British SAS

The Special Air Service began in 1941 as David Stirling's private argument that a handful of men behind the lines could do a brigade's damage. The desert proved him right: jeep-borne raids with Lewes bombs destroyed more than 250 Axis aircraft on the ground — more than the RAF's fighters in the same period — and the winged-dagger badge and 'Who Dares Wins' date from those first improvised months.

Disbanded after 1945 and reborn for the Malayan Emergency, 22 SAS wrote the modern special-forces manual: deep jungle patrols, hearts-and-minds, the Selection course over the Brecon Beacons that became the world's template, and the counterterrorism art perfected in the Killing House at Hereford. Oman's secret wars — the nine-man stand at Mirbat in 1972 above all — were the regiment's connoisseur classics.

Then came the six minutes that made it the most famous unit on earth: the Iranian Embassy siege, London, May 1980, stormed on live television in black kit and gas masks. The Falklands, the Gulf (Bravo Two Zero entering legend and its cautionary literature simultaneously), Northern Ireland, and the modern wars followed. Every tier-one unit in the Western world — Delta Force first and explicitly — is in some measure a copy of Hereford's answer to Stirling's argument.

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