What happened next was a cold, clinical, and brutally honest assessment that left the Americans in absolutely no doubt [music] they were not good enough, not yet. And the SAS were going to tell them exactly that [music] to their faces without apology. Hi, my name is Arnold and this is Delta Force Chronicles. The special relationship, how it all began.
To understand why the Americans came to Hereford hand in hand, you first need to understand just how deep the roots of this relationship actually go. By the early 1970s, [music] the SAS had already spent the better part of two decades refining what would become the gold standard of special operations soldiering.
They had been through Malaya. They had been through Borneo. They had been through Aden and the brutal urban guerrilla warfare of the Radfan. By the time the 1970s arrived, the regiment was operating in Dhofar in Oman. Fighting a slow, grinding, and extraordinarily sophisticated counterinsurgency campaign that most of the world knew absolutely nothing about.
The SAS were not just good, they were a generation ahead of almost everyone else on Earth. It was against this backdrop that the exchange program between the SAS and their American counterparts was established. US Army Special Forces and the SAS began sending personnel back and forth, attaching operators to [music] each other’s units, observing, training, absorbing.
On paper, it was a mutual arrangement. In practice, as the Americans themselves would later freely admit, it was considerably more one-sided than that. Two names matter enormously here. The first is Colonel Charlie Beckwith. Beckwith was a Georgia-born, hard-drinking, profoundly gifted special forces officer who had served an attachment with the SAS at Hereford in the early 1960s.
What he saw there changed him permanently. The independence of thought, the selection process that was designed not merely to find the physically hardest men, but to find the smartest, most self-reliant, most psychologically resilient, the culture of a small regiment that trusted its soldiers to think rather than simply to obey.
Beckwith came home and spent the better part of a decade trying to convince the US Army to let him build something similar. They told him no, repeatedly. More on that shortly. The second name is Dick Meadows, a legendary special forces soldier, a veteran of some of the most audacious operations of the Vietnam era, and the man sent alongside Beckwith on that original attachment to Hereford.
Meadows was the kind of soldier who existed in both the official record and in the whispered conversations of people who knew what was really happening. He would later prove critical in ways nobody anticipated. But in the 1970s, both Beckwith and Meadows returned from Hereford carrying the same conviction that what the SAS had built was unlike anything in the American arsenal and that America needed it.
The Americans come calling. By the mid-1970s, the United States Army was in a difficult place. [music] That is, I think, a fairly generous way of putting it. Vietnam had ended badly. Army morale was fractured. The draft had been abolished in 1973 and the transition to an all-volunteer force [music] was producing its own complications.
Special forces, once the glamorous centerpiece of Kennedy era counterinsurgency doctrine, had been run hard, misused, and in certain quarters actively dismantled in the post-Vietnam drawdown. The institutional army had never been entirely comfortable with special operations. Too independent. Too difficult to control.
Too inclined toward unconventional thinking, which is, of course, precisely [music] what makes special operations soldiers valuable, but also precisely what makes large [music] conventional military bureaucracies deeply nervous. Meanwhile, the threat landscape [music] was changing in ways that the existing force structure was not equipped to handle.
The Munich massacre [music] of 1972 had demonstrated with horrifying clarity what a small, determined, and ruthless terrorist organization could achieve against a completely unprepared target. The subsequent proliferation of hostage-taking, hijacking, and targeted political assassination across Europe and the Middle East produced in Western governments a growing and urgent recognition that something new was [music] needed.
A capability that did not yet formally exist. A force that could operate in the shadows, move in small numbers, and resolve situations that conventional military power >> [music] >> was entirely unsuited to address. The West Germans had stood up GSG9 in the wake of Munich. The French were developing their own capability. The Israelis had already been operating in this space for years.
And the British, well, >> [music] >> the British already had the SAS. They had been doing this quietly since the 1950s. >> [music] >> They were already the benchmark. So, the Americans came back to Hereford. This time not just for an exchange posting or a liaison visit. This time with a more substantive request.
They wanted closer collaboration. They wanted to understand [music] the SAS selection process in granular detail. They wanted training [music] support, doctrinal input, and the kind of frank institutional knowledge sharing that would allow them to build something equivalent on the American side. The [snorts] request was, in [music] its own way, a significant act of institutional humility from an army that was not historically known for an excess of that particular quality.
And the SAS, to their considerable credit, >> [music] >> did not simply wave them through the front gate and hand over the curriculum. What the SAS saw. Here is where it [music] gets uncomfortable. And also, if I am being honest, quite entertaining. Depending on your sense of humor. The SAS assessment of US Special Forces during this [music] period was not a diplomatic document.
The regiment had spent years watching the Americans operate, hosting them on attachments, observing their training [music] methods, and their institutional culture, and forming views that were candid. Now, the SAS are not an organization given to softening their opinions out of politeness. [music] If you have ever spent any time reading about the regiment’s culture [music] or spoken to anyone who has passed through Hereford, you will know that understatement is very much the local language >> [music] >> and that when an SAS man tells you
something is not quite right, what he generally means is that it is catastrophically [music] wrong and he cannot quite believe you have not noticed. The core of the SAS assessment came down to several specific and interconnected problems. The first was the [music] matter of individual initiative. Special operations, at the [music] most fundamental level, are built on the assumption that the man on the ground, the individual soldier, operating potentially alone or in a very small team, potentially [music] out of
communication, potentially in a situation nobody planned for, must be capable of making the correct decision independently. [music] Without being told. Without waiting for orders. The SAS selection process, the infamous and deliberately brutal weeks on the Brecon Beacons, was not designed to find the strongest candidates.
It was designed to find the ones who kept thinking clearly when everything around them was designed [music] to make thinking clearly almost impossible. What the SAS [music] observed in their American counterparts was a capable, brave, and well-intentioned group of soldiers who had been trained in a system that, [music] at its core, still prized obedience to structure over independent judgment. This is not an insult.
>> [music] >> It is an institutional reality that flows directly from the requirements of running the largest standing army in the Western world. >> [music] >> You cannot have 200,000 soldiers all freelancing their battlefield decisions. Structure and hierarchy exist for good reasons, but those reasons become liabilities the moment you move from conventional warfare into the specific and demanding world of special operations.
The second problem was selection itself. American special forces selection in the 1970s, while physically demanding by any reasonable standard, was not selecting for the same qualities the SAS valued most. The emphasis was different. The attrition was lower. The psychological assessment was less sophisticated.
The SAS looked at the process [music] and reached a conclusion that was as simple as it was uncomfortable. The Americans were not yet filtering [music] for the right things. And the third problem, perhaps the most delicate of all, was the question of institutional support. The SAS existed within the British Army as an accepted, understood, and crucially trusted organism. The regiment had autonomy.
It had the backing of commanders who understood what it was for and left it alone to get on with the business of being exceptional. American special forces, by contrast, existed in a state of perpetual institutional tension with the conventional army. They were underfunded, >> [music] >> undervalued in certain quarters, and chronically subject to interference from commanders who did not understand them >> [music] >> and were not entirely sure they approved of them.
You cannot build a world-class special [music] operations capability inside a bureaucracy that is, at some level, ambivalent [music] about whether it actually wants one. The standards problem. [music] Let me give you the specific shape of this problem because I think it is important [music] and I do not think it gets discussed with sufficient clarity.
The SAS selection [music] course, at the time, and essentially to this day, operates on a principle that sounds simple and is in practice [music] extraordinarily brutal. It is self-directed. Candidates are told where they need [music] to be and when. They are not led there. They are not supervised en route.
They navigate alone across some of the most unforgiving terrain in the United Kingdom carrying loads that increase as the weeks progress with the time standards tightening rather than relaxing as the course develops >> [music] >> and with the staff conspicuously declining to offer the kind of encouragement, feedback, or human acknowledgement that most soldiers [music] have been trained to expect.
You complete the task or you do [music] not. Nobody will explain why you failed. Nobody will tell you how close you came. The ambiguity is deliberate. The loneliness is engineered because the regiment is not interested [music] in soldiers who perform well when someone is watching. It is interested in soldiers who perform well when nobody is watching.
When they are exhausted, when the situation is unclear, and when the easiest thing in the world would be to stop. [music] Now stack that against the American special forces selection process of the mid-1970s. There were supervisors. There was structure. There was a training schedule. There was, and I say this with affection because I have enormous respect for what special forces [music] soldiers are, a certain amount of institutional hand-holding that the SAS [music] found, to put it gently, revealing. This was
not a question of physical courage. American special forces soldiers were, and are, as physically courageous as any soldiers on Earth. Vietnam had demonstrated that conclusively at a cost that is still difficult to comprehend. The question was subtler than courage. It was a question of whether the selection process was producing soldiers who were comfortable with uncertainty, with ambiguity, [music] with the specific and disorienting experience of being in a situation [music] that nobody has a plan for.
And the SAS answer, delivered with characteristic directness, was [music] that it was not. Not reliably. Not consistently enough. The result was that when the Americans asked for the kind of deep institutional [music] collaboration they were looking for, the sharing of selection methodology, the doctrinal exchange, the formal training partnership, the SAS declined to simply hand it over.
What they offered instead was something more valuable and considerably more uncomfortable. They offered their honest assessment. They told the Americans exactly what they saw [music] and they told them that if they wanted to build something equivalent to what existed at Hereford, they were going to have to be willing to do the hard work of rebuilding from the foundations up, not just importing a curriculum and grafting it onto an existing structure that was not designed to support it.
That is, for the record, exactly what Charlie Beckwith had been saying to the United States Army for the better part of a decade. It probably did not improve his mood to hear it confirmed by the British. The fallout and what it [music] produced. Here’s the thing about being told you are not good enough.
It can break you [music] or it can build you. And in this particular case, and this is the part of the story I find genuinely extraordinary, it built something remarkable. Beckwith had been fighting the institutional army for years [music] by the time the SAS delivered their assessment. He had been writing memos, submitting proposals, making arguments, and running headfirst into the wall of institutional inertia with a persistence that was either admirable or alarming, depending on your perspective.
I personally lean toward admirable, though I accept that some of his colleagues at the time may have used different language. The SAS assessment did not discourage Beckwith. It vindicated him. It gave him ammunition. He had been saying for years that America needed a unit [music] built on SAS principles, not SAS inspired, not SAS adjacent, but genuinely built from the same foundational philosophy of ruthless individual selection, small [music] team operations, and absolute trust in the judgment of the man on the
ground. Now he had the SAS themselves confirming, in their characteristically [music] understated fashion, that what currently existed did not meet that standard. In 1977, after years of effort, Beckwith finally got his authorization. 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment, [music] Delta. Delta Force.
Built on an SAS blueprint, staffed initially [music] in part by men who had served exchange attachments at Hereford, with a selection process modeled directly and deliberately on what Beckwith had experienced [music] in the early 1960s. The SAS had not just inspired Delta, they had, in a very real sense, made it inevitable by being honest enough to tell the Americans that what they had was insufficient.
[music] Sometimes the most useful thing an ally can do is refuse to tell you what you want to hear. The irony. By the early 1980s, the relationship had transformed entirely. Delta was operational. SEAL Team Six, [music] the Navy’s counterterrorism unit, had been stood up in the wake of the Eagle Claw disaster of 1980, drawing its own inspiration from [music] the SBS, the SAS’s maritime equivalent.The Americans had built their own special operations ecosystem, imperfect and still developing, but recognizably drawing from the same philosophical [music] well as the British units that had preceded them. And the SAS, to their considerable credit, [music] recognized what had been built and adjusted their assessment accordingly.
The exchange program continued. The mutual respect deepened. There is a particular quality to the relationship between soldiers who have all been through selection [music] processes designed to break them. There is a recognition, a shorthand, a shared understanding of what it cost to be standing in that room that transcends nationality entirely.
By the mid-1980s, operators from both nations were working alongside each other in theaters that neither government was particularly keen to discuss [music] publicly. The student had become the peer, not a copy, not an [music] imitation, a genuine peer operating from the same foundational principles, but with its own identity, its own culture, and its own hard-won institutional [music] legitimacy.
The irony, of course, is exquisite. The SAS turned down the Americans’ request for deep collaboration because the Americans were not yet good enough. And in doing so, they gave Beckwith precisely the institutional argument he needed to go back to the army and say, “Look, the best in the world have told us we are not [music] there yet.
Let me fix that.” The rejection was, in the most direct possible [music] sense, the catalyst for exactly the collaboration and the capability transfer that the Americans had been asking for in the first place. Just delivered [music] differently. Harder. Better. The lesson nobody talks about. >> [music] >> I want to leave you with something that I think gets missed almost entirely in the way this story is usually told when it is told at all.
The institutional willingness to be told you are not good enough is extraordinarily rare. It is rare in individuals. It is almost vanishingly rare in large military bureaucracies, which tend to develop powerful internal cultures of self-justification. The US Army of the mid-1970s had every reason to respond to the SAS assessment with [music] defensiveness, with bureaucratic resistance, with the kind of institutional circling of wagons [music] that produces impressive-sounding reports and changes precisely nothing.
It had the precedent of Vietnam to process, >> [music] >> the political turbulence of the post-draft transition, and an internal culture that had not always been kind to the special operations community. And yet, Beckwith persisted. The lesson got [music] through. Not immediately, not smoothly, not without a great deal [music] of friction and frustration.
But it got through. And what it produced. [music] Delta Force, the modern Joint Special Operations Command, the entire architecture of American special operations [music] capability that would go on to define covert warfare for the next half [music] century was built on the foundation of that willingness to hear an uncomfortable truth [music] and act on it rather than bury it.
The SAS did not do America a favor by being polite. They did America a favor by being honest. And that more than any training program or doctrinal exchange or shared operation is the real inheritance of the special relationship between Hereford and Fort Bragg. That is the story of why the SAS turned down US special forces and why in doing so they arguably did more for American special operations than any formal collaboration could have achieved.
As always, the truth behind these units is almost always more interesting than the mythology. If you are new here, subscribe. We cover the real history of the world’s most elite forces, the operations that shaped modern warfare, and the stories that most people never get to hear. I am Arnold.
This is Delta Force Chronicles, and I will see you in the next one.