QuoteReplyTopic: Best Special Forces of Modern Armies Posted: 06-Nov-2007 at 05:18
Originally posted by Batu
I have read that in 1970's 3000 spetnaz were deployed in the border of Pakistan.300 Pakistani commando plus 500 mujaheeden beats the spetnaz force in 27 days.have you heard about that?
Yes, that's right. I've just discovered some original footage from that battle:
WATCH
they hold a competetion every year to find out who is the best already.havent you heard?( i am serious )1.vehicle rescue 2.defusing a bomb 3.navigation 4.etc.last two years Red Berets of Turkish Army won :).they are the best
But who shows up in these competitions?!? British Royal Marines or SAS/SBS? US Marines or US Navy Seals? Do the Americans or British even show up at all?
I recall the South African SF winning one year and India's SF winning another year.
Originally posted by Laelius
I'd go with units like the 22snd SAS, Delta Force, and Seal Team 6. These units are the cream of the crop, according to the founder of Delta they would take 60 men from Army Special Forces, Rangers, Airborne each of which was already a crack soldier in his own right and then pick maybe 2 or 3.
SEAL Team 6 is legengary in reputation. They are the cream of the SEALs. Former members say the first year they were formed, they trained 15 hours a day or more everyday, but for Thanksgiving and Christmas. They said they came up with numerous combat protocols, which previouly never existed for all types of scenarios.
Note that the regular SEAL training is so tough it pushes the limits of human endurance. You can see this in the Military Channel's 2002 six part documentary on the SEAL's BUDs training, where the recruits are forced to swim the length of an olympic sized swimming pool and back while completely under water without any breathing equipment whatsoever. Many of the would-be SEALs passed out just as they hit the wall of the pool on their return trip.
Originally posted by Laelius
I'd go with units like the 22snd SAS, Delta Force, and Seal Team 6. These units are the cream of the crop, according to the founder of Delta they would take 60 men from Army Special Forces, Rangers, Airborne each of which was already a crack soldier in his own right and then pick maybe 2 or 3.
One can make an argument that the SAS/SBS, Brit or Australian, is equivalent to the SEALs, Delta Force, Green Berets, etc., for they are the cream of the crop. However, SEAL Team 6 is a notch higher: The are the cream of the cream of the crop.
Perhaps the 22nd SAS unit is equivalent to SEAL Team 6. Or maybe not!
Originally posted by Batu
I have read that in 1970's 3000 spetnaz were deployed in the border of Pakistan.300 Pakistani commando plus 500 mujaheeden beats the spetnaz force in 27 days.have you heard about that?
Guess we'll have to scratch the Spetnatz off the list.
There's no way that 3000 US Army Rangers or Marines would lose to 300 Pakistani commandos + 500 rag-tag Mujahedeen fighters. (Recall that the Pakistanis have lost at least two wars with India which they themselves started. It's a no brainer that Pakistani commandos were involved in those Pakistani initiated wars.)
The quality of the Mujahedeen fighters is no different from that of Vietcong guerillas. The only difference is that the Afghan moutainous terrain is even more advantages than South Vietnam's jungle terrain. This is why the so called "Lion of the Panshirs", Ahmed Shah Masood, was able to repeatedly humiliate his Russian opponents. Of course, the Afghans got their rear ends kicked by the Russians until the US gave them Stinger missiles, with which they used to easily shoot down Russian fighter-bombers as well as transport and attack helipcopters. I don't think Masood, as amazing as he was, could do jack against the US, be it in the 1980's, and especially now.
Tough training is irrelevant. The Egyptians have one of the toughest training programs anywhere in the world yet the operational record for these special forces is appalling. They never pulled and operation correctly. cypriot police masscred them in the 70s and Palestinians did the same in Maltese fiasco back in the 80s.
what really matters for special forces is skill first and foremost. Shooting skills, Camoflage skills, survival skills etc. Muscularity and strength are simply irrelevent.
they hold a competetion every year to find out who is the best already.havent you heard?( i am serious ) 1.vehicle rescue 2.defusing a bomb 3.navigation 4.etc. last two years Red Berets of Turkish Army won :).they are the best
But who shows up in these competitions?!? British Royal Marines or SAS/SBS? US Marines or US Navy Seals? Do the Americans or British even show up at all?
I recall the South African SF winning one year and India's SF winning another year.
[
You are right it is a limited competition and Indians won it back in 02.
but US was there and so was UK and South Africa and France and some African countries but notably missing was Israel, Russia and others who may be considered top notch.
News clip
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NEW DELHI: Mention Special Forces and the intrepid Israelis, the gung-ho Americans or the secretive British come to mind. But, it appears that it is the Indians who are the toughest of them all. This is what a gruelling contest determined last week.
The Israelis were not there, but a team of Indias 10 Special Forces (SF), led by Captain Krishnadas, outshone their counterparts from the US, South Africa, U.K., France, hosts Botswana and a clutch of African nations in the Kalahari desert.
The second Indian team came fifteenth, out of the 28 that participated in the annual event that took place between 8-10 June. In addition, the two teams won a number of individual prizes.
A proud Special Forces officer says this is all the more creditable since the teams, each comprising of an officer, a non-commissioned officer and three paratroopers were pulled out of active duty and given just two months to prepare. This is the first time India has been invited to participate in the event. Last years competition was won by the South African Special Forces.
The event required a trek of 87 kms over three days with full combat load of 50 kg, all the activity being conducted under the desert sun during the day. The contest was kicked off on June 8 by a paradrop of the teams close to the border with Namibia. The events then progressively moved them east towards the Okavango Delta.
Here the team led by Major Animish Ranade suffered a mishap at the outset when Commando Mool Singhs parachute did not open and his emergency parachute landed him so hard that he fractured his ankle. Despite the mishap that cost the team points, it won the individual prize in the 35 kms endurance march that followed.
On June 9, Capt Krishandass team, scored with the individual prize for the navigation segment where the commandos have to move through 20 kms of trackless desert with just a compass, Ranades team stood second. This was topped by a casualty evacuation exercise that required them to carry a 50 kg deadweight, simulating a casualty, for 10 kms. Krishandas team stood first and Ranades second. On the last day the teams did a 17 kms speed march and Krishandas team again scored a first.
The Indians performed well in the other elements of the competition as well. These included a rifle and pistol firing competition, a 400 metre an observation lane exercise requiring them to spot seven targets and a final 5 kms home run that makes the grand finale of the gathering. A senior officer told TNN that such competitions which deal with our core business, are a great boost for the professional elan of the force. India currently has four SF units that have traditionally been asked to do the toughest jobs in the battlefield.
Currently they specialise in counter-terrorist work where using their own intelligence, they operate independently against terrorist concentrations in remote mountain and jungle regions in Kashmir and the Northeast.
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Another thing to note is that the competition has a pre arranged format which may be very different then either real life or training. But it is an open competition.
What really matters at the end is real time experience, and not how many days you can go hungry or how many bottles you can smash with your forehead. We know who is getting most real world experience.
In the end, the special forces are no match for a prepared infantry unit who can demolish or damage more in the open.
I'm familiar with that article. But it doesn't say which US special forces guys showed up.
But as Al Jassas messianically proclaims, toughness is "irrelevant"...
So India and Turkey can win these competitions, but are they the best?
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Originally posted by Al Jassas
Tough training is irrelevant. The Egyptians
have one of the toughest training programs anywhere in the world yet
the operational record for these special forces is appalling. They
never pulled and operation correctly. cypriot police masscred them in
the 70s and Palestinians did the same in Maltese fiasco back in
the 80s.
what really matters for special forces is skill first and
foremost. Shooting skills, Camoflage skills, survival skills etc.
Muscularity and strength are simply irrelevent.
"Tough training is irrelevant"? Rhetorically correct. Literally? Wrong!
In the case of the SEALs and holding their ability to hold their
breaths, they really do need to be able to swim for extended periods of
time underwater.
Like I said above, I agree your statement in rhetorical sense:
After some minimal level of considerable fitness, operational skills
are most important. For instance, a flabby guy who can handle a
gun can easily shoot and kill 7 time Tour de France champ, Lance
Armstrong.
Rest assured, the SEALs, Green Berets, Delta Force can do a lot of
things. They have plenty of operational skills and no doubt
they've developed a plethora of operational protocols (special forces
combat techniques) on top of their
extreme conditioning, this is particularly true of the SEALs.
Somalia, Ramadi (four Rangers tracking a sniper, non returned alive), and the mother of all, operation red wing are great examples on how tough training of US special ops work.
I'm not familiar with the Ramadi incident. However, you should
know that a lot of the insurgents are themselves Republican Guard
commandos, Saddam Fedeyeen, and so on. BTW, what do you think would have happened if you were to put in Red Berrets, French Foreign Legionaires, British SAS/SBS, Spetnatz, etc., instead?
During the 1989 invasion of Panama, a small team of US Navy SEALs were
surrounded at an airport, where they were supposed to have sabotaged
Noriega's private jet, and were all killed. If you're surrounded
and overwhelmingly outnumbered and have no air support, then you're
dead meat! No if's, and's, or but's about it.
As for the Somali incident, or the battle of Mogadishu in 1993 ("Black
Hawk Down" incident), the Americans killed about 1,000 - 10,000, but
lost only 18. That's a staggering kill ratio. No one really
knows how many were killed. The kill ratio in both Somalia and
Iraq (1991 and 2003) were so bad that the Pentagon goes out its way to
concoct ridiculously low bogus numbers. No doubt, they fear the
stigma of "genocide" and Yankee imperialism.
Please, read history not propaganda, the operation was a complete faliure, the aim, kill or capture Aidid and distroy his militia. Two month after the operation he became virtual master of Mogadisho and his position actually got stronger. Only 130 militia people died and 300-500 civilian not 10 000 as the Americans said. The Mogadisho incident shows that skill are far more important than being tough with big muscles. If the Americans made an approach similar to the one taken by the SAS in Operation Barras or the SAS operations in Borneo success might have been on their side but they didn't. They just jumped in being the strong and fearless Americans who's enemy should through their weapons on sight of them and bow and not try to resist.
Please, read history not propaganda, the
operation was a complete faliure, the aim, kill or capture Aidid and
distroy his militia. Two month after the operation he became virtual
master of Mogadisho and his position actually got stronger.
The Navy Seals claim a kill ratio of 200 to 1 in Vietnam. I find
this estimate at once both highly plausible and suspect. It is
plausible in the sense that they were directly or indirectly
responsible for that many VC (Vietcong insurgents) and NVA (N.
Vietnamese Army infiltrators into S. Vietnam) dead. I find it
highly suspect because the SEALs also had tactical air support as well
as tactical air insertion/extraction. Who gets credit for kills
done by US bombs and AC-130 gunships? Are they gonna count
civilians as combatants, because if so there is less explaining to
do. What would the kill ratio be if the SEALs were left on their
own, because sooner rather than later, they'd be surrounded by VC and
NVA since they were constantly working behind enemy lines?
But the real point here is that the SEALs, US Marines, Army Rangers,
101st Airborne, 82nd Airborne, can kill as many VC and NVA as they
want, they still lost. Indeed, Aidid, Saddam, the Taliban, Iran
all cite(d) Vietnam as a warning to the US not to invade.
Originally posted by Al Jassas
Please, read history not propaganda,
No one really knows how many Somalis were killed in Mogadishu.
But it is undeniable that the kill ratio favored the Americans--BIG
TIME! Keep in mind too that many of the 18 who were killed were killed due to the Blackhawk that was shot down.
And for your information, Chuck Horner, the architect of the air war in
Iraq in 1991 spuriously claims the US only killed 10,000-20,000 Iraqis
even though they bombed the hell out of Bagdad, destroyed 42 Iraqi
divisions, etc., like it was as easy as "shooting fish in a
barrel". This is pure garbage, the Pentagon is deliberately
low-balling the figures by a factor of 10. It's more like 100,000
- 300,000. Again, nobody really knows because nobody, neither the
US nor Saddam wanted to admit it. They could have EASILY killed a
lot more.
The US only lost 300 in 1991, and probably half of that was from
"friendly fire". One lucky scud killed about 78 US soldiers in a
rear base in Saudi Arabia.
So what was the kill ratio in 1991? 1000:1 ? 2000:1 ?
And what was the kill ratio in Somalia? 100:1 ? 500:1 ?
Originally posted by Al Jassas
Only 130 militia people died and 300-500 civilian not 10 000 as
the Americans said. The Mogadisho incident shows that skill are far
more important than being tough with big muscles. If the Americans made
an approach similar to the one taken by the SAS in Operation Barras or
the SAS operations in Borneo success might have been on their side but
they didn't. They just jumped in being the strong and fearless
Americans who's enemy should through their weapons on sight of them and
bow and not try to resist.
Repeat, the official Pentagon stats put it nowhere near 10,000 in
Somalia or 300,000 in Iraq in 1991. They low ball this
figure. I'm getting my estimates from people who condemn what the
US did in Iraq and even Somalia.
And mind you, although the US intervention in Somalia turned into a
total nightmare, but still saved hundreds of thousands of liveds, if
not millions.
Further, African soldiers, or militia men fighting for brutal warlords
are of very low quality. They are merely thugs with guns and have
very little training. Take for instance Sierra Leone in 1995,
when that diamond rich country hired Executive Outcomes, a S. African
mercenary organization, a small band of Executive Outcomes' commandos
were easily able to route the murderous rebel forces who overwhelmingly
outnumbered them. It was a stunning success in every measure, and
these bloody mercenaries ended up doing a good thing: They saved
10's of thousands of innocent Africans from literally being butchered
by the rebels.
Peace activists thoroughly condemned the government of Sierra Leone for
hiring mercenaries, even after the spectacular outcome. This was
a shame because the rebels came back with a vengence once Executive
Outcomes was let go along with its much needed services. The UN was
totally toothless in this Sierra Leone like it is in so many other places. (Of
course the UN's toothlessness in in large part due precisely to the
nefarious efforts of the US, Russia, China, Britain, France, etc., who
deliberately keep it weak! ) However, a positive thing that
resulted in the end was that the rebels knew that they were most
certainly beatable, which brought them to the negotiating table.
Mind you, I'm not for mercenary groups at all. It's simply a
dangerous precedent to use them, since they can be used for diabolical
purposes as well, which is certainly is the common case. BTW, I'm
for giving UN or African Union troops far more firepower.
Lastly, this is not to say that Africans or blacks can't fight, for
they certainly can. The most decorated unit in the Spanish
American War was the "Buffalo Soldiers" regiment. The best
American fighter pilots, i.e. bomber escorts, of WWII were the famed
all-black Tuskeegee airmen.
The best US tank unit in WWII was 761st "Black Panthers" Battalion:
That's Patton on the left, btw.
---------------------------
Executive Outcomes, that mercenary organization from S. Africa hired by
Sierra Leone, also has native African (black) commandos in its
ranks.
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