Why NATO Called on Australian SAS EVERY Time an Operation Was Too DANGEROUS for Its Own Men
In 2008, deep in the mountains of Urus Gun Province, Afghanistan, a combined patrol of Australian SAS operators and American green berets drove into a valley called Anakalai. They were hunting Taliban. They had done this before, just days earlier in a neighboring valley, and it had gone perfectly.
But this time, the Taliban were ready. Within minutes of the Australian snipers setting up in the foothills, up to 200 fighters closed in from every direction. Mortars started dropping around the vehicles. Machine gun fire rad the convoy from the riverbed and the small force of Australians and Americans found themselves trapped in a kill zone with no easy way out.
Two Dutch Apache helicopters appeared overhead and the Australians radioed for help. Fire your hellfires. Use your cannons. We are getting hammered down here. The Dutch pilots refused. They would not drop below 5,000 meters. The Australians and Americans were on their own. What happened next over the following hours would become one of the most intense firefights Australian soldiers had faced since the jungles of Vietnam 40 years earlier.
But to understand how a small unit from Perth, Western Australia, ended up at the center of the world’s most dangerous operations, you need to go back to where it all started. In 1957, the Australian Army formed the first special air service company. It was modeled directly on the British SAS and it borrowed everything from them, including their motto.
The motto was who dares wins. The unit was small, just a single company based out of Campbell Barracks in Swanborn, a quiet suburb of Perth on the western coast of Australia. Far from everything, far from the world’s attention. That was the point. The idea behind the unit was simple but brutal. Train small teams of soldiers to operate deep behind enemy lines, completely alone for weeks at a time, without support, without reinforcements, and without rescue if things went wrong.
Just five or six men with a radio and enough ammunition to fight their way out if they were compromised. By 1964, the company had expanded into a full regiment with three saber squadrons. But nobody outside Australia’s military establishment paid them much attention. They were untested, unproven, a small unit from a country the world associated with beaches and kangaroos, not elite warfare. That was about to change.
If you are enjoying these videos, please do not hesitate to like, subscribe, and comment on what video you want to see next. In 1965, the regiment got its first taste of real combat during the Indonesian confrontation in Borneo. Australian SAS patrols worked alongside their British and New Zealand counterparts in the dense jungles along the border between Malaysia and Indonesia.
The missions were supposed to be reconnaissance only. Watch the enemy, report their movements, stay hidden. But the Australians kept finding themselves in situations where hiding was not an option. In a series of ambushes and contacts along both sides of the border, including secret crossber operations into Indonesian territory, the regiment killed at least 20 enemy fighters.
Three Australian SAS soldiers died during those Borneo operations. One was gored by an elephant. Two drowned during a river crossing. Not a single one was killed by the enemy. The unit was good, but nobody knew just how good until they arrived in Vietnam in April 1966. The first Australian SASR squadron landed at landed at Nui dot in Futoui Province, South Vietnam.
From that moment forward, the regiment would spend six straight years rotating through the war with each of the three Saber squadrons, completing two full tours before the last one pulled out in 1971. The way they fought was completely different from anything the Americans were doing. While US forces moved through the jungle in large platoon and company-sized formations, the Australians went out in tiny patrols of four to six men.
They moved at a crawl, sometimes covering less than a kilometer in an entire day. They did not talk to each other. They communicated in hand signals. They slept in shifts, weapons ready without ever making a fire or a sound. And then when they found the enemy, they opened up with everything they had. The idea was to pour so much firepower into a target that the Viaong would think they had stumbled into an entire company, not half a dozen men with automatic weapons.
It was a technique designed around one principle. Hit them so hard and so fast that by the time they figure out what happened, you are already gone. It worked. Over the course of the war, approximately 580 men who served in the SASR in Vietnam conducted roughly 1,200 combat patrols. They operated not just in Fuaktui province, but across Bian Hua, Lancoui provinces as well, providing intelligence to both Australian and US forces.
The Vietkong and the North Vietnamese army started calling them Marang. It translates to phantoms of the jungle. And that name was not a compliment. It was a warning. When the Australians were in the area, even the most experienced Vietkong infiltrators knew they might walk into an ambush they would never see coming. The Australians also worked directly alongside US Army special forces and Navy Seals with some SAS soldiers serving on exchange with MACVS, the most classified American special operations unit of the entire war.
The unit even provided instructors to the MACV Recondo School, teaching American soldiers how to survive long range reconnaissance patrols. By the time the last squadron left Vietnam, the Australian SAS had lost only one man killed in action. One out of 580 soldiers across 6 years of combat. 28 were wounded.
Their own casualty rate was almost impossibly low compared to the damage they inflicted. But Vietnam was over and the world was changing. The regiment needed a new mission and it found one in the most unlikely of circumstances. On February 13th, 1978, a bomb exploded outside the Sydney Hilton Hotel during a meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government. Three people were killed.
Australia suddenly realized it had no dedicated military unit capable of responding to a terrorist attack on home soil. Within 18 months, the Special Air Service Regiment, SASR, was assigned responsibility for developing a tactical assault group, a military counterterrorism force trained in hostage rescue, close quarters battle, and rapid response.
The TAG became one of the most capable counterterrorism units in the world. And the regiment began crossraining with every elite unit you can name. Delta Force, the British 22nd SAS Navy Seals, Germany’s GSG9. Those partnerships would prove critical in the decades ahead because every one of those units would eventually find themselves fighting alongside the Australians in the most dangerous theaters on Earth.
If you are enjoying this breakdown of the Australian Special Air Service, hit subscribe. I cover military history and special operations every week. Now, fast forward to September 1999. East Teour. After a vote for independence from Indonesia, pro- Indonesian militia groups launched a campaign of violence that destroyed 80% of the capital city of Delhi. Civilians were being murdered.
The country was burning. The United Nations authorized a multinational force to intervene. Australia led that force called Interfett with over 5,500 personnel. The very first troops on the ground were three squadron of the Australian Special Air Service. They secured the airport in Dilly before the main force could even arrive.
They conducted vehicle patrols into the city, established a security perimeter, and served as the eyes and ears of the entire operation in its most dangerous early days. Without the Special Air Service shaping the environment first, the conventional forces landing behind them would have walked into chaos. But the real test came on October 16th, 1999 near a village called Ida Basala, just 15 kilometers from the border with West Teour.
A six-man special air service reconnaissance patrol had been inserted by Blackhawk helicopter 3 days earlier. Their mission was to move on foot through the jungle, establish an observation post over a village, and gather intelligence on militia activity along a known infiltration route from West Teour. On the third morning, as the patrol crossed a dry creek bed, the rear scout spotted six militia fighters in camouflage and webbing moving along the creek just 20 m away.
Three of them appeared to have had military training, likely copases trained. The scout engaged when the lead fighter came within 10 meters, firing half his magazine from an M4 carbine. What followed was a running firefight that lasted an hour and a half. The six Australians fought their way to a landing zone, being attacked three more times by groups drawn from over 60 armed militia who had been organized specifically to find and kill them.
Intelligence later revealed that Indonesian special forces had heard the helicopter during the initial insertion days earlier and deployed the militia search parties in response. The patrol leader, Sergeant Steven Audi, was later awarded the medal for gallantry. The six men killed multiple militia fighters and extracted without a single Australian casualty.
The Governor General awarded the meritorious unit citation to the entire squadron for sustained outstanding service. Their importance to the successful outcome of interfett operations according to the regiment’s own history cannot be overstated. But East Teour was a peacekeeping operation compared to what came next. On September 11th, 2001, terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center in New York City.
Within weeks, Australian Prime Minister John Howard invoked the Anzus Treaty and committed Australian forces to the war in Afghanistan. The unit he sent first was the SAS. All three Saber squadrons of the SASR were deployed to Afghanistan in rapid succession. One squadron group arrived in October 2001. Three Squadron replaced them in April 2002.
Two Squadron followed from August to November 2002. Up to 1,100 Australian personnel were involved in just the first 6 months of Operation Enduring Freedom, making the SASR one of the very first Allied Special Forces units to have boots on the ground in the country. The Australians helped establish the coalition’s first forward operating base, Camp Rhino, southwest of Kandahar in November 2001.
They participated in the capture of Kandahar International Airport in December 2001. They conducted reconnaissance and surveillance operations in the mountainous regions south of Cabo, some of the most hostile terrain on the planet. They were not just supporting American operations, they were embedded in the in them. The SASR worked directly alongside US special forces, operating in the same valleys, chasing the same targets and fighting in the same ambushes.
American commanders did not treat them like junior partners. They treated them like equals because in the field that is exactly what they were. And then in 2003, the Australians were called to Iraq. On March 21st, 2003, a combined force of British SAS and Australian SASR launched one of the opening moves of the entire Iraq War.
They assaulted the strategically critical H2 and H3 airfields in western Iraq near the Jordanian border, driving columns of heavily armed long-range patrol vehicles straight into enemy held positions. The British drove desert patrol vehicles. The Australians drove their own six- wheeled variants. After neutralizing the guard towers and defensive positions, the combined SAS force cleared every hanger and building on both airfields.
The sites were rapidly converted into forward operating bases. And from there, the Australians pushed east into the Iraqi desert on a mission that echoed the original SAS role from World War II. They were hunting Scud missile launchers that Saddam might use to attack Israel or coalition forces. But the Iraqi military was not going to let them operate unopposed.
The Australians found themselves in running vehicle battles with Iraqi soldiers who mounted heavy machine guns on SUVs and tried to overwhelm the small SAS patrols with speed and firepower. The Australians fought back with their own mounted weapons, rocket propelled grenades, and shoulder fired javelin anti-tank missiles.
One military source at the time described the Iraqi Western Desert as a special forces playground, and the Australians were the ones running it. On April 11th, 2003, the SAS squadron concentrated for its biggest objective yet. This was the capture of Al-Assad air base west of Baghdad near the Euphrates River. Al-Assad was enormous, one of the largest air bases in all of Iraq.
And when the Australians moved in, they discovered what the Iraqis had been hiding there. Over 50 MIG fighter jets, many of them still airworthy, concealed in camouflage shelters and nearly 8 million kg of explosive ordinance. 50 jets, 8 million kg of explosives captured by a single SAS squadron. But the Australians were not done.
After securing the air base, they did something that perfectly captures the spirit of the unit. None of them were mechanics or airfield engineers, but they found two broken bulldozers, a roller, and a grater on the base, repaired all of them, and used them to fix the bomb cratered runways. Within days, coalition C130 Hercules transport aircraft were landing at Al-Assad, turning a captured enemy air base into a functioning coalition hub.
That air base would go on to become the second largest US military base in all of Iraq, the western equivalent of Baghdad’s Green Zone, and it started with a handful of Australian SAS operators who took it, then rebuilt it with their own hands. Throughout all of this in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Australians were not operating alone.
They had been integrated into the most elite American command structure in existence. The Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC. Starting in late 2005, the Special Air Service Regiment, SASSR, was folded directly into JSOC operations in Afghanistan, working alongside Delta Force to target al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership.
This is worth pausing on for a second. JSOC does not invite just anyone into its operations. This is the command that runs Delta Force and Devgrrew SEAL Team 6. The fact that Australian SASR operators were embedded in JSOC missions, conducting the same raids and hitting the same high-v value targets says everything about how American special operations leaders viewed their capabilities.
And then came Khaz Oruskin. On September 2nd, 2008, in the same valley system where they had successfully ambushed Taliban fighters just days earlier, a combined patrol of Australian Special Air Service and American Special Forces from the Seven Special Forces Group drove back into the mountains east of forward operating base and Aonda.
The plan was the same as before. Australian sniper teams would set up in the foothills. American and Afghan vehicles would move through the valley to flush Taliban fighters into the open. The snipers would engage. Simple, clean. It had already worked once, but the Taliban had learned from the first ambush. This time, they were waiting.
Two SAS patrols moved into position under cover of darkness, carrying long range sniper rifles. A third patrol accompanied the five vehicle convoy of American Humvees crewed by US special forces and Afghan troops. As the vehicles moved deep into the valley, the sniper teams to the north successfully ambushed armed Taliban moving into position.
The southern patrols observed armed fighters but held fire because children were near them, and the extended range and wind made a clean shot too risky. Then as the vehicles began their withdrawal back through the valley, every everything fell apart. Accurate mortar fire started dropping around the convoy.
Machine gun rounds snapped through the air from the riverbed and at Anacolai. Up to 200 Taliban fighters had closed the trap. The two southern SAS patrols, one with six men and one with five, walked down from the foothills to link up with the vehicles and add their firepower to the withdrawal. They distributed themselves across the three center Humvees riding on the back exposed as the convoy fought its way out under fire.
Air support was called in and ordinance was dropped on the mortar positions. But when the Australians spotted two Dutch Apache attack helicopters overhead escorting a Chinook, they radioed the pilots pleading for help. Former SAS sniper Rob Mailor, who was wounded during the battle, later wrote that they told the Dutch, “We’re in an absolute doozy of a fight.
We need your assistance as we’re taking casualties.” The Dutch pilots refused to engage. They would not drop below 5,000 meters. Despite the Apache being specifically designed to operate at low altitude under heavy fire, the Australians and Americans fought their way out without them. It became one of the most intense battles Australian forces had experienced in decades, and it cemented a reputation that the SAS had been building for over 50 years.
When the mission is too dangerous, too remote, or too sensitive for conventional forces, the Australian Special Air Service is the unit that gets the call. Not because they are the biggest, not because they have the best equipment or the largest budget, but because they have been proving war after war, decade after decade, that a small team of highly trained operators can accomplish what entire battalions cannot.
From the jungles of Borneo, where they first drew blood, to the rice patties of Vietnam, where the enemy named them phantoms, to the burning streets of Dilly, where six men held off 60. To the deserts of Iraq, where they captured an air base and rebuilt it themselves. To the mountains of Afghanistan, where they fought their way out of a valley surrounded by 200 fighters with no air support.
The Australian Special Air Service does not look for glory. They do not do press conferences. Most of their operations are still classified, but every special forces unit on Earth knows their name. And when coalition commanders needed someone for the missions that nobody else would take, there was only one call to make.
Campbell Barracks, Swanborn, Perth, the quiet suburb where the Phantoms go home. If you want to see how another elite unit earned its reputation in a completely different way, that video is on screen now. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.