Why The Pentagon Ordered Every US Unit NEVER to Follow Australian SASR After Dark in Afghanistan

In late 2001, a squadron of roughly 90 Australian soldiers flew into southern Afghanistan to join the American war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. They came from a base in the suburbs of Perth, Western Australia, a place most people would associate with beaches and sunshine, not the hardest special forces unit on the planet.

[music] Within weeks of arriving, those soldiers were running long range vehicle patrols covering hundreds of kilometers across the desert south of Kandahar. Operating alongside United States Marines [music] from Task Force 58, the Americans had Delta Force, the Navy Seals, and the Green Berets stationed at outposts from Bram to the Pakistani border.

And yet, according to accounts from coalition personnel who served alongside them, [music] the Australians operated with a ferocity and silence at night that made even seasoned American operators uncomfortable. The word spread through forward operating bases across Afghanistan like a quiet warning passed [music] from one unit commander to the next.

Do not follow the Australians after dark. To understand how a regiment of fewer than 300 combat operators from a country with a population smaller than Texas built that kind of reputation, you have to go back decades before Afghanistan, back to the jungles of Southeast Asia, where the Australian Special Air Service Regiment [music] known as SASR first earned the name that would define them for generations.

In 1966, the regiment deployed its first squadron to South Vietnam. They were tasked with long range reconnaissance patrols in the dense jungles of Fuakui province, moving in small teams of four to six men through territory controlled by the Vietkong and the North Vietnamese army. The way they moved was different from anything the enemy had encountered.

The Australians traveled slower than any other unit in the country, including other special operations forces, where American patrols would push through jungle at a steady pace. The SASR would take 1 hour to cover what others crossed in 15 minutes. Every footstep was deliberate. Every branch was moved by hand, not pushed through.

And when they made contact, the effect was devastating. If you enjoy deep dives into elite units like this, hit like and subscribe. It really helps the channel. [music] These small teams would unleash a concentrated rate of fire so violent and so sudden that the enemy believed they had walked into a much larger force.

The Vietkong would break contact, regroup, probe the area again, and find nothing. Just empty jungle, no tracks, no sign that anyone had been there at all. The North Vietnamese began calling them Marang, phantoms of the jungle. Over the course of their deployment, the SASR conducted approximately 1,200 combat patrols in Vietnam.

They killed an estimated 600 enemy fighters, and their own losses were almost impossible to believe. One soldier was killed in action, one died of wounds, three were killed in accidents, one was missing, one death resulted from illness, 28 were wounded. That ratio, roughly 600 enemy killed for every one Australian lost in direct combat, was the highest of the entire Vietnam War.

Not just among special forces, [music] among everyone. The Vietkong put bounties on their heads. The North Vietnamese army classified them alongside their own commandos and afteraction reports. Unable to believe that regular Allied troops could operate at that level. They were not regular troops. They were something else entirely.

And the regiment never forgot those lessons. After Vietnam, the Special Air Service Regiment went through a transformation. They developed a counterterrorism capability in the late 1970s, running a permanent tactical assault group on rotation from their base at Campbell Barracks in Swanorn. They trained alongside the British SAS, the American Navy Seals, and Germany’s GSG9.

The selection course to join the regiment became one of the most punishing military assessments on Earth. 21 days of constant physical and psychological pressure. Sleep deprivation that pushed candidates to the edge of hallucination. Navigation exercises across hostile terrain carrying crushing loads. Food deprivation that left grown men weeping.

The instructors were not looking for the biggest candidates or the fastest runners. They wanted something harder to measure. The ability to make decisions when your body is screaming at you to quit. The willingness to keep thinking clearly when every cell in your brain is begging for sleep. Roughly 75% of candidates washed out.

The ones who remained entered a training pipeline that lasted over 18 months covering advanced weapons, demolitions, parachuting, diving, sniping, long range communications, and mountain warfare. By the time a trooper was considered operational, he had been forged into something closer to a weapon than a conventional soldier.

That weapon was about to be tested in the most complex battlefield of the 21st century. When the September 11th attacks hit, Australia was among the first nations to commit forces. On October 11th, 2001, the Australian government announced it was sending a special forces task group built around one squadron of the special air service regiment to Afghanistan under Operation Slipper.

Getting there was not simple. The Australian task force commander had to fight through bureaucratic resistance from other coalition partners jockeying for position within the US command structure. There were no favors offered. Nothing came easy. A US Marine commander by the name of Brigadier General James Mattis, who would later become one of the most respected generals in American military history, eventually agreed to sponsor the Australians under his command.

Mattis would not regret that decision. After staging through Kuwait, one squadron arrived in Afghanistan in December 2001 and went straight to work. Their first base was Camp Rhino, the coalition’s forward operating base southwest of Kandahar. From there, they launched vehicle-mounted patrols that covered hundreds of kilometers, pushing deep into the Helman Valley near the Iranian border.

These were not safe drives through friendly territory. The Australians were operating in small groups across some of the most hostile ground in the country at a time when the Taliban and al-Qaeda were still very much fighting back. During one patrol, an Australian team observed a group of fighters who appeared to be protecting a white-roed older man carrying a cane as they fled a battlefield.

US intelligence initially believed it was Osama bin Laden himself. They later revised that assessment to his second in command, Iman al- Zawahiri. An air strike was called in. Whether it was successful remains disputed to this day. Then came operation Anaconda. In March 2002, more than 6,000 coalition troops launched a massive assault on al-Qaeda forces dug into the Sha Ecot Valley in eastern Afghanistan.

The plan was supposed to take 72 hours. It lasted over 2 weeks. Instead of the estimated 200 fighters in the valley, coalition forces encountered somewhere between 700 and 1,000 heavily armed al-Qaeda entrenched in caves and ridgeel lines with mortars, heavy machine guns, and anti-aircraft weapons. The Australians were positioned in the mountains surrounding the valley, tasked with reconnaissance, and directing air strikes.

For more than a week, SASR patrols called in in air power onto al-Qaeda positions day and night, systematically destroying enemy equipment and killing significant numbers of fighters. On more than one occasion, their actions directly protected US soldiers fighting on the valley floor below. The results spoke for themselves.

An SASR Sergeant patrol commander was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. A United States Air Force member attached to one of the Australian patrols received the US Silver Star, the American military’s third highest decoration for valor in combat. All three SASR squadrons rotated through Afghanistan between late 2001 and November 2002 when the regiment withdrew from the country.

The initial mission was over, but Afghanistan was far from finished with the Australians. Three years later in 2005, the special air service regiment known as SASR was back. This time, the mission had changed. The romantic notion of small patrols scanning mountain passes for al-Qaeda had given way to something far more intense.

The Australians were now embedded in a United States led joint prioritized effects list program, a targeting system that identified Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders for what the military called prosecution. The words sounded clinical. The reality was anything but. Operating out of Camp Russell, a separate compound within the larger coalition base at Tyran Cult in Uru Gun Province, the SASR began conducting relentless nighttime raids against highv value targets across the province.

They operated in small teams, moving on foot in total darkness using advanced night vision equipment, breaching compound walls, clearing rooms, and either capturing or killing the individuals on their target list. The tempo was staggering. From 2005 onward, each SASR squadron rotated through a Afghanistan roughly every 12 months.

Troops in contact occurred in twothirds of all operations. Individual operators deployed not once or twice but five, six, seven times. Some went back even more than that. And this is where the warning started spreading through coalition forces. The Australians operated at night with an intensity that unnerved even the most experienced American special operators.

Their movement was virtually silent. Their target acquisition was precise. Once they entered a compound, the speed and violence of their actions left nothing to chance. Coalition personnel who worked alongside the SASR during this period described them as operating in a kind of controlled fury that was qualitatively different from how other special forces units conducted themselves.

American units for all their own lethality operated within systems that included multiple layers of oversight, judge advocate general officers reviewing targeting decisions and institutional caution borne from decades of media scrutiny. The Australians, by contrast, operated with a degree of autonomy that was unusual even by special forces standards.

They ran their own compound. They controlled their own intelligence fusion cell called the FATC, which processed satellite imagery, drone feeds, intercepted phone calls, text messages, and human intelligence sources from across the province. The SASR were the premier trigger pullers within the Australian Defense [music] Force.

They like to hunt and they needed targets. That hunger produced results that were impossible to ignore. On September 2nd, 2008, a combined Australian, American, and Afghan force launched an ambush [music] mission in the Anakalai Valley east of forward operating base Anaconda in Uruan province. [music] Two SASR patrols had moved into position on foot during darkness, establishing themselves in the hills overlooking the valley.

[music] At 4 in the morning, five Humvees crewed by US special forces from the seventh special forces group and Afghan soldiers departed the base and drove into the valley to bait [music] the Taliban into revealing their positions. It worked, but not the way anyone planned. The Taliban were waiting with mortars, heavy machine guns, and hundreds of fighters positioned across the valley walls.

As the convoy moved deeper into the kill zone, accurate mortar fire began landing around the vehicles. Then came the small arms fire growing heavier by the minute. One Australian patrol commander later described the incoming fire in [music] an interview with the Australian War Memorial. The bullets were hitting the ground around them so thickly it looked like rain on the surface of water.

What followed was a 9-hour battle that pushed every man in that valley to the edge of survival. The SASR troopers riding in the back of the center vehicles dismounted and moved on foot, engaging Taliban positions with sniper rifles while the convoy crawled through rocky [music] terrain at walking pace. Air support was called in and ordinance was dropped on the mortar positions, but the fire kept intensifying.

A US special forces military dog handler, Sergeant Firstclass Gregory Rodriguez, was killed by enemy gunfire during the battle. Nine Australian SASR soldiers were wounded. In one fiveman patrol, only a single member escaped without injury. And then the Australians called the Dutch for help.

The Netherlands had helicopter assets in the region. The Australians radioed them and pleaded for air cover, telling the Dutch pilots they were taking casualties and needed immediate assistance. The Dutch refused to fly into the fight. One Australian SAS sniper named Rob Maylor, himself wounded during the battle, later recalled exactly what they told the Dutch.

They said they were in an absolute doozy of a fight and needed assistance because they were taking casualties. The Dutch helicopter pilots would not come. [music] Despite being abandoned by their coalition partners, the combined Australian and American force fought their way out of the valley. They had expended nearly all their ammunition by the time they reached safety.

Taliban casualties were estimated at up to 80 killed, far exceeding coalition losses. During that same battle, trooper Mark Donaldson of the SASR exposed himself to enemy fire to protect wounded Australian soldiers, then ran into the open to rescue an Afghan interpreter who had been left behind. For that act, he became the first Australian in nearly 40 years to receive the Victoria Cross, the nation’s highest award for gallantry, and the explosive detection dog.

A Belgian Malininoa named Sarby went missing after a rocket explosion broke her leash during the fighting. She was not found for 14 months until an American soldier spotted her with a local Afghan man and recognized her. Even the dogs came back from the impossible. The battle of Ka Origgon cemented the SASR’s reputation as a force that simply would not break.

No matter how badly the situation deteriorated, the Americans took note. So did the Taliban and the night raids continued. Two years later on June 11th, 2010, Corporal Ben Robert Smith of the SASR was part of a helicopter assault on a Taliban stronghold in the village of Tisak in Sha Walikat district, Kandahar province.

The operation involved Australian and American forces conducting raids to destabilize local insurgent networks and identify Taliban leaders. When the assault team came under heavy fire from fortified machine gun positions, Robert Smith charged the first position alone, drawing fire from multiple directions. He eliminated the machine gun crew, then immediately moved on a second fortified position and neutralized that as well.

For those actions, he was awarded the Victoria Cross for Australia, becoming the most decorated living soldier in the country. He was celebrated as a national hero, the embodiment of everything the SASR represented. That image would not last. But before the reckoning came, the machine kept running. 23 rotations of Australian special forces deployed to Afghanistan between 2001 and 2013.

The SASR operated at a tempo that would have been considered unsustainable by any conventional military standard. Individual operators deployed so many times that their lives outside the regiment barely existed. One trooper deployed to Kuwait, then Te-our, then Afghanistan, then back to Teeour, then did five more rotations through Afghanistan.

Personnel serving in Special Operations Command expected to be away from home 6 months of every year. The SASR even demarcated their own compound within the larger Terrancow base. Physically separating themselves from other Australian and coalition units. They were fighting a war within a war. Selected through recruitment courses to stand out and stand alone.

They distinguished themselves even from the commandos who shared the burden of Australia’s combat operations. And with every rotation, the intensity ratcheted higher. Kill capture missions became their own justification. The targeting list grew. The operations became more frequent. The oversight became thinner.

After a while, the question was no longer whether the SASR was effective. Everyone knew they were effective. The question was what that effectiveness was costing them. Coalition forces who operated near the Australians noticed changes that were difficult to articulate but impossible to ignore. The SASR had always been aggressive.

That was their nature. That was what they were selected for, trained for, deployed for. But somewhere in the grinding repetition of nighttime raids across Uruguan province, something shifted. The kill capture missions had become their own end, not a means toward a broader strategy. With a corrupt Afghan government, ancient tribal emmities washing into every valley, and political leadership in both CRA and Washington, either uninterested or unable to articulate what victory even looked like, the operators on the ground were

left to define the mission for themselves. And the mission became the hunt. If you are finding this valuable, hit subscribe. I cover military history and special forces operations every week. Now, here is where the story takes its darkest turn. In May 2023, Australia’s defense chief made an extraordinary public admission.

The United States had warned Australia in 2021 that allegations against the SASR could lead to a suspension of the bilateral relationship between Australian and American special forces. The warning invoked the lies law, a US statute that prohibits American forces from assisting foreign military units credibly implicated in human rights violations.

The closest military alliance Australia had the partnership that underpinned its entire national security strategy was under threat because of what the SASR had become in Afghanistan. The Australian Defense Force launched a 4year internal investigation into the conduct of its special forces. The resulting inquiry was the most comprehensive examination of military misconduct in Australian history.

[music] Its findings described what investigators called possibly the most disgraceful episode in Australia’s military history. An entire SASR squadron second squadron was disbanded. The chief of the Australian Defense Force, General Angus Campbell, described a distorted culture that had undermined the moral authority of the entire military.

Though all three SASR squadrons were implicated in poor conduct, second squadron bore what Campbell called collective responsibility. According to one former patrol commander’s account when it came to what had happened during those nighttime operations in Arusen, everyone knew. When concerns were reported internally, regiment leadership decided to handle the matter on their own terms.

Former Special Air Service Regiment Captain Andrew Hasty, who later became a member of Parliament, spoke publicly about what he described as a warrior ethos within the regiment that was about power, ego, and self- agilation. He said it worshiped war itself. He called it the opposite of the humility he had expected to find there.

The same unit that had earned the name Phantoms of the Jungle for their discipline and restraint in Vietnam had over over the course of 20 years of relentless deployment become something their founders would not have recognized. The warnings that coalition forces passed among themselves the quiet advisories to stay clear of the Australians once darkness fell carried a meaning that went beyond professional respect for a lethal ally.

The story of the Australian Special Air Service Regiment in Afghanistan is not a simple one. It cannot be reduced to heroes or villains. The same regiment that produced Mark Donaldson’s Victoria Cross courage at Ka or Ruskin. The same unit whose operators called in air strikes for a week straight to protect American soldiers during Operation Anaconda.

The same soldiers who earned the respect of James Mattis in the earliest days of the war were also the men who operated in a system that eventually consumed itself. They were selected to be the best, trained to be relentless, deployed until they broke and then they were sent back again.

The regiment story is in many ways the story of what happens when you take the most capable soldiers your country can produce, give them the most dangerous mission imaginable, remove meaningful oversight, and then ask them to do it over and over again for more than a decade. Some of them became the finest warriors of their generation. Some of them earned medals that will be studied in militarymies for centuries.

and some of them crossed lines that no amount of training or selection should have allowed. What the Pentagon understood, what every coalition commander eventually understood was that the Australian Special Air Service Regiment after dark was not something you followed [music] unless you were prepared for where they were going.

The question that Australia is still answering is whether anyone should have been. If you want to see how another elite unit faced a similar reckoning, that video is on screen [music] now. Subscribe for more stories like this one.