The SAS in Libya. A very British debacle.

The reports today of the capture of 8 members of the British SAS regiment in Libya have echoes of the regiment’s foundation.

The regiment has previous for messing up in this part of the world.

Operation Bigamy exhibit “A” (1942).

However I trust that this most recent debacle will not resemble Operation Bulbasket (1944) on YouTube.

If the captors are Islamists then they will make the SS look like the Trumpton fire brigade.

The Nazis hid their atrocities against Allied POWs.

The Al Queda boys trumpet their savagery across the internet.

Despite the spinning that will go on from Whitehall this most recent episode has all the components of a genuine catastrophe and not just for the men and their families.

The regiment is hated in the Arab world for, as it is perceived, the murder of Arab men who had already surrendered in the Iranian Embassy siege in 1980.

It does not matter the facts of the matter that is the perception on the “Arab street”.

At time of writing we do not know for sure exactly the identity of their captors.

It may be pro-western elements who are on their guard against the foreign mercenaries that Gadhafi has been deploying.

In that case the Who Dares Wins chaps will be sent back to Blightly minus their weaponry and that will be the end of the matter.

The captors could,however, be the Islamist elements that have been cutting a dash I the east of the country.

For them the pan Arabist secular Gadhafi is a hated figure the same way that they hated Saddam.

The originator of this operation needs to be carpeted.

The intervention of the British last week by deploying TWO transport aircraft to lift some British nationals was the start of this debacle.

Why only two?

Hundreds of British nationals were left in the country to await further transport sorties.

How would the Americans have tackled this?

Yes dear reader you are correct.

They would have airlifted all of their nationals out in one operation.

I have yet to see an UK based journalist ask why only two transport aircraft were deployed and, ipso facto, hundreds of at-risk British civilians were left within the grasp of Islamists and Gaddafi’s goons.

It was not helped by the gushing copy from London titles.

It seems a house rule of all British blatts that the words “daring” must always be used in any sentence that describes an SAS operation.

What the penny packet airlift achieved was to alert the bad guys that an operation was under way.

The very nature of Special Forces operations, indeed any military operation, is that one takes measures to fool and misinform the enemy.

All warfare is, indeed, based upon deception.

Nothing has fundamentally  has changed  about men and armed conflict since Sun Tzu wrote the Art of War six centuries before the birth of Christ.

Possibly only the weapons and means of transportation has changed in the dark arts of warfare.

In this operation the rules of engagement were so restrictive that the 8 SAS men were as good as unarmed. They were under orders not to kill any Arabs.

No doubt they would have fought bravely to defend themselves if authorised to do so.

However they were in a country illegally with no lawful authority to carry weapons.

Their mission, according to reports in the usually well sourced Sunday telegraph, was to escort a British “diplomat” out of the country.

So reasonable conjecture would be to assume that this “diplomat” has his desk in a, large building at Vauxhall Cross in London. Then the disaster is compounded.

The US military have a lovely unofficial term for such ill-conceived operations that  quickly unravel.

“Clusterfuck”.

Can you imagine the President of the United States authorising the deployment of 8 Delta Force personnel to escort a CIA operative without the sky above being black with predator drones and serious back up a short helicopter flight away?

Of course not.

The US military are already reappraising the high regard they once had for Britain’s armed forces.

However the important issue are these captured men.

These are no ordinary soldiers.  Apart from the millions that cost to train each one of them there is the raw information that they contain within their heads.

It is highly likely that these men have been on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is no hyperbole in calling this capture a catastrophe for the reputation of British Special forces.

After the defeat  at Basra and their failure to secure Helmand (both defeats saw the  USMC move in to save the day) the only part of the British military that had the confidence of the Pentagon and, ipso facto, the Oval office was mystique clad lads from Hereford.

Now that too is gone.