An unanswered SOS from the SAS

The epic survival story of the SAS patrol known as Bravo Two Zero during the first Gulf war until now, has largely overshadowed a darker story of incompetence and worse on the part of some of those who sent eight brave men into the desert on foot, on a Scud-hunt that was doomed from the start. In 1991, soldiers of the regiment’s B Squadron had been here before. A quixotic proposal to land a raiding party on an Argentine airfield a decade earlier, during the South Atlantic war, prompted a refusal on the part of some of the key players to perform.

In cases such as these, a political imperative when things are not going well — the need to buoy up public morale, as in the ill-fated St Nazaire raid of 1942 — overrides military sense. Some military formations, such as the French Foreign Legion and the Parachute Regiment, do embrace a sacrificial tradition, whether at Dien Bien Phu or Arnhem.