Special Force

The Untold Story of 22nd Special Air Service Regiment (SAS)

Alastair MacKenzie

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781848850712
• eBook ISBN: 9780857730091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The exploits of the British Army's elite 22nd Special Air Service Regiment - the regiment of the SAS that forms part of the Regular army - are shrouded in mystery and myths abound about its members. But what is the truth behind the public facade of clinical professionalism? How has such a small regiment attracted so many weighty legends? And what is the purpose of the SAS in the 21st century? "Special Force" provides an original and unusually critical overview of the activities of the SAS from the Malayan Emergency of 1950 to the present day. In the context of a detailed and often controversial analysis of the post-war activities of the Regiment, MacKenzie establishes that the Regiment's almost legendary professional competence is often not backed up by reality. Far from being part of a structured deployment of strategic military assets, MacKenzie argues that the use of the SAS in recent years has been primarily driven by the 'entrepreneurial' actions of a few SAS commanding officers. "Special Force" not only offers a revelatory history of the SAS in the modern period, it is also a disturbing expose of the truth behind the myth.
It will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the British military - past, present and future.

 

PART ONE

BACKGROUND

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

The British Government maintains a requirement for a small specialist force to be used in direct or indirect military actions focused on strategic or operational objectives. This force requires combinations of trained specialised personnel, equipment and tactics that exceed the routine capabilities of conventional military forces. The special operations carried out by the force are politically sensitive, so only the most proficient forces can be deployed in order to avoid detection and possible failure resulting in damage to British national interests and reputation.

Since 1945 there have been two organisations providing the nation with a special forces ability. The first and larger of the two is an Army-based organisation, and the one upon which this book is based, the SAS. The other organisation is a Royal Navy organisation based upon the Royal Marines and known as the Special Boat Service (SBS).¹ Until very recently, the SBS has had little operational involvement in special forces operations and therefore their activities are not assessed in any detail in this study.

In this book the involvement of the SAS as part of UK defence and foreign policy from 1950 to 2000 is reviewed and assessed in order to establish how it has fitted into the UK’s overall national strategy during this period and how effective its contribution has been.

The book examines the activities of the SAS from the end of the Second World War up until the start of the twenty-first century and covers the modern development of the SAS from its almost accidental re-birth at the end of the war to the present, where the SAS has been used in every deployment of British military forces. I examine just how effective the SAS has been in its campaigns in Malaya, South Arabia, Oman, Borneo, Oman, the Falklands, the Gulf War, Northern Ireland and in international operations (IO) such as Bosnia, Kosovo and Sierra Leone.

The role of British special forces has never been fully clarified throughout the post-war period under review. After 1945 it was difficult to pin down the political and the military leaders and get them to specify what special forces were actually for. As this all-important specification was ignored, it left the special forces with conundrums of strategy and operations, and clearly the procurement of weapons and the formulation of training policies were a very hazardous process. British strategy after 1945 was Janus-faced, and this remained the case until the late 1980s with the dual areas of possible or real commitments to the European continent and the defence of, or retreat from, Empire.²

Even in periods of prolonged peacetime no sustained or convincing British special forces philosophy has emerged. This is one of the striking features of the period reviewed. During these years the British Army, for the first time in its history, maintained a commitment to the defence of continental Europe. Simultaneously, the British Army waged numerous colonial and ‘low intensity’ operations during its retreat from the Empire. In conducting its postcolonial campaigns, the Army fell back on its old ‘small wars’ traditions – traditions which did not include the use of special forces. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that no coherent view of special forces application evolved.

There has been little strategic analysis of the activities of the SAS since the end of the Second World War; nor has there been any analysis of their effectiveness, or otherwise, when they have been deployed. Professor Colin Gray considers that ‘the literature on SAS is vast but generally arid’, adding:

There is a great deal of tactical doctrine for Special Forces but virtually no relevant strategic theory or history.³

As Gray has stated, there are numerous publications describing in detail the heroic activities of participant authors in the various SAS deployments that have taken place, worldwide, since the end of the Second World War. As he also states, there are few publications that provide any academic and credible analysis of the effectiveness of post-war SAS operations. The question is raised of how effective the SAS has been in operations since the end of the Second World War, and whether it remains an effective political and/or military tool. This leads to the separate question of whether, with the changing face of warfare, the SAS is going to be a necessary requirement for the future.

Gray provides clarity to the oft-overlooked relationship between special forces operations and foreign policy aspirations:

It is useful to define special operations as being conducted ‘in support of foreign policy’. Special operations forces are a national grand-strategic asset; they are a tool of statecraft that can be employed quite surgically in support of diplomacy, of foreign assistance (of several kinds) as a vital adjunct to regular military forces, or as an independent weapon.⁴

British Post-War Foreign and Defence Policy

The maintenance of great power status was of paramount importance to British leaders immediately after the Second World War. At the root of Britain’s aim of upholding its great power status, and central to an understanding of the nature of the world order being constructed, lay a desire to use the world economic resources for its own benefit. Any general withdrawal by the United Kingdom on political and military fronts would have an adverse effect on its economic position. While British foreign policy in the post-war period until the collapse of the Soviet Union is invariably portrayed by commentators as responses to Soviet designs and as part of the so-called Cold War, the primary threats to Britain’s interest in the Third World arose from independent nationalist movements, from within states.

The British Army continued to be responsible for imperial policing after the end of the Second World War. During 1950–2000, the period under review, it was involved in numerous military operations; peacekeeping in Palestine at the end of the UN mandate; Korea; the Malayan Emergency; Suez; the EOKA terrorist campaign in Cyprus; the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya; withdrawal from Aden; the Confrontation in Borneo; the Sultanate of Oman; the Falklands War; the first Gulf War; Bosnia; and Yugoslavia.

At the end of the Second World War there was no lack of British military commitments. The liquidation of occupation responsibilities took time and the process was not finally completed until the mid-1950s. In the Middle East, the British presence was an elaborate and expensive one. The great Suez base was the cause of friction with the Egyptians; the Palestinian mandate, which was originally acquired in part for strategic reasons, had become an arena in which the British were caught in the crossfire between Jew and Arab.

Neither the Brussels Treaty of 1948 nor the establishment of NATO on 4 April 1949 had any radical effect upon British defence policy,⁵ but these arrangements had some influence on NATO planning. Strategic bombing would be the responsibility of the United States, as the only Western nuclear power, and the only possessor of modern long-range bombers. The European states, and especially France, would provide the bulk of the ground forces.

The paramount considerations in guiding British defence policy in 1955 were a desire to create an effective nuclear capability; the belief that in Europe the Soviet threat might be lessening but that elsewhere, and especially in the Middle East, it might increase; and the conviction that the current defence programme was still beyond the nation’s resources.

The era in which Britain engaged unilaterally in military interventions, colonial wars and coups to pursue its first-order objectives largely passed in the 1960s. Since then the priorities have been pursued chiefly by lending diplomatic, and sometimes material, support to the foreign policy and aggression, abroad, of the United States. The decline of Britain’s global power was evidenced above all in the Middle East: in the failed invasion of Egypt in 1956 and, as a consequence of budgetary pressures at home, in the military withdrawal from the Gulf in 1971.

Our most painful experience of the country’s reduced circumstances was the failure of the Suez expedition in 1956. This was the result of political and economic weakness rather than military failure, because the Government withdrew a victorious force from the Canal Zone in response to a ‘run on the pound’ encouraged by the US Government. Whatever the details of this defeat, however, it entered the British soul and distorted our perspective on Britain’s place in the world. We developed what might be called the ‘Suez Syndrome’: having previously exaggerated our power, we now exaggerated our impotence.⁶

Though Britain retained a foothold in the region to maintain close relationships with one important oil producer, Kuwait, and traditionally close allies, Oman and Jordan, the Western ability to control events in the Middle East lay primarily with the United States.

The break-up of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe shifted the focus of attention to Germany. Triumphs like the successful war to regain the Falklands had made it momentarily possible to believe in a return to Britain’s role of the late 1940s and early 1950s. However, in 1989 Britain was once again seen for what she was, a middle-ranking European state forced by her geographic position and her economic problems to sit on the sidelines.

Foreign policy is not made in a political vacuum but is shaped by domestic factors (such as public opinion), globalising pressures (such as communications technologies), integrative tendencies (especially within the European Union) and transnational forces (such as lobbying from NGOs). The logic underlying the UK’s foreign policy process, however, has changed remarkably little over the past century.⁷

Britain’s whole defence position in the 1990s reflected confusion about her future world role. Britain’s chief structural weaknesses stem from the fact that the United Kingdom is small in area and densely populated, and that her share of mineral resources is severely limited both quantitatively and qualitatively. There is insufficient arable land to feed more than approximately half the population and the only substantial domestic source of energy is coal in an age which gives priority to petroleum. Britain has some domestic sources of iron but hardly any of the other important minerals. The well-known consequences of these and other shortages is the overwhelming importance of foreign trade to her economic prosperity with all that extensive foreign trade necessarily implies: fragility of the economy as a whole, a chronic and probably in-eradicable balance of payments problems, and a very high degree of governmental sensitivity to the economic aspects of policy questions, both domestic and external, in all spheres of administration.

Defence planning in the 1990s could only respond to the notion of cuts and not to clear strategic initiatives. By 2000 Britain occupied a position in the world very different from that in 1945. The Empire had gone and she had accepted the inevitable and entered Europe but still seemed the least enthusiastic member of the union, even under the ‘new’ Labour Government. Despite the long years of imperial decline, Britain was still an important player on the world scene, lying at the centre of several interlocking groupings of nations. She was America’s closest partner in NATO, one of the big four in the European Union, a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council and still the mother of the Commonwealth. She was a genuinely world-orientated country in a way that no other Europe in-state could claim to be. A remarkable revival of the British economy in the late twentieth century also enhanced her importance. By 2000 she was once again the fourth largest economy in the world, having overtaken France. Perhaps at long last the United Kingdom had recovered from those devastating effects of the Second World War.

So how is British defence policy made? The first thing that should be acknowledged is that it is extremely difficult to define defence policy. It is an aspect of security policy, intimately linked – and becoming even more intimately linked – with diplomatic and other general government policies. British defence policy is found in the twin classic principles of the balance of power and collective security. For a small country such as the United Kingdom there can be no realistic alternative to collective security. The political and economic survival of the United Kingdom is closely bound up with those of her allies in Europe and North America, and its continued security freedom cannot be seen in isolation.

British defence policy, not surprisingly, revolves around the defence of the UK and its dependent territories; major alliance activities to resist aggression; and then a range of possibilities from a disaster relief through peacekeeping and peace enforcement, to the possibility of an engagement like the first Gulf War, which could require early action. These are all likely to require mobility and the ability to sustain British forces for months rather than weeks. They are unlikely to require the UK to deploy any significant amount of specific kinds of heavy forces. As regards ground forces, either the essential needs will be for infantry with some combat support and combat service support, or a judgement about what the UK needs in order to be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Appendices
• PART ONE – BACKGROUND
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 The Origins of the SAS
• Chapter 3 The Structure and Management of the SAS
• PART TWO – IMPERIAL POLICING
• Chapter 4 Malayan ‘Emergency’, 1948–1960
• Chapter 5 Counter-Insurgency in the Mountains and the Desert
• Chapter 6 Radfan and Aden
• Chapter 7 Return to the Jungle: Borneo – the Confrontation
• Chapter 8 Back to the Desert: Oman – Operation Storm – the Dhofar War
• PART THREE – CONVENTIONAL WARS
• Chapter 9 The Falklands War: Operation CORPORATE (19 May–14 June 1982)
• Chapter 10 The Gulf War: Operation GRANBY (1990–1991)
• PART FOUR – COUNTERING TERRORISM, AND INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN OPERATIONS
• Chapter 11 Northern Ireland
• Chapter 12 International Terrorism
• Chapter 13 Support for International Humanitarian Operations/Peacekeeping Operations
• PART FIVE – CONCLUSION
• Chapter 14 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography