighting columns of eight Land Rovers supported by UNIMOG supply trucks. They moved by night and hid under camouflage nets

during the day using motorcycle outr rididers to scout ahead for enemy positions. Their mission was simple. Find the Scud launchers and destroy them. Or if they could not destroy them directly, call in air strikes with laser target designators and guide the bombs onto targets that the air force had been unable to locate for weeks. The conditions were brutal. Freezing temperatures at night, sandstorms that reduced visibility to nothing. Iraqi patrols everywhere. And unlike the Air Force pilots flying at altitude, the SAS

teams were operating 300 km behind enemy lines with no quick way out if things went wrong. But the SAS thrived in exactly this kind of environment. They found Scud launchers that had eluded every piece of technology the Americans possessed. They destroyed communications facilities, cut fiber optic cables that linked Baghdad to its missile units, and engaged Iraqi forces in running battles across the open desert. By the time the ground war ended, the SAS had been credited with helping neutralize roughly

a third of Iraq’s Scud capability. Israel stood down. The coalition held together. Schwarzoff, the general who had questioned what the SAS could do that an F-16 could not, personally commended the regiment for its service. The SAS received 55 medals for gallantry and meritorious service from the Gulf War alone. But one patrol from that war would become the most famous SAS mission of all time. For all the wrong reasons, B Squadron’s eight-man team, call sign Bravo 20, was inserted by Shinook

helicopter deep into Iraq to watch a main supply route, and cut communications cables. They were compromised by a goat herder, hunted by Iraqi forces, and given the wrong radio frequencies, which meant they could not call for help. Of the eight men, three were killed, four were captured, and only one, Chris Ryan, escaped on foot across 300 kilometers of desert to the Syrian border. Bravo 20 became a best-selling book and a cultural phenomenon. But it also masked a more important truth. While that one patrol

was falling apart, the rest of the SAS was winning the Scud War that a coalition of 750,000 could not. The lesson was clear. When conventional forces and advanced technology fail, sometimes you need soldiers who can operate in small teams behind enemy lines with nothing but their training and their nerve. The Americans would learn that lesson again 12 years later. And this time, the consequences of ignoring the SAS would be far more dramatic. In July 2003, 4 months after the invasion of Iraq, American and

British special forces were hunting the most wanted men in the country. Saddam Hussein was still missing. So were his two sons, Uday and Kusai. Between them, they had controlled Iraq’s secret police, the Republican Guard, and the feared Fedin Saddam militia. There was a combined bounty of $30 million on their heads. The SAS had been operating in Iraq since before the invasion even began. An advanced team had crossed the border 2 days before the first bombs fell, tasked with destroying Scud launchers in western Iraq. After Baghdad

fell, G Squadron was assigned to hunt high value targets alongside American Delta Force at a shared compound in Baghdad’s green zone called Mission Support Station Fernandez, named after a Delta operator killed in action. The SAS and Delta worked side by side. They shared intelligence. [music] They ran joint operations, but there was a tension beneath the surface. The British were operating with far fewer resources, no helicopters of their own, just a handful of Land Rovers and civilian SUVs. They depended on American

aviation, American logistics, and American approval for nearly every mission. Then came the tip about Uday and Kusay. In [music] Mosul, 400 kilometers north of Baghdad, an SAS reconnaissance team had been conducting close target surveillance on a residential villa. Intelligence suggested Saddam’s sons were hiding inside. The British operators confirmed the target and reported [music] back. British commanders immediately pushed for the SAS to raid the house. [music] It was a surgical operation, exactly the

kind of precision strike the regiment was built for. Get in. Secure the targets. to get out before anyone knew what happened. The request was denied. American commanders took control of the operation. A combined force of Delta Force operators and infantry from the 101st Airborne Division surrounded the villa on the morning of July 22nd, 2003. When a Delta interpreter called on the occupants to surrender, the informant and his family left as planned. The Delta assault team breached the front door. They walked straight into a

firestorm. Uday Kusi Mustafa who was Kusai’s 14-year-old son and a bodyguard opened fire from the second floor with assault rifles. One Delta operator was wounded immediately. As the Americans pulled back, grenades rained down from above. Several more operators took shrapnel wounds. The staircase had been barricaded, making a rapid assault impossible. What was supposed to be a precision raid became a 4-hour siege. Over 200 soldiers eventually joined the fight. The 101st fired 10 to anti-tank

missiles into the building. Kya helicopters strafed it with rockets and heavy machine guns. Mark 19 grenade launchers pounded the structure until it was reduced to rubble. When Delta finally re-entered, they found Uday and Kusai dead, killed not by precision, but by overwhelming firepower. The SAS watched from the sidelines. Their reconnaissance had found the target. their commanders had asked for the mission. [music] They were told to stand down. And while nobody said it publicly, the aftermath raised an uncomfortable

question inside the special operations community. If the SAS had been allowed to conduct the raid their way, a quiet nighttime assault by a small team trained specifically for hostage rescue and close quarters battle. Would the outcome have been different? Nobody will ever know. But the friction between British and American special forces was about to get much worse. Two years later, in September 2005, the SAS found itself at the center of the most explosive incident of the entire Iraq war. And this time, the order to stand

down came not from the Americans, but from London. Two SAS operators known publicly only as Campbell and Griffiths were conducting an undercover surveillance mission in Basra as part of Operation Hawthor. Their target was a senior Iraqi police commander suspected of running a corrupt crime unit with ties to Shia militias backed by Iran. The operators were dressed in civilian clothes, driving a local vehicle, blending into the chaotic streets of southern Iraq. They had completed their surveillance and were heading back when

they ran into an Iraqi police checkpoint. Tensions between British forces and the Bashra police were already at a breaking point. The police force had been heavily infiltrated by the Mi army, a Shia militia that was kidnapping, torturing, and executing suspected collaborators. When an Iraqi officer tried to drag one of the SAS men from the vehicle, the operators opened fire. At least one Iraqi policeman was killed. Campbell and Griffiths tried to escape, but were quickly surrounded. They chose to surrender rather than

fight their way through an entire police force. The Iraqi police beat them, handcuffed [music] them, and dragged them to the Aljamiat police station. Within hours, photographs of the two bloodied SAS operators were broadcast on Iraqi television. They had been subjected to mock executions. [music] A pistol held against the back of the head. A click, shouting in Arabic. The threat was clear. In Baghdad, the news hit the SAS compound like a bomb. 20 operators from A squadron, 22 SAS, and roughly 40 paratroopers from the special

forces support group immediately began planning a rescue. Then came the call from London. Stand down. The politicians were terrified. The situation in Iraq was already politically toxic. A military assault on an Iraqi police station, technically an allied institution, could destroy what little remained of Britain’s credibility in the country. The bureaucrats wanted to negotiate. For the SAS, negotiation was not an option. They knew exactly what happened to Western soldiers captured by militia infiltrated Iraqi police. Other

coalition troops who had been taken had been tortured and killed. Every hour of delay increased the chance that Campbell and Griffiths would be executed. The SAS commanding officer made a decision that could have ended his career. He disobeyed the order. British infantry and warrior armored vehicles were sent to surround the police station as a show of force. The crowd gathered. Stones and Molotov cocktails flew. A warrior was set ablaze with its crew still inside. Three British soldiers were wounded. But

the real crisis was happening behind the scenes. British officers delivered an ultimatum to the police station demanding the prisoners be released. The Iraqis refused. Then something worse happened. Helicopter surveillance revealed that the two SAS operators had been bundled into the trunk of a car, dressed in local clothing to disguise them, and driven to a nearby safe house controlled by an Iraqi militia linked to Hezbollah. The SAS had one chance. If those men reached a secondary location controlled

by Iranianbacked militants, they were dead. After nightfall around 9:00 in the evening, the operation launched. Challenger two tanks and warrior armored vehicles smashed through the prison walls in a diversionary assault. While the Iraqi police and the mob focused on the chaos at the station, the main SAS force hit the safe house. They found Campbell and Griffiths in a locked room. The militants had fled. The two operators were alive. The rescue made international headlines. The Iraqi government was furious. The British

government was embarrassed. The SAS commanding officer, who disobeyed orders, was never publicly disciplined. The Basra incident had one immediate consequence that changed the course of the war. Because the name Task Force Black, the operational designation used by the SAS in Iraq, was leaked to the press during the media frenzy, the unit was renamed Task Force Knight. But far more importantly, the incident exposed just how deeply Iranianbacked militias had infiltrated southern Iraq. And it convinced senior British and American

commanders of something they had been reluctant to admit in the kind of war Iraq had become, where the enemy wore police uniforms and hid in residential neighborhoods. Conventional forces were not enough. They needed operators who could work undercover, strike without warning, and disappear before anyone knew they were there. They needed the SAS, not on the sidelines, not waiting for permission, in the lead. What happened next was the most intensive and sustained special operations campaign in British military history. And it was so

classified that even now most of the details remain hidden behind layers of official secrecy. In January 2006, the SAS underwent what was internally called Operation Traction. For the first time since the invasion, senior officers from 22 SAS deployed to the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC, headquarters at Ballad Air Base north of Baghdad. The move was a signal. The SAS was no longer operating at arms length from JSOC. They were being integrated directly into the most lethal counterterrorism machine

on the planet. Before this, the relationship between British and American special forces in Iraq had been complicated. The SAS had refused to hand detaines over to American custody after reports of mistreatment at facilities like Camp Nama. During the second battle of Fallujah in November 2004, the SAS was banned from entering the city alongside Delta Force because the British government was under intense domestic pressure over the war’s unpopularity. But by early 2006, Baghdad was on fire. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, led by

Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, had turned the capital into a slaughterhouse. Car bombs were detonating at a rate of 150 per month. 3,000 Iraqi civilians were dying every month in Baghdad alone. The country was sliding towards civil war and conventional military operations were not stopping it. General Stanley Mcristel, the commander of JSOC, had developed an entirely new approach to counterterrorism. Instead of planning a raid for days or weeks, his teams would hit a target, exploit the intelligence found on site, and launch the next raid

within hours, sometimes within minutes. The goal was to dismantle terror networks faster than they could regenerate. The SAS fit this model perfectly. Their small team structure, their ability to operate in hostile urban environments, and their experience with close quarters battle made them ideally suited for Mcrist’s tempo. Task Force Knight, the SAS element in Baghdad, began conducting operations almost every night. A squadron rotation would deploy to Baghdad for six months at a time, operating from their base at

MSS Fernandez, right next to Delta Force. They shared helicopters from the American 10060th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the famous Nightstalkers. They received real-time intelligence from signals, intercepts, drone feeds, and human sources. The operations were relentless. In April 2006, B Squadron SAS launched Operation Larchwood 4, a raid on a farmhouse outside Yusfa that targeted mid-level al-Qaeda leadership. The assault team inserted by helicopter alongside paratroopers from the special

forces support group. A firefight erupted inside the building. Three SAS operators were wounded by gunfire. Two more were hit as the fight continued. But the SAS pressed [music] through, cleared the building, and captured five men along with critical intelligence. That intelligence led directly to the biggest kill of the entire Iraq war. The documents and hard drives seized during Operation Largewood 4 gave JSOC a clearer picture of al-Qaeda’s network in the Baghdad area. Within weeks, they

traced Abu Musab al- Zarqawi to a farmhouse near Bakuba. On June 7th, 2006, an F-16 dropped two 500 pound bombs on the building, killing the most wanted terrorist in Iraq. [music] The SAS had found the thread. The Americans pulled it, and the man who had orchestrated the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians was [music] dead. But the war was far from over. In 2007, as the American troops surge flooded Baghdad with additional forces, the SAS escalated alongside them. A squadron deployed to Baghdad and began an

unprecedented campaign. Between May and November 2007, that single squadron arrested 338 people and killed 88 insurgents. And those were just the numbers from one squadron rotation. Over an 18-month period beginning in early 2007, the combined task force SAS and Delta operating together arrested 3,500 terrorists in Baghdad and killed several hundred more. Al-Qaeda bomb attacks in the capital dropped from 150 per month to roughly two. The transformation was staggering. Six SAS troopers were killed

during the campaign. 30 were wounded. Delta Force suffered a 20% casualty rate across killed, wounded, and sick. These were not men sitting in bunkers calling in air strikes. They were kicking down doors room by room, night after night, in the most dangerous city on Earth. General David Petraeus, the overall commander of coalition forces in [music] Iraq, gave an interview to the Times newspaper in August 2008. He said the SAS had helped immensely in the Baghdad area, [music] specifically crediting

them with dismantling al-Qaeda’s carb bomb networks [music] and other operations in the capital. Coming from a four-star American general, that was extraordinary. The US military does not easily praise foreign units, especially in public. But the SAS had earned it in the most brutal way possible. So why were US special forces repeatedly ordered to step aside when the SAS was involved? The answer is not that American operators were less skilled. Delta Force is arguably the finest direct action unit in the world. The

Rangers deevgru, the Green Beretss, they are all exceptional. The difference was institutional. The SAS was born in the North African desert in 1941, founded by a man named David Sterling, who believed that a small team of highly trained soldiers could achieve what an entire battalion could not. That philosophy has never changed. 80 years later, the SCES still operates in four-man patrols, still values initiative over hierarchy, still trains its operators to think independently in situations where there

is no time to ask for [music] permission. When Colonel Charlie Beckwith returned from an exchange tour with the SAS in the 1960s, he was so impressed that he spent the next decade lobbying the US Army to create an equivalent unit. The result was Delta Force, formally established in 1977, explicitly modeled on the SAS. Beckwith wanted Delta to have the same culture of independent thinking, the same comfort with ambiguity, [music] the same willingness to operate in small teams far from support. Delta achieved

that and in many ways surpassed the SAS in resources, technology, and scale. But the SAS maintained one advantage that no amount of funding could replicate. They had been doing this for decades longer. By the time the Iraq war began, the SAS had conducted continuous combat operations in Malaya, Borneo, Oman, the Faullands, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan. Their institutional knowledge of unconventional warfare was unmatched. And perhaps more importantly, the SAS had a different relationship with

failure. The Bravo 20 disaster in 1991 did not lead to hand ringing or bureaucratic paralysis. It led to better equipment, better communications, and better training. When the Basra prison rescue required disobeying a direct order from London, the commanding officer did not hesitate. The culture of the regiment demanded it. The United Kingdom’s special forces concluded their mission in Iraq in May 2009. Task Force Knight was disbanded. The operators rotated back to Heraford, the SAS home base in Western England, and prepared

for the next war. By then, the legacy was established. A single SAS squadron, rarely more than 60 operators at a time, had operated at the heart of the most sophisticated counter counterterrorism campaign in history. They had worked alongside Delta Force as equals and in many operations they had led. General Petraeus called their contribution immense. The commanders who had once told them to stand down were now asking them to take the lead. The SAS proved what David Sterling believed when he founded the regiment in a Cairo hospital

bed in 1941. He believed that a small number of the right people given the freedom to act can change the outcome of a war. They had been told to wait. They had been told no. They had been ordered to stand down. They did the job anyway.