Four men, blue UN berets, SA80 rifles borrowed from the regular army, so nothing looked out of place. They climbed out of a Dutch military helicopter in the dark on the outskirts of a besieged Bosnian town and disappeared into streets controlled by three different armed factions, none of whom had agreed to let them in.
Their cover story was that they were liaison officers. Their actual orders came from a British general who had not asked permission from anyone in New York, in Brussels, or in Washington to send them there because he already knew what the answer would be. No. and he had decided with the cold clarity of a man who had spent more than a decade inside one of the world’s most demanding special operations regiments that no was not an acceptable response to a town full of civilians being shelled into rubble while the international community wrote memos about it. This is the story of British SAS operations in Bosnia between 1994 and 1997. It is a story about a country coming apart at the seams while the most powerful military alliance in history stood at the border and argued about its own rules. It is a story about a UN
commander who was himself a former SAS officer and who understood in ways that the diplomats in New York could not begin to grasp that the only intelligence worth having in a war like this was the kind you could only get by putting trained men inside the problem. And it is a story about what happens when those men go in, do things no one has formally sanctioned, bring back information that changes the shape of a conflict, and then do it again because the situation demands it.
The warning, when it came, was not issued against sending them. The warning was issued by the men they were hunting, who began to understand that something was stalking them through the ruins of their own country. Something that didn’t make noise. Something that watched from positions no drone or satellite could replicate.
Something that could track a man’s gate across a hillside at 3:00 in the morning from 400 m away and identify him without ever firing a shot. That something was the regiment, and it had not needed anyone’s permission to come in. To understand why any of this mattered, you need to understand what Bosnia looked like.
In early 1994, the country had been burning for nearly two years. The Bosnian war, which began in April 1992 when Bosnia and Herzuggoina declared independence from the collapsing Federation of Yugoslavia, had degenerated into a grinding campaign of ethnic cleansing, siege warfare, and mass atrocity unlike anything Europe had witnessed since 1945.
Three armed factions controlled overlapping and contested territory. The Bosnian Serb army, the army of Republica Serpska, commanded by General Ratkcomadich and operating under the political direction of Ratavan Karadzik, was conducting a systematic campaign of encirclement and starvation against Muslim Bosnjak enclaves across the country.
The Bosnian Croat Militia, the HVO, was fighting simultaneously against Serbs and Muslims, depending on whose interests aligned with Croatian territorial ambitions on any given week. And the Bosnian government forces, the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzuggavina were holding a patchwork of territory in a country that was being carved up around them.
The United Nations had been present since 1992 in the form of NPRO4, the United Nations Protection Force, a peacekeeping mission assembled from 39 contributing nations that at its peak numbered roughly 39,000 troops. On paper, Yun Profor’s mandate was to protect humanitarian aid delivery and safeguard a series of designated safe areas.
Six towns across Bosnia that the security council had declared protected zones. In practice, UNPRO4 was a mission with an impossible mandate, limited rules of engagement, a command structure that required approval from both military commanders and a civilian UN special representative before any military force could be used, and a political environment in New York where every decision about whether to escalate was filtered through the divergent interests of five permanent security council members, several of whom had reasons to be cautious about angering Belgrade. The result was an organization that could observe atrocities but could not easily stop them. That could document the shelling of hospitals but faced bureaucratic obstacles the size of mountains before it could call in air strikes to end it. That could deploy troops into safe areas, but could not always defend those troops when they were taken hostage by the same forces
that were supposed to be deterred by their presence. into this impossible situation. In January of 1994, stepped Lieutenant General Sir Michael Rose. Rose was not a conventional choice for the command of a UN peacekeeping force. He had spent the core of his career inside the Special Air Service, commanding 22 SAS as its commanding officer from 1979 to 1982, which meant he was in charge of the regiment during the Iranian embassy siege in May 1980 when a six-man SAS team ended a six-day hostage crisis in 11 minutes of controlled violence that was broadcast live on British television. He had served in Northern Ireland. He understood counterinsurgency not as a theory but as a practice refined through decades of operational experience in environments where the difference between success and failure was measured in seconds and centime.
He was in the language of the special operations community a man who knew what could actually be achieved if you put the right people in the right place with the right information. and he knew with a certainty that no amount of diplomatic briefing could dislodge that UNPRO4 was operating almost completely blind.
The intelligence picture available to UNPRO4 headquarters was by the standards of any serious military operation dismal. The safe areas were surrounded by Bosnian Serb forces whose strength, disposition, morale and intentions were largely unknown. The conventional liaison process, the formal exchange of information with local commanders, was producing heavily filtered data designed to serve the interests of the party providing it.
Satellite imagery existed, but was controlled by American and NATO assets that were not always sharing their product with UN ground commanders. and the fundamental problem of what was actually happening inside the besieged enclaves. The true condition of the civilian populations and the Bosnian government forces supposedly defending them was essentially invisible to Sievo.
Rose needed eyes, not satellite feeds or drone cameras, but human eyes. Trained eyes. Eyes belonging to men who could insert themselves into denied environments, operate without support, read a situation with the precision that only comes from sustained close observation, and report back through secure communications in a format that a commander could actually use to make decisions.
He knew exactly where those men were. He had commanded them once. He picked up a phone. The elements that deployed to Bosnia in 1994 were drawn from A squadron and D squadron of 22 SAS. Their cover was institutional but essentially transparent to anyone paying close attention. They were designated UK liaison officers UCLO in the military shorthand and they wore the standard British Army uniform of the period with United Nations blue berets and carried SA80 assault rifles rather than the SAS’s preferred Colt Canada C8 carbines so that at a distance and in most encounters they would appear indistinguishable from the conventional British soldiers already deployed with unprofor. The uniform was a pragmatic fiction. Every man under that blue beret had passed the SAS selection course on the breakcon beacons, had spent years accumulating the close target
reconnaissance skills, the forward air controller qualifications, and the deep operational patience that distinguished the regiment from every other unit in the British order of battle. They were not liaison officers. They were the commander’s intelligence arm inserted into areas where no sane conventional military organization would think of deploying to do the one thing that unprofors formal intelligence architecture could not do for itself.
Find out the truth on the ground. The first deployments went into the besieged towns of Mlage in central Bosnia, where Bosnian Muslim civilians had been surrounded by Serbian forces and fighting was constant, and into the safe area of Gurazde in eastern Bosnia, where intelligence assessments ranged from the uncertain to the frankly contradictory.
The town of Gorazde, a Bosnjak enclave deep inside Republic of Serpska territory, was surrounded by Bosnian Serb forces and under periodic attack. The UN’s ability to assess the actual situation inside the town was virtually zero until Rose’s SAS teams went in. The Mag Lodge insertion was conducted by Dutch military helicopter at night.
One of those operations where the plan on paper has a clean logic and the reality begins fraying the moment the wheels leave the ground. The town was effectively sealed. The surrounding roads controlled by Serb forces and the helicopter approach was the only viable insertion method. The team that went in was small, trained for exactly this kind of penetration, and aware that if things went wrong at any point in the operation, no quick reaction force was positioned close enough to reach them in any time frame that would make a material difference. They went anyway. What they found inside Mlage and later in other enclaves was grimly consistent with the worst assessments that unprofor headquarters had refused to fully credit. Civilian populations under sustained fire. Bosnian government forces holding out with limited ammunition and declining morale. No
meaningful buffer between the civilian population and the Bosnian Serb military positions encircling the town. The SAS operators established their ground truth, assessed the disposition of forces on both sides of the confrontation line, and reported back to Rose through satellite communications in a format that was precise, verifiable, and completely unlike the politically modified accounts the UN was receiving through formal liaison channels.
More critically, every man in those teams had been trained and qualified as a forward air controller. They could talk aircraft onto targets. They carried laser designation equipment capable of precisely marking armored vehicles, artillery positions, and military installations for NATO aircraft flying strike missions under the authority of Operation Deny Flight, the no-fly zone enforcement operation that had been in place over Bosnia since April 1993.
If the decision was made to use air power against Bosnian Serb forces threatening unpro personnel or civilians, Rose’s teams were already in position to guide those strikes with a level of precision that the alternative methods could not approach. The question was whether that decision would ever actually be made.
And the answer to that question led directly to the operation that killed one of the regiment’s own. In April 1994, the Bosnian Serb army launched Operation Star 94, a concerted offensive against the safe area of Gaze. The attack was not subtle. Tanks and artillery pounded the town’s defenses. Civilian casualties mounted.
The Bosnian government forces, undermanned and outgunned, began to buckle under the sustained pressure of a military force that had no meaningful fear of the international community’s response. because it had tested the limits of that response repeatedly and found them soft. Inside Gaz, a small SAS team under UN cover was in position observing the Bosnian Serb advance.
They established themselves in a building in the town, reported continuously on the military situation, and when the attack intensified sufficiently to trigger Rose’s request for NATO air support, they were the men who would direct those strikes onto the attacking Bosnian Serb armor. The SAS Corporal Fergus Renie, aged 28, was killed on 15th of April, 1994 when his patrol came under fire from Bosnian Serb forces north of the town while attempting to survey their positions. He was shot by a sniper.
He was airlifted to Sievo by helicopter, but could not be saved. A second soldier from the patrol was wounded by shrapnel. Renie had come from the parachute regiment before passing SAS selection, was described by those who knew him as entirely reliable and willing to take on anything, and died doing the job that no UN mandate had formally authorized, but that his commander had decided needed doing because the people of Gazdi needed someone to tell the truth about what was happening to them. The air strikes that followed on the 16th of April were called in by the SAS team still operating inside the town. When a Royal Navy Sea Harrier from HMS Ark Royal was shot down by a Serbian surfaceto-air missile during one of those strikes, its pilot, Lieutenant Nicholas Richardson, was located and extracted by the SAS team on the ground, who guided him through Bosnian Serb lines on foot for
eventual helicopter pickup. The entire team subsequently exfiltrated the town through encircling Serbian paramilitaries to avoid capture. At one point, the SAS team was holding a perimeter that included a Royal Navy aviator who had just ejected from a burning aircraft. They were on foot in enemy controlled territory and the nearest friendly force was measured in hours rather than minutes.
They got out, all of them. They moved through the lines the way the regiment had been moving through denied territory since the North African desert in 1941, patiently, precisely, accepting the difficulty as a cost of doing business rather than an obstacle to be protested. Back in New York, UN officials were still processing paperwork about whether the air strikes had been properly authorized.
The Dayton Accord signed in November 1995 at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio ended the Bosnian War. The agreement that the three waring parties eventually reached divided Bosnia and Herzuggovena into two entities. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzgoa and Republic of Serpska separated by a zone of separation patrolled by IOR, the NATO implementation force that replaced UNPRO on the 20th of December 1995 with roughly 60,000 troops from 32 nations and a one-year mandate to enforce the military provisions of the peace. On paper, the war was over. The killing had stopped broadly speaking in the sense that armies were no longer moving through villages shooting people in the street or shelling civilian infrastructure at scale. But the men who had ordered those shootings, who had designed the concentration camps and the
policy of systematic ethnic cleansing that had killed between 100,000 and 200,000 people and displaced over 2 million more. Those men were not in prison. They were not even in custody. They were walking the streets of Republica, Serpska, towns and cities in some cases with continuing official positions protected by local loyalties, political networks, and the simple fact that I4 had been given a mandate that did not include going after them.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the ICTY, had been established in May 1993 and had been issuing indictments against individuals accused of war crimes throughout and after the conflict. By the time Dayton was signed, the tribunal’s initial indictment list ran to dozens of names.
Ratavan Karadzich, the political leader of Republic of Serpska, and General Ratco Madic, the commander of the Bosnian Serb army, under whose command the Shrebbrrenica massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnjak men and boys had been carried out in July 1995. Were at the top of that list, but the list extended far beyond those two names.
police chiefs, camp commanders, local officials, military officers, men whose hands had done the actual work that Karadzik and Madic directed from their offices in Pale’s approach to these indictments was, in the words of one British diplomat who was there, aggressively passive. Soldiers arriving in Bosnia were given photographs and names of indicted individuals and were under instructions to detain them only if they were encountered in the normal conduct of their duties.
British Ambassador Charles Crawford, reflecting on the rules of engagement years later, summarized the approach with devastating precision. In effect, he said, don’t pick him up unless you actually trip over him. Anything that involved going off the road, even 10 yards, was regarded as not being in the course of your normal duties.
The indicted war criminals understood this perfectly. Simo Derlyaka, the former police chief of Priador, who had overseen the establishment of the concentration camps at Omar, Keratm, and Turnupole, where Bosnjak prisoners were systematically beaten, starved, and killed, was not hiding. He was functioning as an adviser to the interior minister of Republica Serpska.
He knew IOR’s rules. He had done his own analysis of the mandate. He concluded correctly for the time being that the international community was not going to come for him. This was the environment into which the SAS deployed under I4 and its successor S4, the stabilization force that took over in December 1996 for a further 18-month mandate.
And it was an environment that created an increasingly intolerable tension within the British special forces community and within the British government because every day those men remained free was another day that the message received by every potential future war criminal in every future conflict was that if you wait long enough, the patience of the international community will run out before it runs you down.
The SAS was already in Bosnia. It had been there in various configurations and under various covers since 1994. The operators who had worn blue UN berets to insert themselves into besieged enclaves were now under I4 and S4 command in a different role. But the fundamental skills, the close-target reconnaissance capability, the covert surveillance tradecraft, the ability to locate and track individuals through environments where conventional military assets were useless.
Those skills had not gone anywhere. What they needed was an intelligence picture of where the indicted individuals were, what their patterns of movement looked like, and whether they could be taken without triggering a resumption of conflict. Building that intelligence picture was not in the I4 mandate.
It was not in the S4 mandate as initially interpreted. It required going off the road more than 10 yards. The SAS went off the road. The surveillance phase of what would eventually become a systematic British program of war crimes arrests was conducted in conditions that most observers of the Bosnian conflict would later struggle to characterize accurately.
Because the operations were classified, the personnel involved could not speak publicly and the intelligence product was fed into a targeting cycle whose existence the relevant headquarters were only gradually willing to acknowledge. What is known from the accounts that have subsequently emerged through journalistic investigations, partially declassified documents, and the testimonies of individuals involved in adjacent parts of the operation is that British special forces teams were conducting covert observation operations in Republica Serpska in the period between Dayton and the first S4 war crimes arrests in 1997 that went significantly beyond what their official mandate described. Teams were operating in close proximity to the residences, workplaces, and known social locations of indicted individuals, mapping their patterns of movement, identifying their protection arrangements, assessing the physical
layout of their compounds and building the intelligence product that would eventually allow a tactical plan to be constructed around a specific arrest opportunity. This was not casual surveillance. This was the kind of sustained, precise, methodologically demanding observation work that the regiment had been perfecting since Borneo in the 1960s and Northern Ireland from 1969 onward.
In Northern Ireland, the SAS had spent years inside communities that were actively hostile to their presence, tracking IRA members through environments where a single moment of detection meant a gunfight at close range against an enemy that knew the ground far better than they did. Bosnia was in some respects a more permissive environment.
The populations in the towns and villages around which the surveillance was concentrated were not universally hostile to the idea of the international community pursuing war criminals, even if local political structures were. The SAS operators adapted their approach to the terrain and the social environment in the way the regiment always adapted, identifying the specific characteristics of each operational area and calibrating the surveillance method to match.
Sometimes that meant static observation posts established in buildings or elevated terrain overlooking a target’s residence for days at a time. Sometimes it meant mobile surveillance using civilian vehicles in the manner the regiment had learned in the streets of Belfast. Always it meant the deep patience that SAS selection and continuation training spent years installing in operators as a fundamental cognitive habit.
The intelligence picture that was gradually constructed was not built in days. It was built in months. And the political authorization for what to do with that intelligence was not coming quickly either. NATO’s collective political will for war crimes arrests in Bosnia was in 1996 and into early 1997 essentially non-existent.
The American position shaped by concerns about escalation and by the weight of 20,000 US troops in Bosnia, who would be put at greater risk by any operation that destabilized the fragile peace, was to avoid arrests of indicted individuals unless they happened without effort. The French had their own diplomatic calculations.
The political consensus inside NATO was that the mission was peace implementation, not justice. The British argued differently. The British government and the senior British officers in the S4 structure took the position that indefinite impunity for men who had committed genocide was itself a threat to the long-term stability of Bosnia because it told every faction in every potential future conflict that the cost of atrocity was acceptable.
That argument was ultimately correct, but it took time and political capital to move it from a minority view to an operative consensus. In the meantime, the SAS kept watching. The operation that broke the pattern came on the 10th of July 1997. By then the mandate question had through a combination of British persistence, legal argument and the quiet accumulation of intelligence product demonstrating that arrests were operationally feasible been resolved enough to permit action.
The key intellectual shift in the authorization was articulated by ICTY chief prosecutor Louise Arbor, who observed that there was no need to change the S4 mandate, only to interpret it honestly in what she described as a goodfaith interpretation that does not pursue the deliberate intention to avoid the mandate altogether.
That reframing gave the political cover to proceed. Operation Tango was the designation given to a dual arrest operation targeting two indicted war criminals in and around the town of Priador in northwestern Republica Serpska. The two targets were Simo Dyaka, the former police chief who had administered the concentration camp network and Milan Kovachovich who had been mayor of Priador in 1992 and was suspected of organizing the roundup of Muslims for internment in those same facilities.
Kovachevich was by 1997 the director of Priodor Hospital. The intelligence that made Operation Tango possible had been built through the kind of sustained covert surveillance work that had been running for months. The location and patterns of both targets had been confirmed. 14 company.
The specialist surveillance unit drawn from across the British Army and trained to SAS standards for covert intelligence gathering had contributed to the surveillance product. The assault itself was assigned to the SAS. Two five-man teams were inserted into the Priidor area by helicopter on the night of the 9th of July.
The targeting was simultaneous. both strikes time to execute at the same moment to prevent either target from receiving warning of the other’s arrest. The Kovachevich team’s approach demonstrated the kind of creative tactical thinking that distinguishes operators who have genuinely absorbed the regiment’s philosophy from those who are simply executing a drill.
The SAS men talk their way into Priador Hospital by presenting themselves as representatives of the International Red Cross. weapons concealed beneath civilian clothing. It was a deception that required the specific combination of language capability, composure under social pressure, and physical control that the regiment’s training had spent years developing.
They reached Kovacovich, made the arrest without resistance, and extracted him to an American helicopter that transported him to the US base at Tusla. From Tusla, he was flown by C130 transport to the HEG. He died in custody sometime later from a suspected heart attack before his trial concluded.
The Durljaka operation went differently. Durljaka was approached at a fishing lake south of Priador where surveillance had confirmed he would be. When the SAS moved on him, he drew a pistol and opened fire. He was shot in the exchange of fire and died of his wounds. A former British officer who had served in S4 and who was familiar with the operations planning reflected on the outcome afterwards.
Durlaka had run the concentration camps. He had administered a system that murdered and systematically abused thousands of human beings. He reached for his weapon when the men came for him, and the men were better shots. Nobody who understood what he had done wasted much reflection on the outcome. What Tango demonstrated, beyond the obvious fact that the arrests were operationally feasible, was that the months of intelligence work that had gone into identifying the targets, mapping their habits, and selecting the right moment had been both necessary and effective. The intelligence picture was accurate. The tactical plan worked and the precedent that was set in Priador on the 10th of July 1997 rippled outward through the entire war crimes community of Republica Serpska with an impact that no amount of diplomatic pressure had managed to generate in the preceding two years. For the indicted individuals who
had been operating on the assumption that I4 and S4’s political reluctance was permanent, the Prejudor operations were a revelation of the worst kind. The assumption of impunity collapsed overnight. Men who had been publicly visible, who had been attending functions and meeting with international officials and traveling freely, suddenly understood that somewhere in the landscape around them, men they could not see were watching, that the rules had changed, that the mandate question had been resolved and resolved against them. The effect on the broader program of accountability was significant. After Tango, SF4 conducted multiple subsequent arrest operations over the following years. In September 1998, the SAS conducted an operation that extended into Serbia itself to capture Stean Tuttervich, the police chief of Bosanski Samkach, who
was indicted for crimes against humanity. In December 1998, the SAS arrested Antto Ferunza, a Bosnian Croat commander, subsequently sentenced to 10 years for torture. Goran Jealis, indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity at Breco, was taken in January 1998 by a US-led S4 operation, part of the broader momentum that the British had generated by proving the concept worked.
SF4 would ultimately arrest 29 individuals charged with war crimes over the course of its mandate. Each arrest depended on intelligence architecture, surveillance work, and tactical planning that traced its institutional roots directly to the approach the SAS had been developing in Bosnia since 1994. The men who had worn blue UN berets in Mlage in Gazdi, who had operated beyond the margins of their formal mandate, because a former SAS general had understood that the mandate was insufficient to the reality he was being asked to manage, had built the foundation on which the accountability program rested. The two men at the very top of the list, Ratavan Karazzi and Ratco Madic, would remain free for more than a decade after Dayton. Karadzi was finally arrested in Bgrade in July 2008, living under a false identity as an alternative medicine practitioner.
Madic was captured in Serbia in May 2011, hiding in a house belonging to a cousin. Both were eventually convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Karzi received a life sentence on appeal. Madic received a life sentence. The process took nearly a quarter century from indictment to final conviction, but it concluded.
There is a broader truth embedded in the Bosnian SAS story that gets obscured by the operational detail, and it is a truth about the relationship between institutional authority and operational reality. The sea in Bosnia operated repeatedly and consistently at the edge of and sometimes beyond the formal mandates under which they were ostensibly deployed.
General Rose sent men into enclaves that the UN had not approved for reconnaissance missions. Those men called in air strikes and extracted downed pilots and reported intelligence that changed the shape of the diplomatic and military response to the crisis. They did this not because they were rogue operators indifferent to the chain of command, but because the chain of command contained a man, Rose himself, who had made a calculation about necessity and consequence, that the bureaucratic process was too slow and too politically constrained to make on his behalf. The assess teams that built the intelligence architecture for the war crimes arrests operated in a gray zone between what their mandate permitted and what the situation required for months before the political authorization caught up with the operational reality they had already created. When Tango executed in 1997, the intelligence product that made it
work had been accumulating since before the Dayton Accords were signed. The authorization came after the capability had been built, not before. This is not on careful inspection unusual in the history of the regiment. The SAS was founded by David Sterling in 1941 on the premise that the institutional authority structure was failing to make use of capabilities it possessed and that a small team of exceptional individuals operating with autonomy and initiative could achieve effects that the formal military hierarchy could not authorize itself to attempt. That founding principle, unchanged in its essential character for more than eight decades, explains the blue beretss in Mlage, the laser designators in Gazda, the Red Cross cover story in Priador Hospital, and the sustained covert surveillance that tracked war criminals through the towns of Republica
Serpska. While SF4 headquarters was still composing the legal arguments for why it was permitted to do so, Cameron Spence, an SAS operator who served in Bosnia during this period and later wrote about his experiences, describe the approach in terms that speak directly to the founding philosophy. You assess the situation.
You assess your capability. You assess what needs to happen. And then you do the thing that needs to happen. And you write the paperwork afterwards if anyone asks for it. The paperwork rarely tells you as much as the thing itself. The formal structures of NATO, the UN, and the ICTY did eventually produce accountability for the men who had run the concentration camps and ordered the massacres. That is not a small thing.
The institutional architecture of international justice, slow and imperfect and frustrating as it was to watch an operation from inside the crisis, eventually did what it was designed to do. But it did so because the intelligence that made accountability operationally achievable was built by men who had gone into the mountains and the towns and the besieged enclaves without waiting to be told they were allowed to.
Because a general who had once led the regiment understood that the most important information in a crisis is never the information that formal channels are willing to provide. Because four men in blue UN berets climbed out of a Dutch helicopter in the dark outside Melage in 1994 and walked into a besieged town carrying laser designators and encrypted radios and the deep, patient, methodically trained capacity to observe and report with precision.
and nobody in New York had told them to. Corporal Fergus Renie of 22 SAS, the parachute regiment, died at the age of 28 in Gaz on the 15th of April, 1994, doing a job that the formal mandate of his mission did not technically include. doing it because someone above him in the chain had decided it needed doing and doing it in the manner of everyone who passes through the regiment’s gates at Heraford, which is to say without hesitation and without complaint, and with the absolute professional competence that 20,000 rounds in the killing house and 64 km across the Bcon beacons in under 20 hours is designed through its brutality and its precision and its utter indifference to personal comfort to produce the War in Bosnia produced many things. A destroyed country, a rebuilt country, imperfect and fractured along fault lines that have never fully healed. A body of
international law, and a tribunal that struggled for two decades, to do justice to crimes that defied easy categorization. And a set of operations, mostly classified, mostly undisussed in the public record until years after the fact, that demonstrated the same principle. The regiment had been demonstrating in every conflict it had entered since Raml’s airfields in the Libyan desert.
You do not need permission to solve the problem in front of you. You need the capability, the training, the institutional patience, and the willingness to go where the problem is and stay there until you understand it well enough to act. The SAS in Bosnia had all of those things. They had been building them since 1947.
And when the mandate said no, they looked at the mandate, looked at the situation, and made the calculation that four generations of the regiment had made before them. They went anyway.
