Lewis - The Mammoth Book of Special Forces Training: Physical and Mental Secrets of Elite Military Units

Jon E. Lewis is a writer on military affairs and history. His many previous books include the bestselling The Mammoth Book of the Edge, The Mammoth Book of Polar Journeys, The Mammoth Book of True War Stories, World War II: The Autobiography, The Mammoth Book of Combat, Voices from D-Day, A Brief History of the First World War, SAS:The Autobiography, The Mammoth Book of Covert Ops, The Mammoth Book of Vietnam, Spitfire: The Autobiography, Voices from the Holocaust and A Brief History of the First World War.

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Edited by JON E. LEWIS

ROBINSON

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Robinson

Copyright J. Lewis-Stempel, 2015

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

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ISBN 978-1-47211-087-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-47211-178-4 (ebook)

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First published in the United States in 2014 by Running Press Book Publishers,
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US ISBN: 978-0-7624-5233-0

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APPENDIX:
SPECIAL FORCES UNITS OF THE WORLD

Special Operations are defined as operations conducted by specially trained, equipped and organized Department of Defense forces against strategic or tactical targets in pursuit of national military, political, economic or psychological objectives. These operations may be conducted during periods of peace or hostilities. They may support conventional operations, or they may be undertaken independently when the use of conventional forces... is inappropriate.

United States Operations Command,
A Special Operations Primer, 1996

W hen all is said and done, the brutal business of war comes in only two forms. There is the formalized engagement between large regular formations, with their strict uniforms and stricter hierarchies. And then there is the shadowy mission of the irregular, small-scale unit, with its unorthodox tactics and its unusual weapons. The Special Forces.

There have been unconventional forces since the fires of war were first stoked. After all, what did Odysseus do but use specially trained, equipped and organized forces to gain entry into Troy by concealing them inside the Wooden Horse? Think, too, of Rogers Rangers from the French and Indian War of 1756, the British agents who played the Great Game in central Asia against the Russians in the early nineteenth century and John Singleton Mosbys Confederate Cavalry Raiders from the Civil War.

Modern special forces date back to the First World War, and the attempts by the Allies and the central powers to break the military deadlock on the Western Front. One stratagem of the Allies was to raise an irregular Arab army under Colonel T.E. Lawrence: this was to foment trouble against the Turks and so draw off Central Power resources from the main show. The Germans, meanwhile, sought to break through the Allied trenches on the Western Front by creating and training special Stosstruppen. These shock troops caused mayhem during the Michael Offensive of 1918 until Allied might overcame them.

The Germans might have lost the Great War, but they saw clearly that the future of warfare lay with hard-hitting mobile formations, be they of men or machinery. Hitler liked Special Forces because they could be wrapped with the aura of the superman so beloved of Nazi philosophy. It was no coincidence, then, that the Second World War opened with a German Special Forces operation a simulated attack on the German frontier that provided the Fhrer with the pretext to invade Poland. No surprise either, that the 1940 German invasion of the Low Countries included a dazzling airborne assault on the Belgian fortress of Eben Emael by the Koch Assault Detachment that still causes military historians to gape.

Whereas the Germans had become revolutionaries in warfare, the military establishments of the major Allied powers had long been overtaken by a glacial conservatism. The result: in 1939 the major Allied nations were entirely bereft of Special Forces. Despite the late start, Special Forces soon proliferated amongst the Second World War Allies, both because the complexity of modern warfare made specialization an inevitability, and, with no early prospect of a major offensive against the Germans or Japanese, because morale-boosting raids by a small elite were too much of a temptation. Moreover, the sheer scale of the frontline stretching around Europe, North Africa and the Far East simply invited clandestine behind the lines missions of reconnaissance and sabotage.

The other allure of Special Forces was that, for a relatively small commitment of men and means, they might achieve a big, even strategically important result. In North Africa the SAS, which began with seventy soldiers, destroyed 300 Axis aircraft on the ground in North Africa. And it is this understanding by the SASs founder, David Stirling, that Special Forces could play a strategic role in war, and not just be a mob for a particular job, that makes the SAS absolutely the prototype of the modern Special Force. That, plus the SASs tough selection process, the quality of its training, and its ethos: Who Dares Wins.