“That Uniform Means Nothing Here” — The US General Who Insulted A British SAS Major In The Gulf War

The commander of the entire coalition military effort, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, was on record as profoundly skeptical of special operations forces. He had said in his own briefings what hung over the SAS deployment like an unanswered insult. What can the SAS do that an F-16 cannot do? The American way of war in 1991 had no place for men in unmarked Land Rovers hunting the desert with binoculars and laser designators.

 It was built on the most extraordinary concentration of military technology ever assembled in a single theater. 2,430 fixed-wing aircraft, six carrier battle groups, 500,000 American troops, a budget that ran into the tens of billions of dollars, and the man in command considered the British contribution a high-risk distraction with limited strategic payoff.

What followed over the next 42 days would force one of the most comprehensive reversals in the modern history of Allied military cooperation. The British SAS major who walked out of that room would, within 6 weeks, receive a personal commendation from the same general who had dismissed him. The regiment that had been called a sideshow would be credited, in part, with keeping Israel out of the war and saving the Arab coalition from collapse.

And the question of what the SAS could do that an F-16 could not would be answered in the only currency that matters in war. Results. This is the story of how that answer was delivered. It begins with the strategic catastrophe that was unfolding in the autumn of 1990. On the 2nd of August that year, Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard had rolled across the Kuwaiti border with around 300 T-72 tanks and 100,000 troops.

Within 48 hours, the entire emirate was occupied. Within 4 days, American C-141 transports were landing in Saudi Arabia carrying the lead elements of what would become Operation Desert Shield. By the time the United Nations Security Council deadline of the 15th of January 1991 had passed without an Iraqi withdrawal, Schwarzkopf commanded an international army of 750,000 soldiers from 34 nations.

500,000 of them were American. 250,000 came from the rest of the coalition, including a British contingent of 53,462 personnel under Operation Granby. The British commitment was substantial. It included an entire armored division, the 1st Armoured Division built around 7th Armoured Brigade, the famous Desert Rats, with 179 Challenger 1 main battle tanks, 316 Warrior infantry fighting vehicles, 79 artillery pieces, and 16 multiple launch rocket systems.

 The Royal Air Force deployed approximately 6,000 personnel and dozens of Tornado GR1 strike aircraft. The Royal Navy committed warships to the Gulf blockade. By any reasonable measure, Britain was Schwarzkopf’s most significant coalition partner. But the British also brought something else. Something that did not appear on Schwarzkopf’s planning maps.

 A and D squadrons of 22 Special Air Service Regiment, plus elements of B squadron, plus supporting signals intelligence specialists from 264 Signal Squadron and Intelligence Corps personnel. The largest deployment of the regiment since 1945. They arrived in theater shortly after Christmas 1990, and they sat. For nearly a month, they sat.

The squadron commanders briefed contingency plans. The troopers maintained their kit, ran drills, and watched the deadline approach with the particular kind of professional frustration that only highly trained men with no clear task can produce. The reason was simple. Schwarzkopf did not want them. The general’s skepticism had deep roots.

He was a Vietnam veteran. He had commanded the invasion of Grenada in 1983, an operation in which special operations forces, particularly elements of the newly formed Joint Special Operations Command, had performed in ways that left senior conventional commanders deeply uneasy. Communications failures, command and control breakdowns, missions that produced casualties without achieving objectives.

By the time Schwarzkopf assumed command of US Central Command in 1988, he had developed what one analyst would later describe as a preference for centralized conventional force application combined with risk aversion regarding politically sensitive special operations missions. He was not unique in this view.

A significant portion of the senior American officer corps, particularly those shaped by Vietnam, viewed special operations as glamorous, expensive, and operationally unreliable. The phrase that circulated within his planning staff, and that has been confirmed by multiple post-war accounts, was that Schwarzkopf was adamantly against special operations units having any significant role in the conflict.

He accepted some Delta Force operators as personal bodyguards. That was the extent of his enthusiasm. The man who would change his mind was Lieutenant General Sir Peter de la Billière, commander of British forces in the Gulf, and effectively the second in command of the entire coalition military effort. de la Billière was 56 years old.

He had been awarded a Distinguished Service Order, a Military Cross with Bar, and was a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. He had commanded 22 SAS as a lieutenant colonel from 1972 to 1974. He had been Director of Special Forces during the Iranian Embassy siege in May 1980. He had served in Korea, Egypt, Malaya, Oman, Borneo, the Sudan, and the Falklands.

He spoke fluent Arabic. He understood the Middle East in a way that few senior Western officers of his generation could match. And he had absolute, complete, unwavering faith in what the regiment he had once commanded could do behind enemy lines. The relationship between Schwarzkopf and de la Billière was, by both men’s accounts, professionally cordial, but personally complicated.

 de la Billière, in his later autobiography Looking for Trouble, would describe Schwarzkopf as autocratic in style and possessed of an intimidating temper. The American general, for his part, would acknowledge the British commander as an able warrior and diplomat, but the two men’s approaches to warfare were fundamentally different.

Schwarzkopf wanted overwhelming force, centralized control, and clear lines of authority. de la Billière, the SAS man, wanted small units operating with autonomy, deep penetration, and the flexibility to exploit opportunities that conventional planning could not anticipate. The clash was inevitable, and when it came, it was over the SAS.

de la Billière began lobbying Schwarzkopf to commit the regiment to action almost from the moment of his arrival in theater. The argument he made, drawing explicitly on the SAS’s foundational history in the Western Desert against Rommel during the Second World War, was that small fighting columns operating deep behind Iraqi lines could create disproportionate strategic effects.

 They could attack targets of opportunity. They could harass supply lines. They could spread confusion. They could draw Iraqi forces away from the main coalition advance. Schwarzkopf was unconvinced. The exchange that took place between the two men, reconstructed from de la Billière’s own writings and from accounts by senior staff officers present, came down to a single objection from the American commander.

 What can your men do that I cannot do better, faster, and safer with an F-16 carrying laser guided bombs. It was the question that defined the entire pre-war SAS deployment. And in the abstract, on paper, in the world of planning charts and capability matrices, it was a fair question. The coalition air forces had achieved overwhelming air superiority within 72 hours of the campaign opening on the 17th of January.

They were flying over a thousand sorties per day. They had the most sophisticated precision guided munitions ever developed. What could a four-man patrol with binoculars and a radio possibly add to that? The answer, when it came, came from an entirely unexpected direction. From a Soviet designed ballistic missile that the coalition had not taken seriously enough.

The Scud B was an aging weapon. Inaccurate, slow to deploy, with a conventional warhead that posed minimal threat to dispersed military targets. The Iraqi modifications, the Al Hussein and Al Hajar variants, extended the range at the cost of further degraded accuracy. Coalition planners had rated the Scud as militarily insignificant.

They had been catastrophically wrong, but they had been wrong in a specific way. The Scud was not a military weapon in 1991. It was a political weapon. And in the early hours of the 18th of January, less than 24 hours after the air campaign began, eight modified Scud B missiles arced over the Iraqi desert and fell on Tel Aviv and Haifa.

 The political consequences were instantaneous and potentially catastrophic. Saddam Hussein had calculated with considerable strategic acumen that the coalition’s most fragile vulnerability was the participation of Arab states. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, the Gulf monarchies, all of them were standing alongside Israel’s primary military and political ally in a war against another Arab state.

 If Israel could be provoked into joining the coalition militarily, if Israeli aircraft appeared in the skies over Iraq, the Arab participation would collapse. The political cover that Schwarzkopf had spent five months constructing would evaporate. The war would become, in the eyes of the Arab street, a Western and Israeli campaign of aggression.

Saddam wanted exactly this. The Scuds were not aimed at military targets. They were aimed at the coalition itself. In the days that followed the first attacks, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens and IDF Chief of Staff Dan Shomron pressed Washington with increasing urgency. Israel had a doctrine, established and uncompromising, of retaliating against any state that struck its territory.

42 Scud missiles would eventually fall on or near Israel during the war. Two Israelis would be killed directly. 11 more would die from heart attacks and the effects of asphyxiation in sealed rooms during alarms. 20 residential buildings would be damaged in a single attack on the 22nd of January. The political pressure on the Israeli government to launch retaliatory air strikes against Iraqi targets approached the breaking point.

 Schwarzkopf understood, perhaps now in a way he had not understood a week earlier, that the entire coalition was hanging by a thread. And the thread was the Scud. Find the Scuds, destroy the Scuds, prove to Jerusalem that something effective was being done, and Israel might be persuaded to hold its hand. Fail to find them, and the war would be lost politically before it could be won militarily.

The American response was characteristically technological saturation. Roughly 1/3 of all coalition air power was redirected to Scud hunting. F-15E Strike Eagles flew continuous patrols over Western Iraq. Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft crisscrossed the desert. Joint STARS aircraft monitored vehicle movements.

Predator drones, in their early operational form, scanned likely launch sites. Hundreds of sorties per day were dedicated to finding mobile launchers. And the result, after a week of effort, was almost nothing. The Iraqis had adapted. They moved the launchers at night. They concealed them under bridges, in barns, in highway underpasses.

 They transported them inside what looked from above like school buses and civilian trucks. They used decoys made of plywood and aluminum sheeting that produced thermal signatures indistinguishable from real launchers. The vaunted American technology, in the specific environment of the Western Iraqi desert, against an enemy who had spent years preparing to defeat it, was failing.

This was the moment, sometime around the 20th of January, that Schwarzkopf relented. The pressure from Washington was enormous. The pressure from Della Bilier was constant. And the operational reality was undeniable. The F-16s could not find what they could not see. Someone needed to be on the ground with eyes on the desert calling in strikes when the launchers emerged from cover.

The SAS, which had been preparing for exactly this kind of mission for half a century, was given the green light. The British plan was structured around two complementary approaches. The first was the deployment of fighting columns. A and D squadrons, equipped with modified Land Rover 110 Defenders, known throughout the regiment as Pinkies, would drive north out of Saudi Arabia into the Iraqi desert.

Each column consisted of between eight and 12 Land Rovers, supported by a Mercedes built Unimog mother vehicle carrying fuel, ammunition, and supplies. The Land Rovers were armed with Browning .50 caliber heavy machine guns mounted forward. General purpose machine guns on rear pintle mounts. American Mark 19 40-mm grenade launchers and Milan anti-tank guided missile launchers capable of engaging armored vehicles at ranges out to 2,000 m.

 The columns operated at night, traveling under blackout conditions, navigating by GPS and dead reckoning across terrain that no Western military force had operated in since the Long Range Desert Group and the original SAS had prowled the same ground in 1942. By day, they laid up under camouflage netting in wadis and depressions, waiting for darkness.

 The training for these operations had been conducted hastily in the United Arab Emirates. The doctrine, however, went back 50 years. The second approach was static observation. B squadron, held in reserve in Saudi Arabia, would insert eight-man patrols by Chinook helicopter from RAF 7 Squadron Special Forces Flight. These patrols would establish covert observation posts overlooking the main supply routes, the highways that the Iraqis were using to move Scuds between hide sites and launch positions.

From these hidden vantage points, the SAS would watch, identify launchers, and call in air strikes. They would also, if circumstances permitted, locate and sever the buried fiber optic communications cables that ran alongside the MSRs, carrying command signals from Baghdad to the deployed launcher units. Three eight-man patrols from B squadron were inserted on the night of the 22nd of January 1991.

Their call signs were Bravo 1-0, Bravo 2-0, and Bravo 3-0. The first patrol assessed its insertion site, found it offered no concealment whatsoever in the flat featureless desert, and aborted within hours of landing, returning to Saudi Arabia. This decision, controversial at the time, was vindicated entirely by what happened to the second patrol.

Bravo 1-0 went home. Bravo 3-0, equipped with Land Rovers, completed its mission and returned intact. Bravo 2-0, led by a sergeant who would later write under the pseudonym Andy McNab, walked into a catastrophe. The Bravo 2-0 patrol had been inserted by Chinook approximately 20 km from its target observation site, carrying loads in excess of 90 kg per man.

Their radios, it transpired, had been issued the wrong frequencies, rendering communication with headquarters impossible. The weather, against every meteorological prediction for the season, turned brutal. Temperatures dropped low enough to freeze diesel fuel. Sleet and snow swept across positions where the patrol had been issued lightweight desert clothing.

Frostbite and hypothermia began to take hold within the first 48 hours. And then, on the morning of the 24th of January, their hide position was compromised by a young Iraqi goat herder. What followed was a running battle through the desert, the patrol breaking up under contact, three men eventually dead, four captured and subjected to weeks of brutal interrogation, and one, Trooper Chris Ryan, completing what became the longest escape and evasion in SAS history.

200 miles on foot across the desert into Syria over eight days. He survived on the water from one bottle and whatever he could scavenge. When he reached safety, he had lost so much weight that the British military doctors who examined him initially mistook him for a much older man. The Bravo Two Zero disaster, three dead, four captured, the operation a tactical failure, was a body blow.

 And yet, even as the news filtered back to headquarters, the larger SAS effort was beginning to deliver. The fighting columns of A and D squadrons, once unleashed, found their stride almost immediately. Operating from staging bases in northern Saudi Arabia, the columns crossed into the Iraqi border zone designated by the coalition as Scud box, a vast operational area south of the main Baghdad to Amman Highway, nicknamed by the troopers as Scud Alley.

 Delta Force operated north of the highway in their own designated zone. The two forces worked in adjacent but separate sectors, sharing intelligence through liaison officers, but operating independently in tactics and method. The American approach favored heavily armed Humvees, motorcycles, and Pinzgauer trucks supported by their own dedicated helicopter assets.

 The British approach was different in ways that reflected 50 years of accumulated regimental doctrine. The Land Rover columns were configured for sustained autonomous operations measured in weeks rather than days. They carried the firepower to fight their way out of contact. They navigated by methods that did not rely on continuous external support.

They executed their missions on the assumption that resupply, extraction, and air support might or might not be available, and that the patrol commander’s job was to complete the task regardless. The targeting itself was opportunistic and adaptive. When SAS patrols spotted Iraqi communications installations associated with the Scud command network, they marked them for air strikes using laser designators, allowing coalition aircraft to deliver precision guided munitions with devastating accuracy.

When they located actual launcher convoys on the move, they called in F-15Es, and on at least one verified occasion guided in a strike that destroyed a Scud launcher in the process of preparing to fire. When circumstances demanded direct action, the columns themselves engaged. Land Rovers in line abreast on a desert ridgeline, .

50 cals and Mark 19s and Milans opening simultaneously on Iraqi convoys moving along supply roads in the darkness. The fury of these ambushes, viewed from the Iraqi side, must have been bewildering. Vehicles disintegrating under heavy machine gun fire from positions invisible in the night. Anti-tank missiles striking trucks from ranges at which no return fire was possible.

 And by the time any Iraqi response could be organized, the columns were gone, melted into the desert kilometers away by the time dawn arrived. The cumulative effect over the weeks that followed was the transformation of the Scud campaign. Once the SAS and Delta operations were combined with the coalition air patrols, the rate of Scud launches dropped sharply.

The launches that did continue were degraded in their political effect by the visible coalition response. Israel, presented with concrete evidence that something effective was being done, held its hand. The Arab coalition held together. The strategic catastrophe that Saddam had been engineering with his missile campaign was, if not entirely averted, at least contained to a level the coalition could absorb.

 And then, towards the end of the air campaign, the SAS conducted the operation that would come to define the entire deployment. Operation Victor Two. The target was an Iraqi communications installation in western Iraq identified by intelligence as a major node in the Scud command and control network. The site featured a large microwave communications tower and associated bunkers.

 The intelligence assessment provided to the SAS planners suggested the position was lightly defended, perhaps held by a small detachment of communications technicians and a token security element. The whole of a squadron, mustered into a single fighting force for the first time during the deployment, was assigned the task of destroying it.

The plan, drawn up over a single planning cycle in the desert, was a textbook SAS direct action assault. Land Rovers fitted with the heavier weapons, the Mark 19 grenade launchers, the Milans, the .50 cal Brownings, would deploy as a fire support group on a ridge overlooking the target. Land Rovers fitted with twin general purpose machine guns would form a close fire support element.

The assault element, troopers on foot carrying demolition charges, would move in on the masts and bunkers under the cover of fire from the support groups. The objective was to destroy the masts with explosives, neutralize any defenders, and withdraw before any significant Iraqi response could be organized.

 Estimated time on target, less than 30 minutes. The reality, when the operation kicked off in the early hours of one of the final nights of the air campaign, was almost instantly different from the plan. As the SAS columns approached the target, it became apparent that the intelligence assessment of light defenders had been spectacularly wrong.

The site was held not by a handful of technicians, but by what one participant would later estimate at 300 Iraqi soldiers. Trenches, bunkers, anti-aircraft positions, the works. 34 members of the SAS against approximately 300 Iraqis. The numerical disparity was nearly 10 to 1. And the British commander, Major Peter Crossland of A Squadron, made the decision that defined the operation.

 He did not abort. He attacked. What followed, by every account that has emerged from the men who were there, was a sustained close-quarters engagement of extraordinary violence and discipline. The fire support groups opened up with the Mark 19s and the heavy machine guns suppressing the trench lines and bunker positions.

The assault element, despite the volume of incoming fire, drove their Land Rovers into the position itself. The classical SAS principle of speed, surprise, and aggression, repeated by David Stirling’s original L Detachment in the desert against Rommel almost exactly 50 years earlier, applied in the same desert against a different enemy.

The demolitions teams reached the masts under fire, placed their charges, and withdrew. The masts came down. The communication site went dark. And despite the storm of incoming fire from a defending force 10 times their number, A Squadron extracted without losing a single man killed. There were wounds.

 There were close calls. There was a chaotic running fight as the Land Rovers withdrew into the desert with Iraqi forces attempting to organize pursuit. But by dawn, when an SAS reconnaissance patrol returned to confirm the target’s destruction, the masts were down, the communications hub was gone, and not one British soldier had died.

It was a classic operation. It belonged in the same regimental memory as the airfield raids of 1941 and 1942 in North Africa. And it answered, more comprehensively than any words could have answered, the question that Schwarzkopf had asked in that planning room in late January. What can the SAS do that an F-16 cannot do? An F-16 cannot place a four-man team within 7 m of a target compound and watch it for 3 days.

 An F-16 cannot drive a column of Land Rovers across 200 km of enemy desert, ambush a supply convoy, and disappear into a wadi system before the enemy can organize a response. An F-16 cannot guide its own laser designation, exploit captured intelligence within hours, and adapt its targeting in real time to a fluid tactical situation.

 An F-16 cannot sit motionless under camouflage netting for 48 hours waiting for a Scud convoy to emerge from a cement factory. An F-16 cannot land on an objective held by 10 times its number, plant explosives on a communications mast, and walk out alive. An F-16 is a magnificent weapon. But it is not, and was never going to be, the answer to the kind of war that Saddam Hussein was actually fighting.

Only men on the ground could fight that war, and only certain kinds of men. By the end of the 42-day coalition campaign, the regiment’s record, despite the catastrophe of Bravo Two Zero, was extraordinary. The two squadrons of fighting columns and the surviving observation patrols had operated continuously inside Iraq for the entire ground phase of the war.

They had been involved in the destruction of an estimated 1/3 of all Scud launchers neutralized by coalition action. They had destroyed multiple communications facilities, severed buried fiber optic cables, marked targets for coalition air strikes, conducted direct ambushes along supply routes, and produced intelligence that had directly contributed to the political stabilization of the coalition.

The cost had been four men killed and four captured. Not a small price, not by any measure. But measured against what the regiment had achieved, and against what would have happened if it had not been there, the price was one that British defense planning had been willing to pay since 1941. The reversal in American command attitudes was, by all accounts, comprehensive.

Schwarzkopf, who had begun the campaign questioning what the SAS could do that an F-16 could not, ended it issuing a personal commendation to the regiment. The exact text has been described in multiple sources. It included a signed Iraqi map presented to the regiment as a personal token of gratitude. The commendation acknowledged, in the language of senior command, what the operations had actually delivered.

The regiment received 55 medals for gallantry and meritorious service. And the man who had once been adamantly against special operations units having any significant role in the conflict was, by the end of it, on record stating that he would use British special forces again without hesitation. The cultural meaning of this reversal is worth examining because it reveals something about military institutions that goes beyond any single campaign.

The American approach to warfare in 1991 was the product of two decades of post-Vietnam reconstruction. It was built on the conviction that overwhelming force, integrated technology, and centralized command would produce decisive results with minimal casualties. The doctrine had been validated brilliantly in the conventional fight against the Iraqi army.

The advance of VII Corps and ISVE Airborne Corps through the Iraqi defensive belts during the 100-hour ground war was a textbook demonstration of combined arms warfare conducted at a level of sophistication never before achieved. The coalition had liberated Kuwait at the cost of 148 American killed in action and 145 non-combat deaths.

By any historical measure, it was a stunning military achievement. But the Scud War, the parallel campaign being fought in the Western Desert, did not conform to the American doctrine. It was a war of intelligence, patience, mobility, and small unit autonomy fought by men who understood that the enemy’s center of gravity was not a tank division or an airfield, but a network of mobile launchers operating with a discipline that mocked the assumptions of overhead surveillance.

 The British, with the SAS, brought to that fight a method that the regiment had been developing continuously since David Stirling first sketched the concept of small raiding units behind enemy lines on a hospital bed in Cairo in the summer of 1941. 50 years of institutional knowledge condensed into men who could be inserted four at a time and into the most hostile terrain on earth and trusted to deliver effects that no satellite and no F-16 could produce.

 When Schwarzkopf asked his question, “What can the SAS do that an F-16 cannot?” he was asking it from inside one institutional culture about the capabilities of another. The answer required him, eventually, to step outside his own assumptions and recognize that warfare is not a single problem to which technology is always the optimal solution.

Warfare is a collection of problems. Some of those problems have technological solutions. Some have human solutions. And the genius of allied military cooperation, when it works, is in matching the right tool to the right problem. The coalition had F-16s in abundance. It had only one regiment of British SAS.

And in the specific, narrow, but absolutely critical task of finding the Scuds before the political situation collapsed, the regiment was worth, pound for pound and operator for operator, more than any single squadron of American aircraft. The British major who walked out of that planning room in January 1991, his uniform supposedly meaning nothing in the temple of American technological supremacy, ended the war as part of a force whose contribution would be acknowledged at the highest levels of the coalition.

The Israelis stayed out of the war. The Arab coalition held together. The Scud launchers were degraded enough that they ceased to be a strategic threat. And the American commander who had once dismissed British special forces as a sideshow ended his career on record praising them. There is no documented record in any open source of a verbatim apology from Schwarzkopf to any specific SAS officer for any specific remark.

The general’s autobiography, It Doesn’t Take a Hero, is notably restrained on the topic of his early skepticism. De la Billière’s Looking for Trouble is more candid about the friction. What is documented, beyond dispute, is the trajectory. From the question, “What can the SAS do that an F-16 cannot?” to the personal commendation.

From the assessment of high-risk distraction with limited strategic payoff to the acknowledgement of a force that helped save the coalition. From the implication that a uniform meant nothing in the face of American technology to the regiment receiving 55 medals and the gratitude of a commander who had been forced by events to revise every assumption he had brought to the campaign.

 The lesson of the Gulf War is not that technology failed or that special operations triumphed. The lesson is that warfare is a more complicated business than any single doctrine can fully capture. The Americans were not wrong to invest in the F-16, the F-15E, the Apache helicopter, the M1A1 Abrams. Those weapons won the conventional war and saved thousands of coalition lives.

The British were not wrong to invest in 50 years of regimental tradition that produced men capable of operating four at a time in the heart of enemy territory. The two approaches, properly combined, produced an outcome neither could have produced alone. The British major kept his name out of the public record as SAS officers do.

The American general did not. History has been kinder to Schwarzkopf than perhaps he deserved on this issue because his eventual capacity to recognize his own initial error and to credit the men who had proved him wrong is itself a form of leadership that not every senior commander would have demonstrated. He could have buried the SAS contribution.

He could have framed the British role as marginal. He did none of those things. He acknowledged what the regiment had done. He thanked them publicly. He wrote later that he would use them again. And somewhere in the regimental memory of 22 SAS, alongside the medals and the citations and the signed Iraqi map, there is presumably a quiet institutional satisfaction at the way the question was answered.

Not with words, not with arguments in planning rooms, but in the only currency that has ever mattered to the regiment since Stirling sketched the concept on a hospital bed in 1941. With results. With the four men in a Land Rover in the dark and the major who said, after looking at 300 Iraqis through his night vision goggles, that the squadron would attack anyway.

That uniform, it turned out, meant a great deal in the Iraqi desert. It meant that when the F-16s could not find the Scuds, somebody on the ground would. It meant that when the coalition’s political fate hung on a thread spun in Tel Aviv, somebody would walk into the desert and cut the cable that fed the launchers.

It meant that when a supposedly lightly defended communication site turned out to be held by a force 10 times the size of the assault team, the assault would go in regardless and the masts would come down. And it meant that the question asked with such confidence by the most powerful military commander on earth in late January would be answered so comprehensively by late February that the questioner himself would acknowledge the answer in writing. That is what the uniform meant