“They Couldn’t Walk 10 Miles” — Why British SAS Refused To Take Navy SEALs On Mountain Patrols

somewhere in eastern Afghanistan in the Spinar mountain range 4,755 m at its highest peak altitude where the air holds roughly 60% of the oxygen available at sea level. A fourman British SAS patrol was moving on foot through near zero temperatures 25 kg of Bergen on each man’s back, rifles unslung, picking through loose shale in total silence.

They had been on the ground for 9 days. They had resupplied once. They had not been seen. 72 hours earlier, a joint planning cell at Bagram airfield had been asked whether American naval special warfare operators, Navy Seals, should be integrated into the SAS’s mountain patrol program in Kar and Nangaha provinces.

The answer, according to a British special forces liaison officer who was in the room, was delivered without hesitation. They couldn’t walk 10 miles in that terrain, not with what we carry, not at that altitude. It would get someone killed. That assessment was not delivered with contempt. It was not a boast.

It was an operational judgment made by men who had spent years learning that the mountains of eastern Afghanistan do not negotiate, do not offer second chances, and do not care about your budget, your equipment program, or the reputation of your unit. And here is the thing the Pentagon briefings never quite captured. The SAS were right. This is the story of why.

It is a story about what happens when one military culture decides that individual human capability, not platforms, not numbers, not firepower, is the single non-negotiable asset in high altitude warfare. It is a story about the mountains the SAS learned to fight in before Afghanistan existed as a problem and the gap the gap created between them and one of the most celebrated fighting forces on Earth. It is not a story.

The institutions involved advertise. Stay with me until the end because the payoff is not what you expect. To understand what happened in those mountains, you have to go back to Wales. Specifically, you have to go back to the Breen beacons to Penifan. Elevation 886 m, the highest point in South Wales, a mountain that by the standards of Afghanistan’s spinar range is barely a hill.

But what happens on its slopes and across the 64 km of bogland scree and exposed ridge that surrounds it has been producing a specific type of human being for the better part of seven decades. SAS selection begins with a period known as hills phase. four weeks based at Senbridge camp Breen. Candidates drawn from across the British armed forces, primarily from the parachute regiment and infantry battalions are given a Bergen, a rifle, a compass, and a handdrawn sketch map, no GPS, no trail markers, no encouragement from the directing staff. The DS fully badged

SAS operators stand at checkpoints and say nothing. They note your time. They check your weight. If your Bergen falls below the required load, they add a rock. Then they give you the next grid reference and walk away. What you do with the ground between you and that grid is entirely your problem. The marches increase in distance and weight each week.

Week one opens with the fan dance, a 24 km tab over peny fan, ascending and descending the same peak twice, carrying a 40 lb Bergen plus rifle and water. That alone empties most candidates. The DS are not there to catch you when you crack. They are there to record it and load you onto a truck. Former SAS Sergeant Andy McNab, whose account of the Gulf War operation Bravo 20 remains one of the most widely read memoirs in British military history, has described arriving at the end of Hills phase as part of a group that had been 220 candidates strong at the start. 24

made it. 24 out of 220. The final exercise of the phase is called the long drag or endurance. 40 m 64 kilometers across the beacons. Bergen weight 25 kg not including food, water, and rifle. Time limit under 20 hours. Candidates navigate checkpoint to checkpoint alone against the clock regardless of weather, regardless of visibility, regardless of how much is left in the tank.

After 4 weeks of incremental destruction, they are forbidden from using established trails. The long drag does not end selection. It ends the aptitude phase. The candidates who survive it then spend 14 weeks in SF tactics, techniques and procedures, combat survival, CQB, signals, demolitions, advanced patrolling, foreign weapons familiarization, and then jungle training in Bise or Brunai.

The regiment’s mountain troop operators additionally train at the German alpine guides course at the mountain warfare school in Mittenwald, reaching a technical climbing proficiency that places them among the best alpine operators in the world. The pass rate for the full selection process is reported at below 10%.

Not 10% of the general population. 10% of highly trained soldiers from elite parent units who have already met the prerequisite service requirements and self- selected for the hardest course in British military service. Now, here’s the critical detail, the one that explains everything that happened in the spin gar.

What SAS selection is building through those four weeks of loaded marches is not simply a physically fit soldier. The mountains are not a fitness test. They are a revelation exercise. They are finding the specific human being who does not stop. Not the fastest, not the strongest, the one who when his legs have stopped responding to instruction and his mind has joined them in voting for the truck, finds something that overrides both and keeps moving.

That quality cannot be taught in a gymnasium. It cannot be replicated on a SEAL qualification course, however demanding. It is discovered discovered through exactly the kind of sustained unsupported suffering that the Breen beacons deliver across four Welsh winter weeks. The American special forces tradition at its finest produces exceptional warriors.

That is not in question, but the selection philosophy differs at a foundational level. But s basic underwater demolition seal training is extraordinarily demanding. It is designed to stress, to break, to discover who has what the teams call the quiet inside them. Hell week alone produces casualties at a rate that commands respect.

But Buds is a maritime selection. Its defining physical environments are cold, water, surf zone, and sand. The cognitive load is relational. It is predominantly tested through group exercises, boat crews, and shared evolution. SAS selection is solitary. Every checkpoint reached is reached alone. Every navigation decision is made without a partner.

The weight is yours. The pace is yours. The map interpretation at 2:00 a.m. in horizontal rain on a featureless bog. Yours alone. One selects for a man who performs under collective suffering. The other selects for a man who performs alone in the dark on a mountain with no one watching. And in the spinar range at 3,500 m above sea level operating in fourman patrols that might spend 9 days without resupply and without contact.

That distinction matters. That is the forge. That is what it produces. That is why what happened in eastern Afghanistan happened. The mountains of eastern Afghanistan, Karristan, Nangaha are not mountains in the way that the word typically registers for a western military planner raised on desert warfare doctrine.

They are a separate category of problem. The Spinar range peaks at 4755 m. Its lower operational corridors, the ridge lines and passes where patrol movement is actually conducted, sit between 2,500 and 3,500 m above sea level. At 3,000 m, the available oxygen in each breath runs at roughly 70% of sea level capacity.

At 3,500 m, that figure drops to around 65%. For an unaclimatized operator conducting vigorous physical activity, climbing, carrying weight, moving at patrol speed over loose terrain, those numbers translate directly into degraded cardiovascular performance, impaired decision-making at altitude and a measurable compression of physical endurance.

Temperatures at operational altitude in autumn and winter regularly drop below -15 C overnight. The terrain is predominantly loose shale, steep scree, and exposed rock with minimal cover. Wind speeds on exposed ridge lines can exceed 70 km per hour. There are no trails. There are no roads. Helicopter extraction in the event of a compromise may be impossible due to altitude performance limitations on rotary wing assets. The environment is not neutral.

It is an active enemy. The Taliban and al-Qaeda commanders operating in these provinces understood this. They had lived there. They had fought the Soviets there. They had moved through these mountains for decades. And they understood that the terrain itself was their most reliable defensive asset. That any force moving through it would be slow, would be audible, would be visible from distance, and would be exhausted before it arrived at any objective.

They were correct against most forces. The SAS mountain troop had been training for exactly this terrain since the Cold War. During the 1970s and 1980s, mountain troops defined operational scenario was northern Norway, the Scandinavian highlands, where any Soviet push through NATO’s northern flank would need to be slowed by British staybehind elements operating in subarctic mountain conditions.

The regiment trained there annually. They trained in the German Alps. They trained on the peaks of the UK’s highest terrain. Their mountain troop operators qualified to a technical climbing standard that rivaled professional alpine guides. By the time they arrived in eastern Afghanistan, the SAS mountain troop were not learning to move in this terrain. They were executing in it.

The patrol concept they operated was built on four foundational principles that distinguished it from standard American special forces mountain operations at the time. First weight discipline. An SAS mountain patrol carries what it needs and nothing else. No excess, no redundancy systems that add kilograms without adding capability.

The Bergen is weighed before departure and the contents are justified item by item. The difference between a 28 kg load and a 35 kg load over 9 days at altitude on that terrain is the difference between completing the patrol and being extracted as a casualty. Second, silence as a non-negotiable. Mountain patrols in the spinar operated under communications protocols that minimized electromagnetic signature.

Voice radio only in emergencies. Movement on shale at night requires a specific technique. Full sole placement, weight transferred slowly, no scrape, no click of metal on rock. It takes years to make that movement automatic. It takes years to make it automatic while carrying 25 kg and running on degraded oxygen and 4 hours of sleep.

Third, patience as an operational weapon. The SAS observation post doctrine derived from decades of covert surveillance in Northern Ireland, Oman, and the Faullands required the ability to remain static, concealed, and operationally effective for extended periods. 9 days in an OP is not extraordinary by SAS mountain troop standards.

It is a requirement that duration demands a psychological profile and a physical one that the selection process is specifically designed to identify. Fourth, self-sufficiency at the individual level. In the event that a patrol is split, compromised, separated by terrain, by weather, by enemy action, every man must be capable of independent navigation, independent survival, and independent exfiltration.

There is no version of an SAS mountain patrol where one man’s failure means the patrol’s failure. Every man is the patrol. That fourth principle is the one that makes the planning cells assessment of the Navy Seals operationally significant rather than culturally dismissive. It was not a statement about the SEAL’s courage.

It was a statement about their training architecture. Naval special warfare is fundamentally a team system but s builds boat crews. Seal platoon doctrine emphasises unit integrity, mutual support, combined action. That is a strength in the maritime and direct action environment seals are optimized for. But a 9-day patrol at 3,200 m in the spinar does not offer mutual support as a functional concept.

When the man in front of you is struggling at altitude on day seven of a 9-day tab and you have your own 25 kg bergen and your own oxygen deficit and your own temperature management problem, you cannot carry him. You cannot slow down for him. Slowing down in those mountains in that cold is how a patrol stops moving and starts dying.

The SAS were not saying Navy Seals were inadequate warriors. They were saying they had not been built for this specific thing. There is a difference, a significant one. The operational record of SAS mountain patrols in eastern Afghanistan between 2001 and 2009 remains substantially classified. What has emerged through parliamentary records, the accounts of embedded journalists, and the testimony of retired officers provides enough of a picture to understand the scale of what was achieved after the initial deployment of a squadron and G squadron

to Afghanistan in October 2001, which included Operation Trent, the largest SAS operation since the Second World War, a direct action assault on an al-Qaeda opium processing facility, 300 kil meters southwest of Kandahar. The regiment’s focus in eastern Afghanistan shifted to the long range reconnaissance and surveillance role that had always been its foundational capability.

The mountain op program was the engine of that capability. A typical patrol task in Kana or Nangaha would be inserted by helicopter to a landing zone several kilometers from the intended observation point low enough that the rotary wing signature would not be associated with the final position.

The patrol would then move on foot to the OP location, establish a concealed position with overlapping arcs of observation and begin surveillance of the assigned target, a rat line, a supply route, a compound complex, a mountain pass. The intelligence product generated was fed into the joint targeting cycle. Pattern of life analysis, movement patterns, vehicle identification, biometric data where possible, personnel confirmation against priority target lists.

The patrol duration 9, 12, 15 days was not a performance metric. It was a function of what the target required. The target did not move on the patrol’s schedule. So the patrol waited in the Kar river valley in the early years of operation enduring freedom. This patience produced intelligence on Taliban and al-Qaeda logistics networks that helicopter-born operations fast, loud, and compromised by their own signature within minutes of departure could not replicate.

The mountain provides what no drone flying at 20,000 ft can provide. Ground truth. A man watching through binoculars at 400 m can identify an individual. can confirm his patterns, can distinguish the courier from the commander from the local shepherd who just happens to use the same path.

That discrimination, the human ability to contextualize what you see, was the product that justified 9 days of cold and altitude and silence. One coalition intelligence officer speaking to a British defense journalist in 2007 described the output from SAS mountain patrols in the following terms. That what these patrols generated in a week was routinely more actionable than what a full UAV surveillance package generated in a month.

Not because the technology was inferior because the technology cannot read intent. It cannot feel the difference between a man who is walking somewhere and a man who is going somewhere. That quality, the trained human intelligence assessor embedded in the field at close range required the operator to be physically capable of remaining in that field indefinitely.

An operator who needs to be extracted on day five because his body cannot sustain altitude at combat load is not generating intelligence on day 7, 8 or 9. That is the operational consequence of the physical assessment. the planning cell made. It was not about pride. It was about what gets generated and what doesn’t.

In 2001, during the campaign around Tora Bora, the cave complex on the Spingar range where Osama bin Laden had retreated following the fall of Kandahar, an SASR, Australian SAS regiment patrol operating from an observation post at over 1,200 m spotted a group of al-Qaeda figures moving with what appeared to be a heavily guarded individual in white robes.

US intelligence initially assessed a possible bin laden sighting. The patrol held its position. It fed the targeting data. It generated the product. The patrol had been there long enough to know what normal movement looked like. It could therefore recognize what abnormal movement looked like. That is the product.

That is what the mountains trained for. That is what the nine days bought. What happened in the Breen beacons and what it enabled in the spin gar is not a story without cost. That’s the version of this story that gets lost in the comparison content, the VS videos, the ranking debates, the comment sections full of people who have never carried 25 kgs up a Welsh mountain in February rain, let alone a shale ridge at 3,000 m in Afghan.

In 2013, three British Army reserveists died during what was described as a selection exercise on the Breen beacons. Temperatures had reached 30° C. They were carrying Bergens of at least 27 kg. They collapsed at the end of the march. Three men on a training exercise in Wales. The mountains do not turn the danger off when the operation is theoretical.

The selection process that builds the mountain patrol capability extracts a physical price from every man who attempts it, including those who never complete it. stress fractures, torn ligaments, chronic knee damage from 40 mile tabs in boots on terrain that was not designed for human movement at speed under load.

The long drag 64 km 25 kg Bergen under 20 hours is not survivable without consequences for some candidates. The ones who pass pay for it in ways that don’t appear in the public record. On operations in Afghanistan, the toll was different, but it was real. Men on their third and fourth rotation carrying injuries that would have resulted in medical discharge in peace time.

Psychological weight from years of sustained high consequence operations, surveillance tasks where the wrong call, the misidentification, the misjudged pattern of life results in a strike on the wrong compound. the isolation of patrol work, the disconnect between the operational persona required in the field and the person who needs to function in garrison.

The SAS does not publicize its casualties. That is not institutional pride. It is operational security maintained as a culture. A culture in which the work is allowed to speak for itself without the apparatus of public acknowledgement. But the work has a human price. Every 9-day patrol has a human price. Every man who makes the long drag in under 20 hours has paid into an account that will eventually come due in some form in a knee, in a shoulder, in the cumulative weight of years spent at the edge of what a human body is designed to

tolerate. The SAS mountain patrol capability in Afghanistan was not a miracle of physical perfection. It was a remarkable and consistent demonstration of what the right selection architecture and the right training culture can extract from human beings who were already exceptional before they started. That distinction matters because the alternative reading, the one where the SAS are simply better than everyone else, fully formed, invincible, is the reading that erases the cost and in erasing the cost, dishonors the people

who paid it. So, let’s return to the planning cell at Bagram to the assessment that the Navy Seals couldn’t walk 10 miles in that terrain. Was it accurate? The answer requires context. The SEALs who operated in Afghanistan were by any objective measure elite soldiers. Seal team 6 DVGU the naval special warfare development group operated in some of the most demanding conditions of the Afghan campaign.

The battle of Takagar in March 2002 in which SEAL team six operators assaulted a fortified al-Qaeda position at top a 3,100 meter peak in the Shahikot Valley demonstrated not only courage of the highest order but a willingness to continue pressing an objective under conditions that would have ended any conventional operation.

Neil Roberts, Danny Diets, the Rangers who climbed that 70° slope under mortar fire and in thin air carrying full kit to reinforce a position pinned by an enemy they could not suppress from below. Nobody who watched Tacker unfold could argue that the SEALs and Rangers lacked the willingness to endure. But the planning cell was not assessing willingness.

It was assessing the specific physiological and navigational capability profile required for a 9-day covert mountain patrol at altitude. Willingness is a characteristic capability for sustained self-sufficient highaltitude covert patrolling is a training outcome. And in 2002, 2003, and 2004, the American special forces training architecture had not been built around the training outcome in the way the SAS system had been.

That is the substance of the assessment. It was not about who was tougher. It was about who had trained for this specific task in this specific environment over this specific duration. The answer at that time in that context was the British and the institutional response to that reality was neither denial nor adjustment. It was deconliction.

The mountain patrol role in eastern Afghanistan was assigned to British and Australian SAS elements. The SEALs operated in the direct action and maritime interdiction roles where their training architecture gave them genuine advantages. The joint planning cell made a competencybased assignment decision and the result was that both forces operated in the domains they were best prepared for.

That is not a failure story. It is how coalition’s special operations are supposed to work. But the reason it worked that way was because one party to the coalition was willing to say clearly and without diplomatic softening, these men cannot do this specific thing at this standard. Not today, not as currently trained. That honesty is rarer in military institutions than the public record suggests.

And it is exactly the kind of honesty that the SAS system, a system built on the principle that the mountain will tell you who you are and that no amount of institutional goodwill changes what the mountain says is structured to deliver. David Sterling founded the Special Air Service in 1941 with the argument that a small number of individually exceptional soldiers operating behind enemy lines could achieve effects disproportionate to their numbers by doing things that larger forces couldn’t or wouldn’t do.

The mountain patrol program in eastern Afghanistan was in one sense a direct expression of that founding idea. A four-man patrol, 25 kg Bergens, 9 days of cold and altitude and silence, generating intelligence that a company strength helicopter assault couldn’t replicate. Four men, 9 days, results that justified both.

The capability came from selection. The selection came from the mountains and the mountains, the Breen beacons, the Norwegian highlands, the German Alps, and eventually the Spinar itself were never lying about what they required. They required the man who doesn’t stop. Not when his legs vote against it. Not when his mind agrees. Not on day nine.

The SAS found those men because they built a system designed to find them. And in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, that system paid out in a form that no other force on the ground could fully replicate. That is why the assessment was made. That is why the assessment was correct. And that is why when the planning cell said they couldn’t walk 10 miles, they weren’t insulting anyone.

They were just telling the mountains truth.