In 1988, soldiers from Russia’s Spettznaz stood on a training field in Alaska facing American special forces operators. It was one of the first joint exercises between Soviet and Western military units in history, a gesture of good faith as the Cold War inched toward [music] its end.

The Soviets had agreed to train alongside the Americans. They had even agreed to share certain tactical methods. But according to accounts that circulated through western military intelligence circles in the years that followed, there was one western force the Spetznaz had specifically flagged during joint planning discussions.

Not the Navy Seals, not Delta Force, the British SAS. The request, according to those who served in the intelligence community at the time, was simple. Keep them out of our exercises. Not because the Russians did not respect the Americans. They did, but the SAS operated differently. They fought differently and the Soviets knew it because they had been studying them for decades.

To understand why, you have to go back to where the SAS began. It started with a man lying in a hospital bed with an idea so absurd that his own commanders almost threw it in the trash. If you are into deep dives into elite units like this, consider liking and subscribing. It really helps the channel. In July 1941, a young lieutenant named David Sterling was recovering from a parachute training accident in a Cairo military hospital.

North Africa was a mess. The British were getting hammered by Raml’s Africa Corps across the Libyan desert, and conventional tactics were failing spectacularly. Sterling had a different idea. Instead of throwing thousands of troops at fortified German positions, what if you sent five men behind enemy lines to blow up an airfield instead? Small teams, no support.

Deep behind enemy territory, get in, destroy the target, and disappear before dawn. His commanding officers thought he was out of his mind. But Sterling did not go through proper channels. He literally bluffed his way past the guards at British Middle East headquarters in Cairo, limping on crutches, and talked his way into a meeting with the deputy commander-in-chief.

He walked out with permission to form a new unit. He bluffed his way into history. He called it L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade. The name itself was a lie, designed to trick the Germans into thinking the British had a massive airborne force in the region. In reality, Sterling had five officers and 60 men.

Their first mission was a disaster. A parachute drop in November 1941 went sideways when the weather turned violent. Only 22 of the original force made it back alive. A third of the unit was gone on night one. Most commanders would have shut the whole thing down right there. [music] But Sterling adapted. He ditched the parachutes entirely.

Instead, he partnered with the Long Range Desert Group, who drove his teams across hundreds of miles of open desert and modified jeeps to reach [music] their targets. The second mission changed everything. Sterling’s men hit three German airfields in Libya in a single night and destroyed 60 aircraft on the ground without losing a single operator.

In the months that followed, the SAS destroyed more German planes than the entire Royal Air Force managed in the same theater of operations. Adolf Hitler took notice. In October 1942, he issued the Commando Order, a directive stating that any captured SAS or commando soldiers should be executed immediately regardless of whether they had surrendered.

It was not a general order about all British troops. It specifically targeted units like SAS. In July 1944, 34 captured SAS commandos were shot by the Germans after operation bull basket. 3 months later, 31 more were executed after operation Leiton. The Nazis were afraid of them. They dealt with that fear [music] in the only way they knew how.

After the war ended in 1945, the British government disbanded SAS. They figured they did not need them anymore. That decision lasted exactly 2 years before tensions with the Soviet Union made it obvious that a unit like this was too valuable to lose. [music] The regiment was reformed in 1947 and over the next three decades the SAS fought in Malaya, Borneo, Omen, and Northern Ireland, perfecting the art of operating in small teams behind enemy lines and developing counterinsurgency doctrine that militaries around the world would eventually copy. But the moment that put the SAS on the global stage happened on a Wednesday afternoon in London on April 30th, 1980, six armed men stormed the Iranian embassy at Prince’s Gate in South Kensington. They took 26 hostages, including embassy staff, visitors, and a police officer named Trevor Lockach, who had been

guarding the front door. The gunmen were Iranian Arabs demanding the release of political prisoners and safe passage out of the country. Margaret Thatcher’s government decided immediately that safe passage was not an option. The Metropolitan Police set up a perimeter. Negotiators began talking and at their base in Heraford, the SAS counterterrorism team was put on high alert.

B squadron loaded into vehicles and raced down the motorway to London. They set up in a building next door to the embassy and started planning. Engineers lowered microphones down the embassy chimneys so intelligence officers could track where the hostages were being held. SAS planners studied blueprints of the building and consulted with the embassy caretaker to understand every door, window, and stairwell.

For 5 days, the police negotiated. The gunman released a few hostages but grew increasingly frustrated. Then on the sixth day, they crossed the line. The terrorist leader killed a hostage named Abbas Lavasani and pushed his body out the front door. Within minutes, operational control transferred from the police to the Ministry of Defense.

The SAS were given the green light. At 7:23 in the evening on May 5th, roughly 30 SAS operators launched Operation Nimrod. Multiple teams hit the embassy simultaneously. Soldiers in black tactical gear and gas masks abseldiled from the roof while others breached through windows on every floor. One operator got tangled in his rope and was burned by flames erupting from a window below. The team adapted on the spot.

17 minutes. That is how long the entire assault took. Five of the six terrorists were killed. One was captured. 19 hostages walked out alive. The only hostage who died was killed by the terrorists before the SAS could reach him. The entire operation played out on live television. Millions of viewers across Britain and around the world watched men in black balaclavas swing through windows and clear rooms with a precision that looked almost choreographed.

The images became iconic instantly. But here’s what most people don’t realize about that day. The real audience wasn’t the British public. It was every intelligence agency and military command center on the planet, including Moscow’s. Within weeks of Operation Nimrod, the SAS received requests from governments around the world asking for training assistance.

The regiment’s counterterrorism techniques were studied, analyzed, and copied by special forces units in dozens of countries. The Americans had already built Delta Force by modeling it directly on the SAS after Colonel Charlie Beckwith spent time training with the regiment in the 1960s. Now, after watching what happened at Prince’s Gate, every nation with a counterterrorism capability wanted to know what the British were doing differently.

The Soviets were watching closely. In fact, they had been watching for years. Victor Suarov, a GRU military intelligence officer who defected to the West, published a book in 1987 called Spettznaz, the story behind the Soviet SAS. The title alone tells you something. The Soviets did not compare their elite forces to the SEALs or to Delta. They compared them to the SAS.

The regiment was the benchmark. And the Soviets built their own version. The FSB maintains a training facility near Moscow that includes a close quarters battle house modeled directly on the SAS killing house at Sterling Lines in Heraford. Same concept, same training methodology adapted for Russian doctrine, but the DNA traces straight back to the British.

So what was it about the SAS that made the Spettznaz treat them differently from every other Western force? Part of the answer lies in selection. The SAS does not select the biggest soldiers or the fastest or even the toughest. They select the ones who refuse to quit. The process begins in the Breen beacons in Wales, a stretch of mountains where the weather can swing from clear skies to freezing rain in minutes.

Candidates start with the fan dance, a 24 km loaded march over Penny Fawn, the highest peak in the range carrying a 25 kg Bergen and a rifle. They have to finish in under 4 hours and 10 minutes. And that is just the first test. Over four weeks, the marches get longer, the loads get heavier, [music] the navigation gets harder.

Candidates move alone between checkpoints using nothing but a compass and a handdrawn sketch map. No GPS, no trails, no help. The phase culminates with the long drag, a 64 km trek carrying a 25 kg pack that must be completed in under 20 hours across terrain that most hikers would consider dangerous even in good weather.

By the end of the hills phase, roughly 90% of candidates have [music] been eliminated. In Andy McNab’s account, his intake went from 220 candidates down to 24. And that is only the first phase. Another 14 weeks of tactical training follow, then jungle warfare, then combat survival and resistance to interrogation.

In 2013, three army reser died during the fan dance when temperatures reached 30° C. The mountains do not care about your fitness level or your determination. The Bracken Beacons have killed candidates before, and they will again. But here’s where the SAS diverges from the Spetsznaz philosophy. The Russians built their reputation on brutality.

Candidates for Spettznaz units face five experienced operators who attack them with fists and bats until one side gives up. They are dragged behind trucks. They lie on the ground while burning cinder blocks are smashed on their chests with sledgehammers. The philosophy is simple. Pain is [music] the filter.

The SAS does does not work that way. The filter is not pain tolerance. It is decision-making under [music] exhaustion. Can you navigate accurately when you have been awake for 40 hours, you are hypothermic, and you have not eaten in 2 days? Can you make correct tactical decisions when every cell in your body is screaming [music] at you to stop? That is the test.

The result is a different kind of operator. Spas were feared because they were brutal and relentless. The SAS were feared because they were precise and unpredictable. One former observer who worked alongside both forces during NATO exercises in the Balkans put it bluntly, “The Spaz looked like boys pretending to be men compared to the quiet, unshoy competence of the British.

” That competence was tested on a massive scale in January 1991 when Iraq invaded Kuwait in the Gulf [music] War began. The SAS deployed roughly 300 operators with A squadron, B squadron, and D squadron. [music] It was the largest SAS mobilization since World War II. Their mission was to hunt Saddam Hussein Scud missile launchers in the Western Iraqi Desert.

The most famous patrol was Bravo 20, an eight-man team led by Sergeant Andy McNab. They were inserted by helicopter deep behind Iraqi lines with orders [music] to locate and destroy Scud launchers along a 250 km stretch of the main supply route between Baghdad and northwestern Iraq. Everything went wrong.

Their radios didn’t work. The weather turned brutal, cold enough to freeze diesel fuel, and they were spotted by an Iraqi goat herd. Within hours, the entire Iraqi military in the region was hunting them. Three of the eight men died. Four were captured and tortured. Only one escaped, a trooper named Chris Ryan, who walked 190 m across [music] the desert to the Syrian border over 7 days without food and the last 3 days without water.

He started hallucinating visions of his daughter so vivid that he reached out to touch her. It remains the longest escape and evasion by an SAS trooper in the regiment’s history. Bravo 20 was a tactical failure, but it demonstrated something that every military in the world took notice of [music] even when everything collapsed around them.

SAS operators kept fighting, kept moving, kept making decisions. The patrol became the most decorated British unit since the Bore War. The real proof of what the SAS could do at scale came a decade later in the streets of Baghdad. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the SAS formed Task Force Black, a unit embedded within the American Joint Special Operations Command alongside Delta Force.

Their mission was to dismantle al-Qaeda’s CAR bomb [music] networks in the Iraqi capital. Operating out of a compound they called the station in Baghdad, SAS teams conducted raids almost every night. They would receive intelligence, plan an assault, breach a target building, and extract suspects or neutralize threats, sometimes conducting multiple operations in a single evening.

The pace was relentless. They worked from a command bunker that the Americans nicknamed the Death Star because of its high-tech surveillance equipment. Real-time intelligence from phone intercepts and drone feeds would identify a target and within hours an SAS team would be kicking in the door. According to journalist Shawn Raymond, Task Force Black removed or killed approximately 3,500 insurgents in Baghdad over an 18-month period beginning in early 2007.

The result was staggering. Bombings in the city dropped from around 150 per month [music] to just two. General David Petraeus, the commander of all coalition forces in Iraq, said it publicly in an interview with the [music] Times in 2008. The SAS, he said, had helped immensely in the Baghdad area, particularly in dismantling al-Qaeda’s carb bomb networks.

coming from the most senior American general in theater. That was an extraordinary statement about a foreign special forces unit operating inside his command. The Americans already had Delta Force and SEAL Team 6. They already had the Rangers and the 24th Special Tactics Squadron. [music] And yet, it was the SAS that Petraeus singled out.

By 2009, when British special forces left Iraq, [music] Task Force Black had provided the United Kingdom with one clear, undeniable success in a war that was otherwise deeply controversial. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Williams, a former commanding officer of 22 SAS Regiment, described the Death Star’s purpose with characteristic bluntness.

Its job was the destruction of al-Qaeda in [music] Iraq, and it delivered quite a lot of death. So why did the Spettznaz single out the SAS? Why not Delta Force which had more resources? Why not the SEALs who had more operators? The answer comes down to history and philosophy. Delta Force was created in 1977 by Colonel Charlie Beckwith specifically because he was so impressed by the SAS after training with them.

The unit was literally built as an American copy. The SEALs evolved from underwater demolition teams and specialized in maritime operations. Neither had the same 80-year lineage of unconventional warfare behind enemy lines that defined the SAS from day one. The Spettznaz GRU was established in 1949 to conduct reconnaissance and sabotage behind NATO lines in the event of World War II.

Their primary cold war mission was targeting Western tactical nuclear weapons. In that context, [music] the force they would most likely encounter was not the SEALs operating offshore or Delta running hostage rescues. It was the SAS conducting the exact same kind of deep reconnaissance and direct action operations on the other side of the line.

They were mirror images, both built for operating deep behind enemy territory. Both designed to function in small teams without support. both trained to survive, evade, and continue fighting when everything went sideways. The Spettznaz knew exactly what the SAS was capable of because the SAS was capable of doing everything the Spettznaz trained to do.

but with 70 years more institutional experience doing it for real. From the deserts of Libya in 1941 to the balcony of the Iranian embassy in 1980 to the alleyways of Baghdad in 2007, the SAS wrote their reputation in operations, not press releases. They did not build a brand. They built a track record.

And when the hardest special forces operators that Russia ever produced sat down to assess the Western units they might face in combat, the SAS was the one that made them pause. That’s not propaganda. That’s professional respect from an adversary who understood exactly what they were looking at.

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