The Yanks’ General Said The SAS Was Useless. The SAS Saved His War — The Gulf War.
The Yanks general said the SAS was useless. The SAS saved his war. The Gulf War. Chapter 1. The general who didn’t believe in them. What the hell can the SAS do that an F-16 can’t? That was the question. General H. Norman Schwarz Cop, four-star commander of United States Central Command, the most powerful military officer in the Gulf, said it out loud in a briefing room in front of his own staff.
When a British liaison officer first proposed deploying SAS fighting columns deep into western Iraq, he wasn’t being rhetorical. He genuinely wanted an answer. It was late January 1991. The air war against Saddam Hussein had been running for just over a week. The most sophisticated air force in the history of human warfare.
750 combat aircraft, stealth bombers, precisiong guided munitions, satellite reconnaissance capable of reading the serial number off a tank was systematically dismantling the Iraqi military from 30,000 ft. Schwarzoff had watched it happen in real time on his intelligence screens, and he believed down to his bones that technology would win this war cleanly and completely.
He had no use for small units of men crawling around in the sand. This was not a personal quirk. It was a deeply held philosophical position shared by most of the senior American military leadership that had come of age in the era of massive firepower and technological overmatch. The lesson that a generation of American officers had drawn from Vietnam was not that small units were more capable than the army gave them credit for.
The lesson was that small units operating without conventional support got destroyed and that the solution to any military problem was overwhelming force applied from a position of complete technological superiority. Schwarzoff had commanded conventional units for three decades. He was a product of that tradition.
When he looked at the British SAS, he saw a small number of men with light weapons operating without armor, without air support on permanent standby, without medevac on call in terrain that offered no cover and no logistics chain. He saw a liability. He was wrong. Dead wrong. Because within 72 hours of that question being asked, everything Schwarzoff believed about the air campaign’s capacity to find and destroy a specific category of target would be exposed as an illusion.
The finest air force ever assembled would fail spectacularly and repeatedly at a mission that was about to become the most politically critical operation of the entire war. And the solution, the only solution that actually worked would come from those small units of men with light weapons operating in terrain that offered no cover.
To understand how a general who doubted the SAS ended up depending on them to hold his coalition together, we have to go back to the beginning. To the missile that nobody was supposed to worry about, to the weapon that Schwarzoff himself had publicly dismissed as militarily irrelevant right up until the moment it threatened to end the war before the ground campaign even began. Chapter 2.
The weapon nobody worried about. The Scud was, by every objective military measure, a terrible weapon. It had been designed by the Soviet Union in the 1950s as a battlefield ballistic missile, a blunt instrument for delivering conventional or chemical warheads across distances of up to 300 km.
The liquidfueled engine was temperamental. The guidance system was primitive. Its circular error, probable the radius within which 50% of fired missiles would land, was measured in hundreds of meters, which meant it could hit somewhere in a city, but could not reliably hit a specific building in that city.
It carried a conventional warhead of roughly 300 kg, enough to destroy a structure, not enough to affect a battle. Preparing it for launch required 45 minutes of work by a trained crew fueling a vehicle in the open, creating exactly the kind of heat signature that should have made it detectable from the air. The launcher itself, a large truck-mounted erector launcher system, was not small, not fast, and not particularly good at concealment.
American military planners had evaluated it and reached a conclusion so unanimous it barely qualified as an assessment. The Scud was militarily insignificant. General Schwarzoff said so publicly in the opening days of the war. His senior air commander, Lieutenant General Charles her called Scuds lousy weapons.
His chief planner, Brigadier General Buster Gloson, said they were not militarily significant when used against military targets. The Scud had been so thoroughly analyzed and so completely dismissed that the coalition war plan had devoted minimal resources to counter Scud operations. Static Scud launch sites had been identified and targeted for destruction in the opening hours of the air campaign.
The mobile launchers, the truck mounted systems that could move, hide, fire, and move again had been noted as a secondary concern. There was one thing they had all missed. One assumption so fundamental it had never been questioned. They had assumed Saddam Hussein would use his Scuds against military targets. He didn’t.
He pointed them at Tel Aviv. The first Scud hit Israeli soil on January 17th, 1991, 8 hours after the air war began. Then another, then another. Within 48 hours, Saddam had fired eight Scuds at Israel, killing two Israeli civilians, injuring dozens more, and sending hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens into sealed rooms wearing gas masks against the possibility of chemical warheads.
The missiles were militarily worthless. Politically, they were devastating. Israel, a country that had never in its modern history absorbed an attack without responding, that had launched preemptive strikes and retaliatory operations on the principle that no attack on Israeli soil could go unanswered, mobilized its military within hours of the first impact.
The Israeli cabinet met in emergency session. The Israeli Air Force received orders to prepare for operations. Washington received a message that carried the weight of an ultimatum. If one more Scud hit Israeli soil without a decisive coalition response, Israeli jets would enter Iraqi airspace and destroy the launchers themselves.
Schwarzkov understood immediately what that meant. The coalition he had spent months assembling included Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and a dozen other Arab nations. Every single one of them had made their participation conditional on one thing above all others.
Israel must stay out. The moment Israeli jets crossed into Iraq, the Arab coalition states would withdraw. The alliance would collapse. The United Nations mandate would fracture. The international legitimacy that made Desert Storm possible that made it a coalition war rather than an American war would disintegrate in a matter of hours.
Saddam Hussein with one of the worst weapons in the modern military inventory had found the one pressure point that could end the coalition without a single tank battle. He was firing rusting Soviet missiles at a civilian population and achieving something that no Iraqi general had believed possible. He was threatening to win the air campaign that Schwarzkov had believed would win everything needed to solve this problem immediately.
The mission was simple. Find the mobile Scud launchers in the western Iraqi desert and destroy them before they could fire at Israel again. What happened next would force the most powerful air force in history to confront an uncomfortable truth about what technology could and could not do. Chapter 3.
500 sorties, zero launchers. The US Air Force went to work. Coalition aircraft flew hundreds of sorties into the western Iraqi desert. A vast flat expanse of sand and rock stretching from the Euphrates River to the Jordanian border, roughly the size of England. They flew at night and during the day at all altitudes with every sensor system available.
They used forward-looking infrared to search for heat signatures from launcher vehicles and fuel systems. They vetoed in dedicated reconnaissance aircraft with highresolution camera systems. They had satellite imagery updated multiple times daily. They had signals intelligence monitoring Iraqi military radio frequencies.
They had electronic surveillance platforms circling at altitude. They found nothing. Not a single confirmed mobile Scud launcher, not one confirmed kill of a launcher that had been located from the air and successfully attacked before it could move. The reason was embarrassingly simple, and the Iraqi Scud crews, ordinary soldiers with basic training on Soviet era equipment, had figured it out themselves without any particular tactical genius.
Liquid fuel generated heat. Heat was visible to infrared systems. So, the Iraqis stopped leaving, their launchers fueled and ready. Instead, they hid the launcher vehicles during the day under bridges, inside barns, in hollowedout civilian buses parked along roadsides, beneath camouflage nets strung between farm buildings and small towns across the western desert.
They waited while the air reconnaissance windows passed overhead. Then in the middle of the night, they pulled the launcher out, fueled it, a process that took 30 to 45 minutes fired, and moved before coalition aircraft could respond to the launch signature. By the time the jets arrived at the launch coordinates, the vehicle was already somewhere else, cold, hidden, invisible.
The Air Force had been looking for hot metal in an open desert. The Iraqis were hiding cold metal in a landscape that provided infinite cover for a truck. Every time a Scud fired, coalition aircraft scrambled toward the launch coordinates. By the time they arrived, the launcher had moved. They would photograph the area, see nothing that appeared to be military equipment, and returned to base.
Intelligence analysts would review the imagery, find nothing, and the cycle would begin again. The Scuds kept firing. The Israelis kept threatening. Washington kept calling. By the end of the first week of the air campaign, the counter Scud mission had consumed thousands of sorties, enormous amounts of planning and intelligence resources, and produced no confirmed results.
The situation had become a crisis that threatened the entire war. Schwarzkov redirected assets on a scale that alarmed his own planners. Aircraft were pulled off strategic target sets, power stations, communications nodes, command bunkers that had been prioritized for weeks and redirected to Scud patrols. Patriot missile batteries were rushed to Israel, requiring American soldiers to operate weapons on Israeli soil, a deployment that created exactly the kind of American presence in Israel that Arab coalition partners found uncomfortable.
emergency intelligence sharing arrangements with the Israeli military were established and expanded. Schwarzoff did everything that the air campaign and conventional diplomatic tools could do. The Scuds kept firing. There was a man in Riad watching all of this with a particular kind of frustration.
General Sir Peter de la Billier, commander of British forces in the Gulf, former director of the SAS, a man who had spent two decades operating with and commanding the regiment across four continents, had been arguing for weeks that the SAS should be deployed in exactly the role that was now needed. He had been making his case to Schwarzoff since the earliest days of coalition planning.
He had been receiving variations of the same response. Unconvinced, not yet. What can they do that an F-16 can’t? With Israel’s patience measured now in hours rather than days, Debilier walked into Schwarzov’s headquarters and made his case for the last time. Only eyes on the ground can find these launchers, he said.
The air campaign cannot see them because they are not there to be seen from the air. The SAS can operate in that desert. They are trained for extended operations behind enemy lines with no support in exactly this kind of environment. They can find what the aircraft cannot find. Schwarzoff asked his question one more time. What can the SAS do that an F-16 can’t? De Laabilier’s answer was immediate.
See, Schwarzoff gave the order. He remained visibly skeptical. He told his own staff afterwards that he was authorizing the deployment under political duress, that he expected to be committing resources to rescue operations within a week, and that he still believed the problem could be solved from the air with sufficient persistence.
But with Israeli patients exhausted and no alternative presenting itself, he authorized the SAS to cross the border. The regiment began moving into western Iraq. what they would achieve and what they would endure to achieve it would exceed anything that question had anticipated. Chapter 4. Into Scud Alley, the SAS went in with everything.
A and D squadrons of 22 SAS drove into the Iraqi desert as fighting columns, the formation the regiment had been refining since it was invented in the Western Desert in 1941. 8 to 12 Land Rover 110s per column. Each vehicle loaded with firepower that reflected 50 years of operational refinement. Browning 50 caliber heavy machine guns on roll bars capable of destroying light vehicles at 12,200 m.
Milan anti-tank missile launchers on swing mounts. Accurate against armored targets at 2,000 m. Mark 1940mm grenade launchers cycling explosive rounds at 400 per minute. Generalpurpose machine guns on secondary mounts of every second vehicle. Motorcycle outr rididers running two kilometers ahead of the main column to probe for contact before the vehicles committed.
Unimog support trucks. The Mercedes-B logistics backbone of the formation carrying fuel for weeks of operations, ammunition for sustained firefights, water in quantities that assume no resupply for days at a time. They drove at night by GPS and starlight. During the day, they disappeared, drawing the vehicles together under camouflage nets stretched between them, lying motionless in whatever depression the desert offered, while Iraqi military patrols drove along roads a few hundred meters away and saw nothing. The western Iraqi desert had
been divided between British and American special forces. Delta Force, the American Tier 1 unit that had been operating alongside the SAS in various theaters since the 1980s, took the northern sector, the area around Alkaim that operators called Scud Boulevard. The SAS worked the southern sector, Scud Alley, 250 kilometers of desert stretching toward the Jordanian border where Saddam’s mobile Scud network was dispersed and hiding.
The mission had two complimentary components that together were designed to do what the air campaign alone could not. Road watch patrols operated the first component. Small teams, sometimes as few as four men, were inserted by Chinook helicopter to set up covert observation posts along the main supply routes between Baghdad and western Iraq.
They would lie in position for days, watching the road, cataloging every vehicle that passed. When a Scud launcher or support convoy appeared, they would report it and talk in coalition aircraft using laser designators to mark targets with enough precision that bombs delivered from altitude would find the right vehicle. They would then remain in position and continue watching, fighting columns operated the second component.
The Land Rover formations moved through Scud Alley at night, probing for activity, attacking targets of opportunity, destroying the infrastructure that the Scud network needed to function. Fiber optic communications cables running alongside the main supply routes. The hardwired command links between Baghdad and the deployed Scud batteries that allowed coordinated launch operations were a primary target.
The SAS found them by digging at likely locations along the road network, confirmed them, and destroyed them with explosives. When the cables were gone, the Scud crews had to use radio communications, which coalition signals intelligence could monitor in real time. The SAS had blinded Saddam’s Scud network while simultaneously becoming its eyes for the coalition.
The fighting columns also hit communication stations directly the physical nodes where command signals were processed and transmitted. One assault later in the campaign involved a half squadron attack on a major Iraqi communication center cenamed Victor 2. Two SAS fighting columns that had linked up in the desert hundreds of kilome inside Iraq, attacking a defended fixed installation with no support and no possibility of reinforcement.
They destroyed it. They drove away. What made all of this possible was the thing the air campaign could not replicate. The capacity for human judgment in a complex populated environment. The western Iraqi desert was not empty. It was populated with farms, small towns, vehicle compounds, military checkpoints, shepherds, truck drivers, and civilians going about the business of surviving in a country at war.
From satellite photography at high altitude, it looked like an undifferentiated landscape of dust and scrub. From ground level at night, through the eyes of trained observers who had spent their careers learning to read environments for signs of military activity, it was full of information. A camouflaged launcher parked next to a barn was invisible from 30,000 ft.
It was visible from 200 m to a man who knew what the pattern of vehicle tracks around that barn should look like if it were actually a farm and could see that the pattern was wrong. That judgment produced by a trained human observer with enough patience and experience to notice what was anomalous was the one thing the air campaign could not buy with more sorties or better sensors.
The SAS columns produced it continuously across 6 weeks of operations in the dark and the cold 500 km inside enemy territory with no fixed base and no way home except the way they had come. And within days of crossing the border, they started finding what 500 air sorties had missed. Chapter 5. Bravo 20. The patrol had a call sign. Bravo 20.
Eight men from B squadron inserted by Shinook helicopter in the early hours of January 22nd, 1991 into the desert northwest of the town of Haditha, approximately 100 km inside Iraq. Their mission was road watch. Set up a covert observation post along the main supply route between Baghdad and the Jordanian border. Monitor Scud launcher movements and report them for air attack.
Locate and cut the fiber optic communications cables running alongside the road and direct precision air strikes when launchers were identified. Standard SAS methodology, the same doctrine the fighting columns were applying across Scud Alley, adapted for a small dismounted patrol operating on foot. They carried equipment for 14 days of operations, weapons, ammunition, rations, water, demolition charges for the cables, communications gear, sleeping bags, medical supplies.
Each man was carrying over 40 kg. It was, several members later noted, more weight than most special forces units would consider compatible with sustained operations. But 14 days in the desert with no resupply required 14 days of supplies. From the moment the helicopter lifted away, things began going wrong in ways that compounded each other.
The patrol’s primary communication system had developed a fault. The radio could transmit but could not receive. They could send reports, but had no way of knowing if those reports were being received at headquarters. They had no way of receiving updated intelligence, orders, or confirmation that extraction was available if needed.
They were isolated from the command structure in the most fundamental way possible. They could speak, but they could not hear. Then the terrain. Intelligence preparation of the area had indicated cover was available. Buildings, vegetation, terrain features that would allow a patrol to conceal itself during daylight hours.
The ground they found bore no resemblance to that description. The desert west of Haditha was flat, bare, and open, offering almost nothing that would conceal eight men and their equipment from anyone passing within a kilometer. Patrol commander Sergeant Andy McNab, a pseudonym he uses in his published account, made the call.
The position was untenable for long-term occupation, but relocating in daylight was more dangerous than staying. They settled into the best available position and waited for darkness. In the late afternoon of January 24th, a young shepherd leading a flock of goats walked directly across their position. He saw them. He stopped.
He stared at the camouflaged men lying in the desert sand. Then he turned and walked back the way he had come. McNab made the call without hesitation. Compromised. Move now. Within minutes came the sound of engines, then what the patrol believed to be armored vehicles approaching their location. They prepared to fight, accepting that the covert phase of the mission was over and they were now in the combat phase.
What followed over the next seven days became one of the most intensively documented actions in SAS history. Not because it succeeded operationally, but because of what it revealed about what eight men could endure in conditions designed to kill them. The patrol fought and moved, moved, and fought. They headed toward the Syrian border more than 140 km across open desert in temperatures that dropped below minus 8° C at night in clothing that had not been designed for those conditions.
The desert in January was not the desert of popular imagination. It was bitterly cold, swept by wind, offering no shelter and no warmth. The men were exhausted from their loads, dehydrated from the exertion, and hunted by Iraqi forces who had flooded the area in response to the firefight. One member of the patrol, trooper Vince Phillips, died of hypothermia during the night withdrawal.
Another, trooper Bob Consiglio, was killed in a firefight. A third died of hypothermia later in the evasion. Four were captured. They were taken to Baghdad, held by Iraqi military intelligence, and subjected to interrogations that the survivors later described in clinical detail. Beatings with fists, boots, and implements.
Stress positions maintained for hours. The particular kind of systematic degradation designed to break a man’s sense of himself before he would answer questions. They endured. They gave nothing. They were released when the war ended. One man walked out alone. The patrol member who published his account under the name Chris Ryan covered 115 km on foot in 7 days through hostile Iraqi territory with almost no food and a small amount of water before crossing the place Syrian border.
He found a border crossing, made contact with Syrian authorities and was retrieved by British intelligence. His escape was later assessed as the longest successful evasion by a British soldier since the Second World War. Bravo 20 was the most decorated British patrol since the Boore War.
That phrase gets used regularly to describe what the patrol achieved. What it actually means is this. Eight men were inserted into hostile territory, lost their communications, were compromised within 48 hours, fought multiple engagements against a numerically superior enemy, suffered severe casualties in the worst possible conditions, and the survivors did not break under torture, and did not give up information that would have compromised the regiment’s operations elsewhere in Iraq.
The patrol had not achieved its operational objectives. The road watch had not been established. The cables had not been cut. The launchers along that stretch of the route had not been reported. What the patrol had done was survive a situation that should have ended in total destruction. And in surviving it had given the regiment something more enduring than a successful mission.
A demonstration that SAS men could be put into the worst possible circumstances and still not be broken. Schwarzoff received the report. His concern about the cost of special forces operations, the resources required to manage a compromised team, had been validated in the most painful way possible. Everything he had worried about had happened.
But while Bravo 20 was fighting for its life in the northern desert, the fighting columns of A and D squadron were still moving through Scud Alley, still finding launchers, still cutting cables, still directing the air attacks that were reducing the Scud launches against Israel that the air campaign alone had been unable to suppress.
The launches slowed, then they slowed further. Then, for stretches of 48 and 72 hours at a time, they stopped. Chapter 6. what eight men could do. General De Laabilier briefed Schwarzkoff on what the fighting columns were achieving in Scut Alley. The picture that emerged from those briefings was the kind that military analysts spend careers constructing, but rarely see this clearly.
In the areas where SAS columns were operating, the 250 km corridor of Western Iraq Scud launches against Israel had been suppressed by more than 80% compared to the peak rate in the opening days of the air campaign. That number came not from the destruction of specific launchers, though launchers had been found and attacked, but from the systematic degradation of the Scud network’s ability to operate.
The fiber optic cable network had been severed at multiple points. Iraqi Scud commanders, who had been communicating with Baghdad through a hardwired system that was invisible to signals intelligence, were now forced to use radio, which coalition electronic surveillance monitored continuously. their positions, their schedules, their coordination procedures, all of it suddenly visible to the intelligence apparatus that had been flying blind for a week.
The cable cutting alone, achieved by SAS patrols digging at likely roadside locations and destroying what they found, had transformed the intelligence picture. The communication stations that processed and relayed those command signals had been attacked and in several cases destroyed. Iraqi Scud batteries operating without reliable command links.
defaulted to extreme caution, moving less frequently, launching less often, spending more time in static hides where they felt concealed, but were also less able to respond to launch windows. The psychological dimension was equally significant. Iraqi Scud crews now knew that British special forces were operating in western Iraq.
They had found evidence of the fighting columns, vehicle tracks, destroyed equipment, dead soldiers from ambushes. They did not know how many columns there were, where they were operating, or what methods they were using to find launchers. This uncertainty was itself a weapon. A Scud crew that does not know whether a SAS observation team is watching a particular road will not park its launcher on that road while it fuels up.
The act of moving the columns through Scud Alley had changed the behavior of every Iraqi Scud operator in the region, whether or not any specific team had been directly observed. One engagement illustrated the difference between the air campaign and ground operations with particular precision. An SAS fighting column had been watching a farm compound 3 km from a main supply route for 12 hours when the patrol commander noticed something.
The foot traffic around the compound was wrong. Agricultural compounds in that area at that time of year had a particular pattern of activity workers in the fields during the day. Vehicles moving in and out with predictable timing. This compound had people moving around it at times that didn’t fit the agricultural pattern.
The vehicle present was the wrong kind for farming. The security arrangements, subtle but present, were inconsistent with a farm. The patrol investigated under cover of darkness. They found a Scud launcher in a barn. No satellite could have produced that assessment. No reconnaissance aircraft with infrared or optical sensors could have told the difference between the foot traffic pattern of a working farm and the foot traffic pattern of a military installation using a farm as cover.
That judgment required a human being who had absorbed enough operational experience to know what normal looked like and enough patience to watch for long enough to see what was abnormal. The SAS patrol called in the coordinates, designated the target with a laser, and directed a coalition air strike. The launcher was destroyed. Schwarzoff, reviewing the daily operational reports, was being educated in a lesson that the question about F-16s had revealed he needed.
An F-16 could not watch a compound for 12 hours. An F-16 could not notice that the foot traffic was wrong. An F-16 could not find a fiber optic cable running under a road and destroy it. An F-16 could not drive through a town at 3:00 in the morning and assess whether the pattern of lights and activity indicated a Scud staging area.
The SAS could do all of those things. And in January and February of 1991, those things were the operational difference between an alliance that held and an alliance that fractured over the question of whether Israel’s patience had been exhausted. Israel was briefed on what was happening in Scud Alley, not with vague reassurances with specific operational details, launch suppression statistics, and evidence that the coalition’s special forces were achieving against the mobile Scud network, what the air campaign had not been able to achieve
alone. The Israelis reviewed the information, consulted their own military assessment, and made a calculation. The threat was being addressed. The launches were declining. The political benefit of restraint, maintaining international support for the coalition, avoiding the consequences of Israeli strikes on Arab coalition partners, outweighed the domestic pressure to respond, the coalition held.
The ground campaign began on February 24th, 1991 with 300,000 troops crossing the Kuwait border in the largest armored assault since the Second World War. It lasted 100 hours. The Iraqi army, stripped of command communications, bombed for 6 weeks, and outmaneuvered by a ground assault that came through the desert flank rather than directly into Kuwait’s defenses, collapsed with a completeness that surprised even the officers who had planned the operation.
Schwarzkov declared the ceasefire. The war was over. The SAS fighting columns were still inside Iraq when the order came through. They had been in continuous operations for 6 weeks without returning to Saudi Arabia. They drove back across the border in the same battered Land Rovers they had driven in, carrying the equipment they had carried at the start, having covered thousands of kilometers of enemy desert in vehicles that had been built for British farmland. Chapter 7.
The general’s Verdict. After the war ended, Schwarzkoff did something that nobody in his position was required to do, and few people in his position would have done. He stood in front of the assembled personnel of the SAS and Delta Force, the special operations soldiers whose utility he had doubted, whose deployment he had initially resisted, whose operations he had authorized under political pressure rather than operational conviction.