In 2006, inside a bunker came the Death Star at Balad Air Base in Iraq, a British special air service officer stood in front of a room full of American special operators, Delta Force, SEAL Team 6, the most elite soldiers the United States had ever produced. They were used to long briefings, PowerPoint slides, intelligence summaries that could run for an hour.

The Americans settled in, expecting the same from the British. The SAS officer looked around the room, then said five words that reportedly left the Americans in stunned silence. [music] Stop talking. Start killing. That was the briefing. No slides, no lengthy analysis, [music] just a philosophy distilled into a sentence.

And within months, the partnership between the SAS and America’s Joint Special Operations Command would become the most lethal counterterrorism machine in the history of modern warfare. But to understand how a regiment of roughly 300 soldiers earned the right to walk into a room full of American special forces operators and command that kind of respect, you need to go back to a desert in North Africa, to a man so reckless that his own commanders wanted him gone.

[music] into a first mission so catastrophic that it should have ended the SAS before it even began. This is the story of the most dangerous military unit on Earth. [music] And it starts with a complete disaster. If you’re into stories like this, real operations, real units, no Hollywood, subscribe now because what the Special Air Service did next makes that briefing look calm.

July 1941, the North African desert. The British army was getting hammered by Raml’s Africa Corps. Morali was in the the [music] dirt and a young Scottish officer named David Sterling was lying in a hospital bed with both legs temporarily paralyzed after a parachute training accident. Sterling had been part of a commando unit called lay force and he had watched the British waste hundreds of men on bloated raiding operations that achieved almost nothing.

Massive planning, massive manpower, minimal results. The math did not work. Lying there unable to move, Sterling had nothing to do but think about a better way. His idea was radical. Instead of 600 men attacking a single target, send four or five men to attack a dozen targets simultaneously.

Tiny teams, no support, deep behind enemy lines, hit airfields, supply dumps, fuel depots, disappear before anyone knew you were there. The problem was that nobody wanted to hear it. Middle East headquarters despised maverick officers, and Sterling was the definition of one. He had been thrown out of Cambridge for drinking and gambling.

He had spent years climbing mountains and chasing adventure instead of building a career. His superiors thought he was a liability. But Sterling had one skill that mattered more than any of that. He was incredibly persuasive and he had connections. He managed to get his proposal in front of General Claude Aenlech, the commander-in-chief of Middle East forces, who saw the potential immediately.

The unit was given a deliberately misleading name, L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade. The name was part of an intelligence deception to make the Germans think there was an entire parachute brigade operating in the region. In reality, it was five officers and 60 men. Their first operation in November 1941 [music] was a catastrophe.

Operation squatter called for the new unit to parachute behind German lines and destroy enemy aircraft at three airfields in Libya. The night before the drop, a brutal sandstorm ripped across the desert. Visibility dropped to almost nothing. Winds gusted at speeds that made a parachute drop suicidal. Sterling and his men knew they should abort, but they also knew that if they did not go, Middle East headquarters would use it as an excuse to shut them down permanently.

The unit would be dissolved before completing a single mission. So they jumped anyway into the storm. It was a blood bath. Men were scattered across miles of open desert. Equipment was lost. parachutes were shredded by the wind. Of the 62 men who jumped that night, only 22 made it back alive. The rest were killed, injured, or captured by the Germans.

Not a single airfield was hit. By every measure, the SAS should have died that night. One mission, total failure, exactly the excuse the generals needed to pull the plug. [music] But that’s when something unexpected happened. A commander from the long range desert group, a unit that ran reconnaissance patrols deep in the Sahara, approached Sterling with a simple question.

Why are you parachuting in when we can drive you? It was such an obvious solution that it bordered on embarrassing, but it saved the SAS. Within weeks, Sterling and his surviving men were loaded onto LRDG trucks and driven directly to their targets. No parachutes, no drop zones, just a ride through the desert and a walk to the airfield fence.

The results were immediate and devastating. On their first raids with the LRDG in December 1941, small teams of SAS soldiers crept onto German and Italian airfields at night and attached bombs to dozens of aircraft. They destroyed more planes in a single evening than the Royal Air Force had managed in weeks of aerial combat.

Patty Maine, Sterling’s second in command and a former British Lions rugby player, personally destroyed so many aircraft that his tally exceeded that of any RAF fighter ace. Over the next 15 months, the SAS destroyed more than 250 Axis aircraft on the ground, blew up dozens of supply dumps, wrecked railways, and put hundreds of enemy vehicles out of action, all with a force that never numbered more than a few hundred men.

Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery reportedly said of Sterling, “The boy is quite mad. Quite quite mad. But in war, there is often a place for mad people.” In January 1943, Sterling was captured in Tunisia. He spent the rest of the war in a series of prison camps, including Cold’s Castle, where he made multiple escape attempts.

But the SAS continued without him under Patty Maine, fighting through Sicily, Italy, France, and eventually into Germany itself. When the war ended, the SAS was disbanded. The generals who had always resented the unit finally got their wish. But here’s what those generals didn’t anticipate.

The idea was too good to die. In 1947, the SAS was quietly reformed as a reserve unit. In 1950, during the Malayan emergency, a squadron was deployed to the jungles of Southeast Asia to fight communist insurgents. They called themselves the Malayan Scouts and they proved that the SAS concept worked just as well in dense tropical jungle as it did in the open desert.

By 1952, the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment was formally established as part of the regular British Army. And this is where the story crosses the Atlantic. In 1962, a hard charging American special forces captain named Charlie Beckwith arrived in England on an exchange program with the Special Air Service, SAS.

Charlie Beckwith was tough. He’d fought in Korea. He’d operated in Laos on covert missions. He thought he’d already seen the best the military had to offer. [music] The SAS changed his mind completely. What struck Beck with wasn’t just the physical training, although that was punishing. It was the mindset. SAS soldiers were expected to operate in tiny teams, completely self-sufficient for weeks at a time.

They did not need a battalion commander to tell them what to do. They were trained to think, adapt, and make lethal decisions on their own. Beckwith later wrote that the American approach at the time was to train teachers, men who could instruct foreign armies in guerrilla warfare. What the SAS trained were doers, soldiers who could execute the most dangerous missions in the world with no backup and no excuses.

When Beckwith returned to the United States, he submitted a detailed report arguing that the United States Army desperately needed an SAS type unit, a small elite force trained for direct action, counterterrorism, and hostage rescue. The Army brass told him no and kept telling him no for the next 15 years.

Meanwhile, in Malaya, Beckwith contracted leptosperosis so severe that doctors gave him three weeks to live. He survived. In Vietnam, he was shot in the abdomen by a 50 caliber round, a bullet normally used against vehicles and aircraft. Doctors again told him he would not make it. He survived that, too.

And every time he recovered, he went right back to arguing for his SAS type unit. Finally, in the mid 1970s, as international terrorism exploded across Europe and the Middle East, the Pentagon realized Beckwith had been right all along. On November 19th, 1977, the first special forces operational detachment Delta was formally established at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Delta Force, modeled directly on the British SAS, right down to the selection process, the squadron structure, and the obsessive focus on individual competence. The SAS had effectively fathered America America’s premier counterterrorism unit and within 3 years the bomb between those two units would be tested on live television.

On April 30th, 1980, six armed men stormed the Iranian embassy at Prince’s Gate in London. They were Iranian Arab separatists demanding the release of political prisoners. They took 26 hostages, including embassy staff, visitors, and a police officer named Trevor Lockach. For 5 days, the Metropolitan Police negotiated.

Food was sent in. Some hostages were released in exchange for minor concessions. Behind the scenes, MI5 specialists lowered microphones down the embassy’s chimneys to listen to every word the gunmen were saying. And at a barracks nearby, the SAS counterrevolutionary warfare team rehearsed the assault plan over and over.

The SAS studied blueprints of the building. They consulted with the embassy janitor. They sent teams onto the roof at night to check entry points. They built a fullscale replica of the embassy interior and practiced until they could clear every room blindfolded. Between rehearsals, the soldiers watched the snooker championships on television.

There was nothing else to do but wait. On the sixth day, the gunmen’s patience shattered. They shot a hostage, Abas Lavasani, the embassy’s press atache, and threw his body out the front door. [music] That was the line. British policy was explicit. Force would not be used unless hostages were killed or in [music] imminent danger of being killed.

The gunman had just crossed that threshold themselves. The home secretary personally authorized the use of force. Control of the situation passed from the Metropolitan Police to the Ministry of Defense. The SAS were [music] ordered to go in. At 7:23 in the evening on May 5th, 1980, while a police negotiator kept the lead gunman on the phone, the SAS assault teams moved to their start positions.

[music] An explosive charge detonated above the skylight on the second floor. Electrical power to the building was cut. Simultaneously, blackclad figures began absailing down the rear of the building. One trooper’s boot smashed through a window, alerting the gunmen inside. Another soldier got tangled in his rapelling rope and hung suspended against the [music] wall as flames erupted around him from stun grenades.

His teammates had to proceed without him. On live television, millions of viewers watched the assault unfold in real time. It was the first time most British citizens had ever seen the SAS in action. [music] Inside the embassy, the troopers moved room to room with heckler and coke, submachine guns, and stun grenades.

In 17 minutes, it was over. Five of the six gunmen were dead. 19 hostages were rescued alive. One hostage had been killed by the gunman during the assault. Operation Nimrod was declared an almost unqualified success. Margaret Thatcher was congratulated by world leaders. The images of mass soldiers in black storming a burning building became iconic.

For the SAS, it was a double-edged achievement. The regiment that had always operated in silence was suddenly the most famous military unit in Britain. Applications to join flooded in. Foreign governments begged for training. The SAS motto, who dares wins, became part of the national vocabulary.

Some senior members saw this attention as a disaster. The SAS was never meant to operate in the spotlight. Their strength had always been anonymity, but the world had noticed, and it would never stop watching. Through the 1980s, the SAS fought in the Faulland’s war, launched controversial operations in Northern Ireland, and quietly expanded its global counterterrorism role.

But the real test of the modern SAS came in a theater that would push them further than any mission since World [music] War II. Iraq. During the 1991 Gulf War, the SAS returned to the desert for the first time since their founding. [music] Their mission was to hunt Scud missile launchers in western Iraq.

Saddam Hussein was firing Scuds at Israel. And if Israel retaliated, the entire Arab coalition against Iraq would collapse. The US Air Force flew hundreds of sorties trying to find the launchers from the air. They could not find a single [music] one. The Iraqis were hiding them under bridges in barns even inside school buses.

Sir Peter de Labilier, a former SAS officer now commanding [music] British forces in the the Gulf, convinced a deeply skeptical American general named Norman Schwartzkov that only boots on the ground could find the Scuds. Schwartzkov famously questioned what the SAS could do that an F-16 could not. Deabilier persuaded him to find out.

SAS fighting columns drove deep into the Iraqi desert in heavily armed Land Rovers and support trucks. They traveled by night and hid under camouflage nets by day using motorcycle outr rididers to scout ahead. When they found communication installations linked to the Scuds, they called in air strikes. When the situation demanded, they assaulted the targets themselves.

Not every mission went to plan. The eight-man Bravo 20 patrol was compromised by a goat herder hunted across the desert by Iraqi forces and torn apart. Three men died, four were captured. Only one, a trooper named Chris Ryan, managed to escape, walking nearly 200 miles through the desert to Syria in one of the longest escape and evasion marches in military history.

Bravo 20 became the most famous SAS disaster since Operation Squatter. Books were written, films were made, but the broader Scud hunting campaign was a strategic success. The SAS patrol suppressed the Scud launches long enough to keep Israel out of the war. After September 11th, 2001, the SAS deployed to Afghanistan and carried out Operation Trent, the largest operation in the regiment’s history, including its first wartime high alitude parachute jump since World War II.

But it was the return to Iraq in 2003 that would cement the SAS reputation among the world’s special forces community in a way that nothing else had before. Task Force Black. When the invasion began, the SAS were designated Task Force 14 and tasked with securing Western Iraq and hunting weapons of mass destruction.

They seized airfields, destroyed Iraqi positions, and cleared hundreds of miles of highway. They lost no soldiers during the invasion itself. But the real war started afterward. As Iraq descended into insurgency, Baghdad became the most dangerous city on Earth. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, led by the psychopathic Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, was detonating car bombs across the city.

Up to 150 explosions per month. Thousands of civilians died. The SAS squadron based in Baghdad, now operating as Task Force Black, from a compound known as the station inside the Green Zone, began executing nightly raids against the insurgent networks. Their operational process was called find, fix, finish, find the target, fix their location, finish the operation.

In early 2006, everything changed. The SAS began Operation Traction, a secret integration into the American Joint Special Operations Command under General Stanley Mc Crystal. Senior SAS officers were deployed to the JSOC headquarters at Ballad Air Base. The two forces were now, as one officer described it, joined at the hip. This was unprecedented.

The SAS had always operated independently. Joining forces with JSOC meant sharing intelligence, coordinating raids, and trusting American operators with the most sensitive British military secrets. It also meant an operational tempo that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.

Task Force Black was conducting raids almost every single nightly. They would hit a target compound, collect every scrap of intelligence, phones, laptops, documents, anything, rush it back to analysts, and use whatever they found to identify the next target. Sometimes they would hit two or three compounds in a single night.

Each raid building on the intelligence from the last. This was the environment where the legendary cross briefing happened, where a British officer told a room of American special operators to stop talking and start killing. It was not arrogance. It was the distilled philosophy of a unit that had been doing this since 1941.

Move fast, hit hard, let the results speak. In April 2006, the SAS launched Operation Larchwood 4. [music] B Squadron raided a series of al-Qaeda safe houses in what were called the Baghdad Belts, the ring of towns surrounding the capital. [music] The intelligence they captured during those raids led coalition forces directly to Abu Musab al- Zarqawi.

On June 7th, 2006, Zarqawi was tracked to a farmhouse near the village of Hibhib [music] northeast of Bakuba. Delta Force operators prepared to assault the safe house. But when a helicopter suffered engine failure, JSOC called in an AR strike instead. Two F16 bombs struck the building. Zarqawi was found alive in the rubble but died shortly after from his injuries.

The SAS had provided the critical intelligence threat. Delta Force operators secured the scene. It was the joint task force at its most effective. But the killing of Zarui didn’t end the violence. The insurgency adapted. New leaders emerged. The nightly raids continued. According to journalist Shaun Raymond of the Telegraph, Task Force Black removed or killed approximately 3,500 insurgents in Baghdad before 2008.

The result was measurable and dramatic. Monthly bombings in the city dropped from roughly 150 to just two. A single SAS squadron rarely numbering more than 60 operators working alongside Delta Force and the 75th Ranger Regiment had fundamentally altered the course of the war in Baghdad. The price was steep.

SAS soldiers were wounded in firefights, ambushes, and vehicle attacks throughout the campaign. Multiple operators were killed. The toll on the men who survived conducting raids night after night, month after month in the most dangerous urban environment on the planet is still being measured.

Today, the names of every SAS soldier who has died on duty are inscribed on the regimental clock tower at Sterling Lines, the regiment’s headquarters in Credinhill, Heraffordshire. Those whose names appear are said to have failed to beat the clock. Inscribed on the base of the tower is a verse from a poem by James Elroy Flecker.

It reads, “We are the pilgrim’s master. We shall go always a little further. It may be beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow across that angry or that glimmering sea.” The British SAS did not just create the blueprint for modern special forces. They influenced the founding of Delta Force, Seal Team 6, the Australian SASR, and virtually every elite counterterrorism unit in the Western world.

Their selection process is considered the standard against which all others are measured. Their operational philosophy, small team mindset, maximum violence, zero fanfare has been copied by militaries across the globe. But what makes the SAS truly different is not the training or the weapons or the missions. It is the culture.

A culture that began with a reckless Scottish officer lying in a hospital bed in the desert, [music] scribbling plans on a notepad, convinced he could win a war with 60 men and a willingness to do things that no one else would consider sane. David Sterling was asked once what made the SAS work. He said it was simple.

Every subunit of four or five men could tackle a full target area on their own. And if they failed, it was more than compensated by the fact that with 60 men, they could attack a dozen targets at once. [music] 85 years later, the principle has not changed. Small teams, massive impact, no publicity, no excuses.

Who dares [music] wins. If you want to see how Delta Force was built from the ground up using the SAS blueprint, [music] subscribe.