In 1941, a Scottish lieutenant lay in a hospital bed in Cairo with a pair of broken legs and an idea that every senior officer in the British Army thought was insane. His name was David Sterling. He was 25 years old, 6’5, and he had just botched an unauthorized parachute jump that left him partially paralyzed from the waist down.

Most people in his position would have focused on learning to walk again. Sterling was focused on something else entirely. He had been watching the British military fumble one commando raid after another across the North African desert. And he was convinced there was a better way. Small teams, five or six men, no backup, no reinforcements, no support, just a handful of soldiers sneaking behind enemy lines in the dark and blowing up everything they could find.

There was just one problem. Nobody with the authority to approve this plan wanted to hear it. So Sterling did what any reasonable person would do. He snuck out of the hospital, hobbled past the guards at Middle East Command Headquarters on crutches, and talked his way into the office of the deputy chief of staff.

He pitched his idea on the spot without an appointment, without authorization, and without the ability to walk properly. And somehow it worked. The British Army gave this injured, unauthorized lieutenant 66 men and told him to prove it. They named his unit L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade. A deliberate deception designed to trick the Germans into thinking a full parachute regiment was operating in North Africa.

What happened next would change warfare forever. But first, it almost ended in total disaster. If you enjoy videos like this, please like, subscribe, and turn on notifications. It really helps the channel. The SAS launched their first mission in November 1941, dropping by parachute into the Libyan desert in the middle of a storm.

German resistance was fierce. The weather was catastrophic. Of the 55 men who jumped, only 22 made it back alive. More than half the unit was gone before they had accomplished a single objective. Most commanders would have shut it down right there. Sterling refused. One month later, he changed the approach entirely.

Instead of parachuting in, the SAS hitched rides with the long range desert group, the original desert raiders, who drove them right up to enemy airfields under cover of darkness. And then the destruction began. Over the next 15 months, Sterling’s teams destroyed more than 250 Axis aircraft on the ground.

That was more than the Royal Air Force managed to shoot down in the same period. They wrecked dozens of supply dumps, tore up railways, cut telecommunications, and put hundreds of enemy vehicles out of commission. Field Marshall Raml, the legendary desert fox, was so frustrated by these ghost raiders that he assigned a special unit solely to hunting down Sterling.

He called him the Phantom Major. The Germans finally caught Sterling in Tunisia in January 1943. He tried to escape four times. The last time they sent him to Cold’s Castle, one of the most secure prisoner of war camps in Europe. He stayed there until the war ended. But the unit he built did not die with his capture.

His second in command, a former British Lions rugby player named Patty Maine, took over and led the SAS through Sicily, Italy, France, and into Germany itself. By D-Day, the SAS had expanded into a full brigade with British, French, and Belgian regiments conducting operations behind enemy lines across occupied Europe.

And then, incredibly, the British government disbanded them. The war was over. Nobody needed commandos anymore. The SAS ceased to exist in 1945. But here is the thing about an idea that works. It does not stay dead for long. By 1950, a communist insurgency was tearing through the jungles of Malaya and the British military suddenly realized they needed exactly the kind of small team behind the lines capability they had just thrown away.

The SAS was reformed as the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment based in Heraford and they have been active ever since. What makes the modern SAS different from every other special forces unit in in the world starts with how they choose their people. The selection process lasts roughly 5 months and it has an approximately 90% failure rate.

Out of every 200 candidates who show up at the Brecon Beacons in South Wales, only about 25 will earn the beige beret and the winged dagger badge. The first phase is called endurance. For three weeks, candidates march alone across the Breen beacons carrying progressively heavier packs.

No encouragement, no criticism, no information about how well you are doing. Just a map, a compass, a rifle, and a Bergen rucks sack that gets heavier every day. The terrain is brutal. The weather in South Wales is worse. Candidates have died during this phase. The climax is the long drag. A 40-mile march across the mountains carrying 55 lbs of gear completed in under 20 hours.

You are completely alone. Nobody tells you if you passed. Those who survive the hills move on to jungle training, usually in Bise or Brunai, where four man patrols learn to operate for weeks behind enemy lines in dense rainforest. After that comes advanced weapons, demolitions, and combat driving.

Then the final phase, the one nobody talks about willingly, escape, evasion, and resistance to interrogation. Candidates are released into the countryside dressed in oversized World War II gray coats, hunted by a dedicated pursuit force, and when caught, subjected to days of psychological interrogation. The SAS wants to know one thing.

Can you keep your mouth shut when everything inside you is screaming to talk? The men who pass all four phases earn earn the right to call themselves blades. What they have proven is that they can think, navigate, survive, and endure alone in the worst conditions imaginable when nobody is coming to help.

And for decades, almost nobody outside the military knew any of this existed. The SAS operated in the shadows. Malaya, Omen, Borneo, Northern Ireland, all classified, all deniable. That changed on a single evening in May 1980. On April 30th, six armed men stormed the Iranian embassy on Prince’s Gate in London and took 26 people hostage.

They were members of an Arab separatist group demanding the release of prisoners in Iran. For 5 days, Metropolitan Police negotiators talked, stalled, and bought time while MI5 technicians lowered microphones down the building’s chimneys. Behind the walls of a neighboring building, B squadron of the 22nd SAS regiment was building a full-scale replica of the embassy interior, rehearsing entry points and waiting for the order that everyone knew was coming.

On the sixth day, the terrorist shot a hostage named Abbas Lavasani and threw his body out the front door. The British government’s threshold had been crossed. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher transferred operational control from the police to the military. The SAS was ordered to go in. At 7:23 in the evening, Operation Nimrod began.

Roughly 30 SAS operators assaulted the embassy from the roof, the windows, and the ground floor simultaneously. One trooper got tangled in his Absale rope and was badly burned by flames from a fire inside the building. Another broke a window with his boot, alerting the terrorists seconds early. Nothing went exactly according to plan. It didn’t matter.

In 17 minutes, 19 hostages were freed. Five of the six terrorists were killed and the surviving gunman was pulled from among the hostages by SAS operators who identified him by the smell of gunpowder on his hands. The whole thing played out on live television. Every camera in London was already pointed at Prince at Prince’s gate.

Millions of people watched shadowy figures in black assault suits and gas masks repelling down the building and smashing through windows. The images became iconic overnight. The SAS had just performed the most publicized hostage rescue in history, and they did it in 17 minutes.

The regiment had never been famous before. After May 5th, 1980, they would never be anonymous again. But the real impact of operation Nimrod happened far from the cameras. Intelligence agencies and military planners around the world watched those 17 minutes and immediately started asking the same question. How do we build something like that? Colonel Charlie Beckwith of the United States Army had actually spent time with the SAS on an exchange program back in 1962.

He had been trying to convince the Pentagon to create an American equivalent for over a decade. After operation Nimrod, the funding and political will materialized almost overnight. Delta Force, which Beckwith had activated in 1977, was directly modeled on SAS structure, training methods, and operational philosophy.

Even their close quarters training facility, the House of Horrors, was copied from the SAS killing house in Heraford. Israel’s Sierra Matka had been modeled on the uh on the SAS since its founding in 1957 and openly adopted the SAS motto, who dares wins. Australia and New Zealand built their own SAS regiments using British training methods.

Dozens of countries from Jordan to Colombia sent military delegations to Heraford asking for help building their special operations capabilities. Every major special forces unit created in the last 50 years traces its DNA back to Heraford. And that includes one unit you wouldn’t expect. In 2013, Russia established the KSSO, their special operations forces command, and they modeled it directly on the British SAS, the same Russia that had spent the entire Cold War trying to figure out how to defeat them.

If you’re finding this valuable, hit subscribe. I cover military history and elite forces every week. Now, to understand why Russia was so fixated on the SAS specifically, you need to understand what the SAS did after Operation Nimrod. Two years later, Argentina invaded the Faulland Islands, a British territory 8,000 mi from London.

The British assembled a naval task force and sent it south. D Squadron of the 22nd SAS was on board. On the night of May 14th, 1982, 45 SAS operators were flown by helicopter to Pebble Island, where the Argentine Air Force had established a forward operating base for ground attack aircraft. Those planes could have wre havoc on the British amphibious landing planned for San Carlos Bay a week later.

The SAS had to eliminate them. What happened next was almost a perfect echo of David Sterling’s original desert raids 40 years earlier. The SAS stormed the airirstrip under cover of darkness, planted explosives on every aircraft they could reach, and called in naval gunfire from the destroyer HMS Gamorgan. Within 30 minutes, 11 Argentine aircraft were burning on the ground.

Six Pukaras, four mentors, and a sky van transport were destroyed. That was half the para fleet on the islands. Two SAS operators were lightly injured. None were killed. The regiment’s founding mission, destroying enemy aircraft on the ground behind enemy lines, was still their specialty four decades later.

Then came the Gulf War in 1991 and the SAS operation that became the most famous behind enemy lines mission since World War II. When Iraq launched Scud missiles at Israel in the opening days of the war, the coalition faced a crisis. If Israel retaliated, the Arab members of the coalition would likely pull out.

The Scud launchers had to be found and destroyed, and satellite reconnaissance could not locate them. The job fell to the SAS. A and D squadrons drove deep into the Iraqi desert in heavily armed Land Rover columns, hunting Scud launchers across hundreds of miles of hostile territory. They stayed inside Iraq for the duration of the war, destroying launchers, supply dumps, and communication facilities.

Their firepower was astonishing. Each Land Rover mounted a 50 caliber heavy machine gun with additional weapons including generalpurpose machine guns, 40mm grenade launchers, and Milan anti-tank missiles. But it was an eight-man foot patrol from B Squadron that captured the world’s attention.

Call sign bravo 20 commanded by a sergeant riding under the name Andy McNab was inserted by helicopter deep behind Iraqi lines to locate Scud launchers along a main supply route between Baghdad and northwestern Iraq. Almost immediately everything went wrong. The patrol discovered far more enemy troops than intelligence had predicted.

Their radio malfunctioned. A young shepherd stumbled onto their position and the patrol was compromised. What followed was a desperate running battle and escape attempt across the Iraqi desert toward the Syrian border in freezing winter conditions. Of the eight men, three died. One was killed in a firefight.

Two succumb to hypothermia during the escape. Four were captured and endured weeks of brutal interrogation and torture in Iraqi prisons. Only one man riding under the name Chris Ryan made it out, walking over 120 kilometers alone through the desert to reach Syria on foot.

Bravo 20 became the most heavily decorated British patrol since the Boore War. McNab received the Distinguished Conduct Medal. Ryan received the Military Medal. The story became an international bestseller that introduced millions of civilians to the reality of SAS operations for the first time. General Norman Schwarzkoff, the coalition commander, personally thanked the SAS for their contribution.

The regiment received 55 medals for gallantry and meritorious service from the Gulf campaign alone. So why out of all the Western Special Forces units did Russian Spettznaz commanders maintain a standing intelligence requirement specifically on the SAS? During the Cold War, Spettznaz GRU had one primary mission above all others.

In the event of a third world war, they were tasked with infiltrating behind NATO lines and destroying tactical nuclear weapons before those weapons could be used against advancing Soviet forces. That was the entire reason the GRU created its own special operations brigades beginning in 1962.

The force most likely to detect, intercept, and kill those Spettznas teams in Western Europe was the SAS. The regiment had spent decades perfecting exactly the kind of counter infiltration, longrange surveillance, and behind the lines operations that would be needed to stop Spettzn’s reconnaissance and sabotage missions.

But it went deeper than the Cold War chessboard. Operation Nimrod demonstrated hostage rescue and close quarters combat capabilities that Spettznaz simply had not matched. When the Soviets eventually created their own counterterrorism units, including Alpha Group in 1974, they studied SAS methods extensively.

The Moscow theater siege in 2002 where Spettznaz pumped fentinyl gas into a building before storming it and 130 hostages died from gas inhalation. was a grim contrast to the precision of Prince’s Gate. The SAS also trained foreign forces that consistently fought against Sovietbacked insurgencies and proxy armies around the world from Omen to Colombia to Southeast Asia.

Every time Moscow supported a guerilla movement, the odds were good that SAS advisers were on the other side, teaching local forces the counterinsurgency tactics that Sterling’s men had pioneered decades earlier. The SAS represented something Spetzna’s commanders recognized and respected.

not just a fighting force, but a system, a way of selecting, training, and deploying small teams that consistently produced results far beyond what their numbers suggested possible. From 66 men in the North African desert to the template for every elite unit on the planet, the Russians studied many Western units, they feared the SAS.

And here’s the part that matters. Decades later, when Russia finally decided to modernize its own special operations, they did not model the KSSO on Delta Force or the SEALs or [music] any of the flashier American units. They modeled it on the SAS, the same regiment that David Sterling built from a hospital bed with broken legs, a stolen appointment, and 66 volunteers who nobody thought would survive their first mission.

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