SAS Operation Oman [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

Tony Jeapes (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 247 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd (November 17, 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0718300181
• ISBN-13: 978-0718300180
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,445,922 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good book on an important but obscure conflict, October 9, 2007

By 

Mark bennett "Mark" (portland, OR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: SAS Operation Oman (Hardcover)

In the early 1970s, the country of Oman in the middle east was facing a local revolt on the verge of becoming a civil war. The rebels controlled territory within the country, controlled a border with Yemen across which they get unlimited military supplies and had taken control of the local population. Into this situation, the British introduced small SAS special forces teams.

The SAS teams has a mandate to win the war with minimum money and minimum casualities among their own force. The book provides almost a textbook example of how to break a well-armed insurgency using mostly local forces. The author provides a good mix of the strategic decisions made (the plan), actual accounts of operations and post analysis of what went right/wrong.

One of the things I took from the book was the SAS approach to propaganda wars. The first principle given in the book was that the strongest propaganda is the truth. The best thing to counter an enemy radio or information network is to establish total credibility by telling the truth good or bad. If the enemy doesn't do the same, their broadcasts cease to have an effect. The seoond thing that was interesting was that they did better introducing radios at a cheap price into the marketplace in the country as opposed to giving them away. The observation was that when people bought something even at a subsidized price, they had a sense of ownership and would not let anyone take it away from them. Radios given away didn't create the same sort of attachment.

The Oman operation was probably one of the better counter-insurgency campaigns ever fought. Especially with outside forces helping. The only caution is that the solutions offered in the book don't scale up to insurgencies past a certain size. The SAS team plan worked because of the quality of the men involved. But in any military there are only so many people at a certain level and attempts to scale up special forces/special force warfare inevitably fail because a large force inevitably can't mantain the standards of a small picked force.