A band of brothers: The extraordinary story behind a team of SAS mercenaries

This is the second part of a series, you can read part one here. The Egyptian Air Force. That was the true menace. Soldiers and tanks, the royalists could manage. But against the enemy MiG 17 fighters and Ilyushin II-28 bombers they were helpless. So, the mercenaries’ first task seemed simple: recce Sanaa, the Yemeni […]

German Commandos save Lufthansa Flight 181

Thursday, October 13, 1977, began as just another routine trip for the crew of Lufthansa Flight 181, as the Boeing 737 departed the island of Palma de Mallorca bound for Frankfurt Germany. Onboard, 86 passengers and five crew members went about their business, while the coast of mainland Europe slipped by below them. Little did […]

How a bunch of SAS mercenaries stopped an entire Army

What happens if you put a Yemeni tribal fighter, an Egyptian soldier, a European mercenary, a Saudi prince, a Jordanian king, and an Israeli politician together? A war teeming with geopolitics, controversy, war crimes, covert ops, and sheer adventure. The North Yemen Civil War (1962-1970), fought between an Egyptian-backed puppet government and a royalist tribal […]

A glimpse into the Covert Ops of the Vietnam War

On August 2, 1964, four North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked the destroyer USS Maddox (DD731). This did not turn out well for the North Vietnamese. Between American guns and air support, one NV patrol boat was left dead in the water with the remaining badly shot-up. The Maddox took a few machine-gun hits. In spite […]

UK Special Forces breakdown: 18 (UKSF) Signals Regiment

This is the first part of a multi-part series exploring the various units within the U.K. Special Forces (UKSF). The Special Air Service (SAS) is widely recognized the world over and is often erroneously considered the only special operations unit Britain has. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In this series, we’ll cover the […]

Ukrainian airplane shoot-down just another one in a long list of military screw-ups

The world reacted with horror over the mistaken shootdown of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 by the Iranians. The shootdown killed 176 people including 82 Iranians. What made that tragedy even worse was the fact that Flight 752 had just taken off from Tehran’s international airport.  This highlighted a common problem among disasters of this […]

SAS Old School: The Oman mission that saved the Special Air Service

“The Special Air Service is superfluous. It doesn’t belong to our Cold War army.” This was your conventional post-war British military thinking. Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, the “anomaly” of the SAS had been corrected and the Regiment disbanded. It took a communist insurgency in Malaya (1950-1960) to resurrect it. But its position still […]

Remembering the Father of American Air Forces 

Most Americans today don’t recognize the name Billy Mitchell, but he is considered the father of the United States Air Force. Mitchell was a very early proponent of airpower and was the commander of all American air forces in France during World War I.  Mitchell was a forward thinker who predicted decades before World War […]

Stoner 63: Trumpet of the Navy SEALs

Once Eugene Stoner, designer of the AR-15/M-16 series of combat rifles, left Armalite Corporation in the early 1960s, he decided to design a unique weapons platform that used a common receiver around which a family of small arms could interchange. Such a commonality would enable it to transform into a rifle, carbine or light machine gun […]

A hot MACV-SOG Christmas Day in Laos

Christmas Day, 1968 was just another day for MACV-SOG Spike Team Idaho. Early that morning ST Idaho was loaded onto Kingbees and flown to the Quang Tri launch site. That day’s target was one of the MA targets west of the DMZ in Laos, along the river that ran through the DMZ. In the briefing […]

‘Surrender to the Germans? Nuts!’

On this day 75 years ago one of the most famous lines ever uttered by an American military officer was said when the Germans surrounded the 101st Airborne around Bastogne, Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge. General Anthony McAuliffe, the acting Division Commander in the absence of General Maxwell Taylor who was in the […]