British Special Forces in the 2030s: UKSF, ‘Special Operations’ and ‘NATO First’

British Special Forces in the 2020s

The United Kingdom’s Special Forces (UKSF) provide the sharp edge to British foreign policy.[1] This is reflected in their status and organisation, UKSF forming a Directorate, a headquarters within the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) separate from those of the other armed forces and headed by the Director UKSF, a major general from the British Army or Royal Marines who reports directly to the Prime Minister and Defence Secretary. The units he oversees provide that sharp edge by carrying out missions of high political sensitivity and risk in situations where deploying conventional, ground-holding forces is not an option. Such missions might include direct strikes on critical targets, reconnaissance on behalf of the intelligence and security services (MI6 and MI5) and the UK’s allies, rescue or extraction of British and friendly personnel from danger zones, covertly training and fighting alongside armed proxies and pre-empting or quick reaction to terrorist attacks in the UK and abroad. The potential political fallout from these missions means they must be covert and, ideally, deniable; consequently, UKSF specialise in inserting small, clandestine parties into denied territory which achieve strategic effect disproportionate with numbers via combining very high-quality personnel – selected meticulously from already serving members of the British armed forces – with tactical doctrine combining speed and surprise and technology often unavailable to other forces.

This paper discusses UKSF in the context of UK national strategy in the mid-2020s and onwards, which is evolving in reaction to the looming threat of conventional war in Europe and beyond. The UK’s Special Forces are its one undeniably world-class military capability still remaining after several decades of major cuts to defence spending and consequent reduction in military capacity, particularly to the Army.[2] Over this same timeframe, UKSF has grown conspicuously in size and capability, and a key contention of this paper is that they represent a highly cost-effective means not just for the UK in particular to meet challenging policy aims and remain relevant to allies but the way in which they are deployed tells much about the strategic value of Special Forces in general.[3] The current UK Government, under Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Defence Minister John Healy, clearly recognises this value, not only assigning UKSF a key role in their new, Europe-focused defence strategy but embracing another recent development, the British Army and Royal Marines’ development of ‘Special Operations’ capabilities. The term ‘Special Operations’ is usually employed, loosely, to mean ‘anything beyond conventional warfare’ and many – particularly in the USA and other NATO countries – treat the terms ‘Special Forces’ and ‘Special Operations Forces’ as interchangeable. This is certainly not the case in the UK: as clarified below, UKSF and the new British ‘Special Operations’ forces are not the same, in organisation or employment and outlining how they differ might give some clarity over what these terms mean in general, in theory and practice.

UKSF in their context

Special Forces are something of a British speciality. The UK pioneered their use in the Second World War, and UKSF still centres on two units formed then, the Army’s 22 Special Air Service Regiment (22 SAS) and the Royal Marines’ Special Boat Service (SBS); both perform the same range of tasks, but 22 SAS specialise in airborne insertion while the SBS works in the littoral, the area where land meets sea. In 2005, UKSF added the Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR), whose principal role is covert intelligence gathering in denied territory, but also, more controversially, inside the UK and other friendly territories in counterterrorist scenarios. The following year, 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment (1 Para) was assigned to UKSF as the Special Forces Support Group (SFSG), providing 22 SAS, the SBS and SRR with infantry support, including extra firepower, cordoning areas around objectives and quick reaction to unforeseen enemy action. UKSF has integral communications and information support courtesy of 18 (UKSF) Signal Regiment, a British Army Royal Signals unit whose personnel undergo a form of UKSF’s arduous selection and training process. Organic air transport comes courtesy of the Chinook heavy helicopters of Royal Air Force No.7 Squadron and the lighter Dauphins of 658 Squadron of the Army Air Corps, the latter based at 22 SAS HQ at Credenhill and supporting UKSF in domestic counterterrorist operations.

Context for UKSF’s current and future development comes from the radical change in the UK’s threat environment since Russia launched its offensive against unoccupied Ukraine in February 2022.[4] Until then, UKSF worked in an environment of counterinsurgency and ‘remote warfare’ abroad and counterterrorism at home, and a presumption that peer-level inter-state conflict, if it ever happened, would be resolved ‘sub-threshold’ via covert penetration and subversion of the opponent’s society. This reached its apotheosis in the idea – central to the Johnson, Truss and Sunak Governments’ ‘Global Britain’ policy programme – that kinetic action was now just one end of a scale of ‘strategic competition’ against adversary powers or transnational terrorist groups trying to penetrate key areas of the world. The British ‘Special Operations’ forces formed in the early 2020s were intended explicitly for this kind of ‘sub-threshold’ or ‘irregular’ action – falling traditionally under UKSF’s remit – as we cover below.

The world was already moving back towards a paradigm of great-power confrontation via conventional warfare, or the threat of it, when the Russians attacked. UK MoD reacted in several ways, most obviously Operation Interflex, a programme involving tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers being trained by the British and allied armies at UK facilities, and Operation Mobilise, initiated by the then Chief of the General Staff (CGS, official head of the British Army), General Sir Patrick Sanders, wherein the British Army is reorientating its doctrine, organisation and training towards conventional warfare in Europe.[5] The next shaping factor came in July 2024 with the election of a Labour Government promising a major review of UK defence policy in light of Russia’s aggression. Unsurprisingly, when its Strategic Defence Review was published in June 2025, its core narrative centred on the slogan ‘NATO First’, ‘global competition’ giving way to facing up to Russia in Europe and the North Atlantic, enacted through a bold, ten-year vision of reinvestment in the UK’s armed forces and defence industry to prepare for prolonged, conventional confrontation in the NATO region.[6]

Significantly, the Review included a short chapter on the part UKSF and the new ‘Special Operations’ forces might play in this new, NATO-centric defence strategy. Reviewing these proposals and their possible implications, forms the backbone of what follows. This matters firstly because it marks the latest stage in the conspicuous expansion of UKSF’s role in British defence strategy since the 2010s, culminating in two of Britain’s armed forces now being led by former UKSF officers, General Sir Roland Walker, who served with 22 SAS prior to being Director in 2018-2021 as CGS, and General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, appointed as the first Royal Marine First Sea Lord, head of the Royal Navy, in 2025 having been Commanding Officer SBS in 2009-2012 before succeeding General Walker as Director in 2021. Secondly, there are signs in the Review – admittedly brief ones – that the government envisages UKSF and the new ‘Special Operations’ forces playing a key part in NATO’s strategy of deterrence via denial – confronting potential aggressors with a credible threat of defeat. This strategy centres on rapidly deployable reaction forces, the latest NATO Force Model – adopted in direct response to the Ukraine War – creating a new, multinational Allied Reaction Force which conspicuously includes ‘Special Operations’ forces from a number of member states.[7] The Review envisages UKSF as a framework force for another new formation, NATO’s projected Special Operations Task Force 2026, indicating how far their focus might now be ‘NATO First’. What the Review says about UKSF’s strategic role is, therefore, some indication of what might lie ahead for Britain in NATO as well.

‘NATO First’ and ‘Special Operations’

The Review is unequivocal that UKSF remains a national asset: ‘Defence must continue to enhance its Special Forces, ensuring UK sovereign choice by maintaining this strategic capability at the very highest level.’[8] This is linked to their deterrence via denial value, ‘first mover advantage’ allowing them to outmanoeuvre ‘peer adversaries in support of national objectives’ as well as guarantee the safety of British citizens in world danger spots.[9] Moreover, they provide a template for the future of British military forces, a working microcosm of the MoD’s projected ‘Integrated Force’, technologically enabled and constantly innovating new means of hurting potential enemies across the ‘five domains’ of land, sea, air, space and cyber.[10] As to ‘NATO First’, UKSF can provide ‘exquisite sovereign support’ for the projected Special Operations Task Force; choice of words is telling here, ‘exquisite’ being a current MoD buzz-term for capabilities which are cutting-edge but limited in quantity, making a virtue out of necessity after two decades of swingeing spending cuts and loss of tactical mass.

The ‘Special Operations’ forces will also form part of this Task Force, so we must now ponder what their role might be. This is currently unclear: there is no British Army or MoD definition of ‘special operations’ within the public domain and NATO’s is imprecise, covering a broad range of units ‘designated to undertake complex and dynamic security missions within the evolving strategic environment’ some under command of service, theatre or even battlefield-level headquarters, contrasting with the explicitly national-strategic role of UKSF.[11]

Most prominent of these new units is the British Army’s Special Operations Brigade, an evolution of the Specialist Infantry Group, formed in 2017 and intended clearly for ‘strategic competition’, consisting, as it did, of five teams of officer and non-commissioned officer instructors, each drawn from a single Infantry regiment, tasked with advanced training and mentoring for the infantry of friendly armies in regions important to British interests. In 2021, the Specialist Infantry was reformed into a new unit, The Ranger Regiment, now the core of the Special Operations Brigade. The Rangers identify themselves explicitly as a ‘land special operations regiment, operating and fighting by all means alongside partners world-wide’; each battalion is assigned to ‘operate overtly or discreetly in complex, high-risk environments, taking on some tasks traditionally done by Special Forces’ in a specific geopolitical region (1 and 3 Battalions in Europe). Such operations form part of ‘the emergent competition between states and with non-state actors over international rules and norms’ – the language of ‘Global Britain’ rather than ‘NATO First’.[12] The Special Operations Brigade is intended to fight as well as train, Rangers being expected, under many circumstances, to go beyond mentoring partner forces into escorting them into combat and, significantly, ‘gathering information to inform targeting’; to expedite this, each battalion now incorporates a conventionally-organised Gurkha company for infantry support, and the Brigade also includes 1 (Special Operations) Squadron from the Honourable Artillery Company, a British Army Reserves unit specializing in deep reconnaissance and target acquisition for long-range artillery and tactical airpower, something identified explicitly as a key Brigade role but also done by 22 SAS in the past.[13]

The Rangers have deployed 691 times in their first three years and report some of these missions delivering valuable political influence and intelligence in the regions concerned.[14] They now lie at the heart of an ambitious project to expand the British Army’s ‘land special operations’ capabilities as part of Operation Mobilise.[15] The British Army has adopted a doctrine for the conventional battle of ‘recce strike’, in which the main effort consists of advanced surveillance assets locating enemy forces for strikes by air, artillery and missiles at long range and deep into their rear areas; in announcing this new doctrine in 2023, the Army made it explicit that ‘The Ranger Regiment and Special Operations Brigade will play key roles in this new approach to finding the enemy as far forward as possible and neutralising the threat’ and they have since practiced long range patrolling alongside European NATO SOF in exercises in Scandinavia and the Baltic.[16] Significantly, the British Army’s 11 Brigade, previously the Security Force Assistance Brigade and intended to train allies in non-combat situations, is also being restructured as a ‘recce strike force’ and, indeed, ‘the Land Special Operations Force’s fighting formation’ making extensive use of drone and AI technology alongside four regular infantry battalions with specialist training.[17] Both brigades remain explicitly Army assets, falling under Headquarters Field Army, which oversees the generation and planning of UK land operations.

The Royal Marines are also moving into ‘special operations.’ 3 Commando Brigade, their core formation, was redesignated the Commando Force in 2022 and in line with the Future Commando Concept of 2021, its two main component units, 40 and 45 Commandos, which previously ‘ground held’ at battalion strength, now operate independent ‘Strike Companies’ – three per Commando – as part of two Royal Navy Littoral Response Groups (LRGs). The LRGs are amphibious task forces intended to ‘pre-empt and deter sub-threshold activity, and counter state threats’ in key regions, LRG North in the NATO region and LRG South in the rest of the world – fundamentally 3 Commando Brigade’s old role as ‘out of area’ intervention force but more focused and on a smaller scale.[18] However, like the Rangers, the Strike Companies are also training in deep patrolling and targeting, in their case focusing on hostile anti-access/area denial (A2AD) systems in key littoral areas or maritime chokepoints. The LRGs are part of the Fleet, the Commander Littoral Strike Group, a Royal Marines major general, reporting to the Director UK Strike Force, a rear admiral overseeing Royal Navy forces deployed operationally.

So, it seems that the British Army and Royal Marines are gravitating strongly towards having their own ‘Special Operations Forces’, possibly another stage in the apparent evolution of the Army in particular towards a ‘boutique’ force offering a range of ‘exquisite’ capabilities alongside allies supplying the mass. However, these are not ‘Special Forces’ in the British sense of the term and how their activities will be deconflicted with UKSF remains unclear.

What they might be up to already…

Further points of discussion arising from the SDR’s chapter on UKSF include what they might be doing already. For reasons obvious already, the UK MoD’s only response to enquiries about current UKSF deployments is an unyielding ‘no comment’, operational details sometimes remaining highly classified for years afterwards. Nevertheless, UKSF’s alleged involvement in Ukraine may provide a good example of ‘implausible deniability’, particularly given the UK Government’s very hard line against Russia and a trickle of open-source indications that UKSF and British ‘Special Operations’ forces are, indeed, working there. Ranger Teams deployed to Ukraine in early 2022 to train Ukrainian troops with the NLAW anti-tank guided missiles, which proved so effective against Russian armour in the opening battles of the invasion, but withdrew a few weeks beforehand on direct orders from Downing Street. However, other British troops stayed on: in January 2022, with the invasion looming, 45 Commando helped evacuate the British Embassy from Kyiv and then, in April, as reported by Lieutenant General Sir Robert Magowan, Deputy Chief of the UK Defence Staff and former Commandant General, Royal Marines, returned to help re-establish the British mission and, more cryptically, ‘support other discreet military operations in a hugely sensitive environment and with a high level of political and military risk’.[19] In March 2023, leaked US government documents suggested at least fifty UKSF were operating inside Ukraine, the largest of several NATO SF contingents allegedly assisting the Ukrainian military and in December a Polish journalist reported encountering British and Polish SF near Bucha.[20] A year later, in an interview with Associated Press, General Bryan Fenton, Commanding General of US Special Operations Command, reported that SOCOM was learning about the war in Ukraine ‘mostly through the eyes of our UK special operations [sic] partners.’[21] Finally, responding to Russian media accusations, in early 2024, the then Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, admitted there were British military personnel on the ground ‘supporting the armed forces of Ukraine’ but in small numbers with no plans for any major deployment.[22]

Conclusions and Caveats

Presuming UKSF are working with Ukrainian forces – most likely training Ukrainian troops and reporting on the efficacy of British-supplied equipment – they are playing their part already in the UK’s new ‘NATO First’ defence strategy and possibly a very effective one, supporting a close friend, testing concepts and learning from the war the hard way. This might also provide a good indication of the ongoing strategic usefulness of Special Forces in general, in that they allow discreet and sometimes highly impactful military intervention with reduced risk of escalation, no mean thing when confronting an aggressive, expansionist regime with the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal.

One possible caveat, however, is whether this is repeatable elsewhere. Sustaining a Special Forces deployment to Ukraine could be easy: operators could enter overland, via Poland and western Ukraine, be supplied via that route, and would work alongside a friendly government. Things might be more complicated without such routes or basing nearby. Until 2023, UKSF had dedicated long-range airlift courtesy of C-130 Hercules of RAF No.47 Squadron, invaluable to special operators in that they could lift sixty troops rigged for parachuting or twenty tonnes of supplies out to ranges of over 3,000 km and operate from rough airstrips in undeveloped territory. There is no indication these have been replaced, apparently leaving UKSF reliant on allies or non-specialised Royal Air Force support for long-range airlift in less accessible theatres.

What to do with the various ‘Special Operations Forces’ is also problematic. Products of a previous, less urgent strategic paradigm, they are having to reorient rapidly to ‘NATO first’ and a new era of conventional warfare. Nevertheless, it could be argued that with The Rangers and Future Commando Force, the ‘Special Operations’ label is an unfortunate misnomer, obfuscating capabilities which are not SF but still valuable strategically. They are deployable rapidly in cases of trouble flaring up somewhere, and their training and role could make them useful for extended ‘remote warfare’ operations alongside local proxies, similar to NATO and Arab Special Forces in Libya in 2011 or Emirati Special Forces in Yemen after 2015, releasing UKSF for more urgent or delicate missions demanding covertness and deniability.[23] Moreover, through building the capabilities of British allies, the Rangers in particular can enhance the value of those alliances to both sides while signalling British commitment and intent downstream of impending crises, so playing a critical part in UK defence strategy into the 2030s, but as ‘Specialist Infantry Plus’, rather than ‘SF-Lite’.

However, there is a shadow hanging over UKSF right now – the ongoing Inquiry, presided over by Lord Justice Haddon-Cave, investigating allegations that UKSF members committed unlawful killings in Afghanistan in 2010. This runs concurrently with the Northern Ireland Coroner’s ruling that soldiers of 22 SAS were ‘not justified’ in killing three members of the Irish Republican Army in an ambush at Clonoe in Northern Ireland in 1992, and the stream of further allegations of unlawful conduct it has set off. These cases are sub judice at the time of writing, but could strengthen demands for UKSF to face greater Parliamentary scrutiny, possibly via a Select Committee similar to the one overseeing Intelligence.[24] Given the potential for security breaches and increased hostile scrutiny, this may have a freezing effect on future UKSF deployments and could alter the relationship between the Directorate and its political masters. This would be handled better in a separate paper once these cases are resolved, but it is worth noting that, given their high status with the British public, no serious Prime Minister would want to impose collective punishment on Britain’s Special Forces and besides, they are too valuable as national assets to do this too severely if at all.[25]

Whatever comes next, UKSF remain a vital asset for missions of national importance, high urgency and high political sensitivity and a most efficacious way of keeping the UK globally relevant.