“They Made Us Feel Like AMATEURS” – What US Special Forces Said About British SAS

In 1962, a young American Green Beret named Charlie Beckwith stepped off a transport plane in the jungles of Malaysia and reported for duty with a unit he had never heard of. He was there on an exchange program assigned to train alongside soldiers from the British Army’s 22nd Special Air Service Regiment. The SAS Beckwith was already considered one of the toughest soldiers in the United States Army. He had served in Korea and earned his Green Beret. He figured a few months with the British would be a nice addition to his resume.

He was wrong. Within weeks, the SAS had broken him down completely. The endurance marches through the Malaysian jungle, the mental pressure, the expectation that every man could navigate, shoot, administer medical aid, and operate independently behind enemy lines. Beckwith later admitted that his time with the SAS was the most humbling experience of his military career. But the thing that shook him most was not the physical difficulty. It was the philosophy. The SAS did not just want strong soldiers. They wanted

intelligent, independent operators who could think for themselves in situations where no commanding officer was around to give orders. Beckwith realized the United States had nothing like this. And that realization would change American special operations forever. But before we get to what Beckwood did with that lesson, we need to go back even further because the story of the SAS starts with one of the most audacious acts of insubordination in British military history. If you enjoy military content

like this, please comment, like, and subscribe and turn on post notifications. It really helps the channel. It was July 1941 and the British army was getting hammered in North Africa. Raml’s Africa Corps was pushing east across the Libyan desert, threatening Egypt and the Suez Canal. The entire Allied position in the region was at risk. In a hospital in Alexandria, a young Scottish officer named David Sterling lay in bed with temporarily paralyzed legs after a botched parachute jump. While most men

would have focused on recovery, Sterling used the downtime to sketch out an idea that his superiors would have called insane. He believed that teams of four to five men operating deep behind enemy lines with no backup and minimal supplies could destroy more enemy aircraft than an entire conventional battalion. [music] Small, fast, invisible, hit the airfields at night, disappear before dawn. The math made sense. A traditional commando unit needed 600 men to attack two targets. Sterling figured 60 men could hit 20

targets on the same night. The problem was getting anyone to listen. Sterling knew that middle ranking officers would bury his proposal in paperwork. So when he was released from the hospital, he did something that would have gotten most soldiers court marshaled. He broke into the British Middle East East military headquarters in Cairo. He literally climbed the perimeter fence on his crutches, dodged the centuries, and barged into the office of the deputy commander-in-chief, Lieutenant General Neil Richie, who, as it happened, was

just sitting there doing paperwork. Richie read the proposal. 3 days later, Sterling was standing in front of General Alench himself. He walked out with a promotion to captain, permission to recruit six officers and 60 men in orders to prove his theory worked. Now, the first mission was a disaster. In November 1941, 65 men parachuted into the desert during a sandstorm. Only 22 made it back. The rest were killed or captured. The bureaucrats in Cairo were ready to shut the whole thing down. But Sterling had an alley. The long range

desert group, a reconnaissance unit that operated deep in the Sahara, offered to simply drive the SAS to their targets instead. No more parachutes, just jeeps, [music] darkness, and explosives. What happened next is still considered one of the most effective special operations campaigns in military history. Over the following 15 months, Sterling’s SAS destroyed [music] over 250 Axis aircraft on the ground. [music] They wrecked dozens of supply dumps, blew up railways, and put hundreds of vehicles out of action. Raml himself

reportedly called Sterling the Phantom Major and ordered special units to hunt [music] him down. Field Marshall Montgomery said Sterling was quite mad, quite quite mad, but added that in a war there is often a place for mad people. Sterling was captured in January 1943 and spent the rest of the war in Culitz Castle. But the SAS did not die with him. Patty Maine, an Irish rugby international with a legendary combat record, took command and led the regiment through Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany. After the war, the SAS was

disbanded, reformed, and nearly disbanded again. By the 1950s, the regiment was fighting communist insurgents in the jungles of Malaysia. And that is exactly where Charlie Beckwith showed up in 1962. When Beckwith returned to the United States, he was a different soldier. He immediately wrote a detailed report for the Army brass, arguing that America was dangerously vulnerable without an SAS type unit, small teams, extreme selection, counterterrorism capability, direct action behind enemy lines. The

army ignored him. For over a decade, Beckwith pushed the same proposal up the chain of command only to be told that the Green Beretss were [music] sufficient. Special Forces leadership at the time did not want the headache of building something new. Meanwhile, Beckwith nearly died twice. once from a severe bacterial infection in Malaysia which doctors said he had three weeks to survive and again in Vietnam in 1966 when he took a 50 caliber round to the abdomen. A bullet that size can tear a man’s limbs off. Doctors essentially

left him for dead. He survived both times [music] and he kept pushing. It wasn’t until the wave of international terrorism in the 1970s that the Pentagon finally listened. After the Munich Olympics massacre in 1972 and a string of airplane hijackings, senior military leaders realized that the United States had no dedicated counterterrorism unit. In 1977, 15 years after Beckwith first pitched his idea, he was finally given the authority to create the first special forces operational detachment,

Delta, [music] Delta Force. The unit was modeled directly on the British SAS. Same selection philosophy, same small team structure, even the same squadron designations. Brigadier John Watts of the SAS had told Beckwith it would take 18 months to build a squadron, but advised him to tell the army 2 years. Don’t let anyone talk you out of this. Watts said Delta Forc’s first mission was Operation Eagle Claw in 1980. the attempt to rescue American hostages held in Thran, Iran. The mission was aborted

in the desert after helicopter failures and a catastrophic crash that killed eight servicemen. It was a humiliating failure that haunted Beck with until the day he retired. But what happened just 3 weeks later on the other side of the world showed exactly what a mature special operations unit looked like when everything went right. On April 30th, 1980, six armed men stormed the Iranian embassy in London, taking 26 people hostage. For six days, the Metropolitan Police negotiated while the SAS quietly

moved into position, building a replica of the embassy at their barracks and rehearsing the assault. My lowered microphones down the embassy chimneys to track hostage locations. On the sixth day, the terrorist executed a hostage and threw his body out the front door. At 7:23 in the evening, with television cameras rolling live, blackclad SAS operators absailed down the building and smashed through the windows. 17 minutes later, it was over. 19 hostages were rescued. Five of six terrorists were dead. The timing could

not have been more brutal for the Americans. Their hostage rescue in Iran had just failed. The British had just pulled theirs off in 17 minutes on live television. Delta Force studied Operation Nimrod obsessively, and the SAS quietly continued doing what it had always done, going back into the shadows. A decade later, in January 1991, the SAS was deployed to the Iraqi Desert during the Gulf War. Among the patrols sent behind enemy lines was an eight-man team with the call sign bravo 20. Their mission was to locate Iraqi

Scud missile launchers and cut fiber optic communication cables along the main supply route between Baghdad and northwestern Iraq. From the moment they hit the ground, everything went wrong. There was no cover in the flat desert terrain. Their communications equipment failed. They were unable to contact headquarters. On the second day, a young goat herder stumbled onto their position and alerted nearby Iraqi forces. [music] What followed was one of the most harrowing escape and evasion stories in

modern military history. The eight men fought running battles against Iraqi soldiers, then split into groups and attempted to cross over 100 km of freezing desert to the Syrian border. Three men died, four were captured and tortured. Only one man, Chris Ryan, escaped on foot, walking 120 kilometers through hostile territory in sub-zero temperatures to reach Syria. Bravo 20 was a tactical failure. But the sheer endurance of those eight men cemented the SAS reputation among American operators fighting in the same theater.

But the chapter that truly made American special forces sit up and take notice did not come until over a decade later in the blood soaked streets of Baghdad. In 2003, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, an SAS squadron was assigned to a joint United States and United Kingdom special operations task force in Iraq. Their contingent was designated Task Force Black based inside Baghdad’s green zone. For the first two years, tensions simmered with the Americans over interrogation methods and detainee

handling. The British had strict rules about prisoner transfers and conditions at some United States detention facilities created friction at the command level. But by early 2006, a new SAS commanding officer named Lieutenant Colonel Richard Williams pushed aggressively to integrate his men directly into General Stanley Mcrist’s Joint Special Operations Command. Williams had seen what Mcrist was building, a machine of industrial counterterrorism where every raid generated intelligence for the next

raid, sometimes within hours. The SAS commander wanted in. Operation traction was the code name. The SAS deployed a headquarters group to the American Joint Special Operations Command Base at Balad. And from that point forward, the British were, in Williams’ own words, joined at the hip with American special operations. [music] What happened next was staggering. The SAS, operating as part of the combined task force alongside Delta Force and Seal Team 6, launched raid after raid against al-Qaeda in Iraq. On some nights, they

hit multiple targets before dawn. British paratroopers from the special forces support group provided outer cordons while SAS assault teams breached buildings, cleared rooms, and extracted intelligence for the next operation. [music] During one six-month tour, a squadron of the 22nd SAS carried out 175 combat missions. General Mcristel himself publicly praised the British special forces for their courage and effectiveness. According to journalists Shawn Raymond of the Daily Telegraph, Task Force Black was credited with

clearing 3,500 insurgents from the streets of Baghdad. Before the SAS campaign, the city was averaging 150 bombings per month, killing 3,000 people. After the campaign, bombings dropped to two per month. Six SAS soldiers were killed during the operation. 30 more were wounded. The toll was heavy for a unit that numbered only 60 to 70 operators per squadron. One of the most dramatic incidents came in September 2005 when two undercover SAS soldiers in Basra were arrested by Iraqi police at a roadblock. The men were beaten and moved

to a police station that British intelligence believed had been infiltrated by Shia militias. When it became clear the men might be killed, 20 SSAS operators flew from Baghdad while British army tanks surrounded the police station. After nightfall, the SAS stormed the building and extracted their men. The governor of Basra claimed the British used more than 10 tanks backed by helicopters to rescue two soldiers. On Christmas Day 2006, the SAS went back to that same police station, killed seven gunmen, freed

27 prisoners who had been tortured, and blew the building up. Task Force Black ceased operations in Iraq in May 2009. The squadron was redeployed to Afghanistan, where they continued working alongside American JSOC units in the ongoing campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. [music] So, why do American special operators, men from Delta Force, and SEAL Team 6 consistently point to the British SAS as the gold standard? Part of it is history. The SAS invented modern small team special operations in the North

African desert in 1941. Every tier 1 unit in the Western world traces its DNA back to David Sterling’s 60 men. Part of it is proven capability. From the Iranian embassy [music] to the streets of Baghdad, the SAS has repeatedly demonstrated what a small number of highly trained operators can accomplish against overwhelming odds. But the biggest reason is something Charlie Beckwith understood in 1962, standing in a Malaysian jungle watching SAS uh troopers do things he did not think were possible. The SAS does not

build soldiers. It builds independent thinkers [music] who happen to be the most dangerous men on any battlefield. That philosophy is why Beckwith copied it. It is why Mcrist [music] wanted them in his task force. And it is why when American operators talk about the unit that earned their respect, the answer keeps coming back to the letters SAS. If you found this story as fascinating as I did, you will want to see the video on screen right now about the most insane special forces operations that

almost went wrong. Subscribe if you want more stories like this one. [music] I cover military history every week.