In January 2005, American soldiers arriving at a forward operating base in Iraq were given a simple briefing about the British operators they might encounter on the compound. Don’t look for them. Don’t follow them. Don’t ask questions. If you see men who don’t look like regular military, who carry weapons you don’t recognize, and who leave the base at hours that don’t make sense, you never saw them.

Those men were members of the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, and the Americans weren’t afraid of them. They just knew better than to get in their way. But here’s what makes the SAS truly remarkable. They weren’t built by a government committee or a Pentagon budget. They were built by a single man who broke every rule in the British military to make them exist.

And to understand how, we need to go back to 1941, to the deserts of North Africa, and to a man the Germans would come to call the Phantom Major. In the summer of 1941, the British were losing badly in North Africa. Raml’s Africa court was pushing them back toward Egypt, and every commando unit thrown at the Germans was getting chewed up.

But a young Scottish lieutenant named David Sterling saw the problem differently. Sterling believed small, highly mobile teams could slip behind enemy lines, destroy targets the Germans thought were safe, and disappear before dawn. The problem was getting anyone to listen. So Sterling did something that would define the Special Air Service forever.

He broke into British Middle East and Middle East headquarters in Cairo on crutches, recovering from a parachute accident. When guards spotted him and gave chase, he ducked into the first office he found and pitched his idea directly to the deputy chief of staff. It worked. Within weeks, Sterling had six officers and 60 men.

He called it L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade. The name was part of a deception to make the Germans think Britain had a massive airborne force in the region. In reality, it was barely a company. Their first operation was a disaster. 55 men parachuted behind German lines to attack Axis airfields. A violent storm scattered them across the desert. Only 22 made it back.

But Sterling adapted. He partnered with the long range desert group which could drive the Special Air Service known as the SAS across hundreds of miles of sand to within striking distance of their targets. The SAS would attack on foot at night, plant explosives on parked aircraft, and vanish before sunrise.

Over 15 months, Sterling’s unit destroyed more than 250 Axis aircraft on the ground, blew up dozens of supply dumps, and disabled hundreds of vehicles. Legendary Patty Maine personally destroyed more enemy planes than any Royal Air Force fighter ace. Field Marshall Montgomery reportedly said Sterling was quite mad, but in a war there is often a place for mad people.

The Germans nicknamed him the phantom major. In January 1943, they finally captured him. He made four escape attempts before ending up at the supposedly escape proof Culitz Castle. But what Sterling outlived his capture. The SAS fought across Europe was disbanded after the war and then was reconstituted. By the 1950s, the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment was a permanent fixture based at a secretive barracks in Heraford, and the way they selected their men became legendary in its own right.

Twice a year, soldiers from across the British military arrive at Sennybridge camp in Wales. For four weeks, they carry increasingly heavy loads across the Breen Beacons, navigating alone with a compass and a handdrawn map. No encouragement, no feedback, just the mountains and the clock. The first major test is the Fan Dance, a 24 km march over Penny Fan, the highest peak in the Beacons with a full combat load.

Candidates climb the mountain, descend the far side down a path called Jacob’s ladder, then turn around and do the entire route in reverse. The beacons have killed candidates during selection. The final test is called the long drag. 64 km carrying 55 lbs of equipment completed in under 20 hours alone. No established trails.

Former SAS Sergeant Andy McNab described his intake going from 220 candidates to 24 by the end of this phase alone. And that is just the beginning. Survivors face 14 more weeks of weapons, demolitions, and close quarters combat training. Then six weeks in the jungles of Brunai, then resistance to interrogation.

At the end, roughly 10% earned the beige beret and winged dagger badge. out of 200 men, maybe 20 make it. But on May 5th, 1980, the world got to see exactly what those 20 men were capable of. Six armed gunmen had stormed the Iranian embassy at Prince’s Gate in London, taking 26 hostages. For 6 days, police negotiated while the SAS quietly moved into a building next door, studying blueprints, lowering microphones down chimneys, and rehearsing their assault in a full-scale mockup at a nearby barracks.

On day six, the gunman executed a hostage and pushed his body out the front door. Prime Minister Thatcher authorized the assault immediately. Operation Nimrod began at 7:23 that evening. Roughly 30 SAS operators from red team and blue team stormed the building simultaneously, absailing from the roof, breaching ground floor windows, and clearing 56 rooms across six floors.

One operator got tangled in his rope and was burned when flames engulfed the facade. Another accidentally broke a window, alerting the gunman seconds early. None of it stopped them. 17 minutes later, five of the six gunmen were dead and 19 hostages were free. The entire operation played out on live television across Britain.

The one surviving gunman served 27 years in prison. The success of Operation Nimrod did something the SAS never wanted. It made them famous. Applications to join the regiment surged. Foreign governments lined up to request SAS counterterrorism training. And images of masked operators in black tactical gear became some of the most iconic military photographs in history.

If you’re finding this interesting, hit subscribe. I cover military history and special operations every week. The Iranian embassy siege made the SAS globally famous overnight, but the regiment’s most sustained combat performance was still two decades away. After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the SAS was assigned to Task Force Black, a joint Anglo-American Special Operations Unit based in Baghdad.

Working alongside Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 under General Stanley Mcristel, the SAS conducted nightly raids targeting al-Qaeda in Iraq. Mcrist’s concept was to hit the enemy faster than they could regenerate, strike a target, gather intelligence on site, analyze it immediately, and use whatever they found to identify the next target within hours. The SAS excelled at this.

Their decades of surveillance experience in Northern Ireland against the IRA made them uniquely suited to intelligence-driven urban warfare. Over 18 months beginning in 2007, Task Force Black captured roughly 3,500 suspected insurgents in Baghdad and killed several hundred more. Al-Qaeda bomb attacks dropped from 150 per month to approximately two.

General David Petraeus called the SAS performance phenomenal. Six SAS operators were killed during the campaign. 30 more were wounded. Intelligence gathered during SAS and Delta raids eventually led to the tracking and killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

In June 2006, the SAS had raided his safe houses multiple times, once finding eggs still cooking on the stove. They kept missing him by minutes. But each near miss produced more intelligence and eventually that intelligence caught up with him at a farmhouse northeast of Bakuba. Task Force Black also pulled off one of the quieter triumphs of the war when four humanitarian workers were kidnapped in Baghdad.

The SAS launched nearly 50 raids over several months, relentlessly chasing leads until they pinpointed the hostages in a house in western Baghdad. In March 2006, they rescued British activist Norman Keber and two Canadians without firing a single shot. And here is the part that ties the whole story together.

The Americans the Special Air Service fought alongside in Baghdad Delta Force only existed because of the SAS in the first place. Colonel Charlie Beckwith, who founded Delta Force in 1977, had served as an exchange officer with the 22nd SAS in the 1950s. He came home convinced America needed its own version, not just trainers, but a force of doers.

He spent nearly two decades fighting the Pentagon bureaucracy. And when Delta was finally created, its structure, selection process, and philosophy were modeled directly on the British regiment. Today, the SAS continues to operate in silence. The British government never comments on their operations. Their headquarters at Creden Hill remains one of the most restricted sites in the United Kingdom.

Special Forces units in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and dozens of other nations have all modeled their training and tactics on the SAS. The regiment regularly sends teams worldwide to train Allied forces, and demand for that expertise has only grown since the Iranian embassy siege. And at their barracks stands a memorial clock tower bearing the names of every soldier killed in action.

Those whose names appear are said to have failed to beat the clock. At the base of that tower is a verse from a poem called the golden journey to Samuran. We are the pilgrim’s master. We shall go always a little further. From 60 men in the North African desert to the most respected special forces unit on earth.

That is the SAS. That is why the Americans said do not look for them. And that is why the motto Davis Sterling chose for a unit nobody wanted still echoes around the world. Who dares wins.