A former commanding officer of the Special Air Service told his men in Northern Ireland that their lives were worth less than those of terrorists during the delicate peace negotiations in the 1990s.
The extraordinary revelation, delivered with a ruthless perspective on a soldier’s life, was shared on The Independent’s SAS: The Shadow War podcast.
Listen to the final eighth episode of SAS: The Shadow War here
Colonel Richard Williams, now retired, commanded Britain’s elite unit in Northern Ireland during the process that led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. He told them bluntly that they might have to sacrifice themselves for a better future.
“In this particular scenario, at this particular moment in history, we as soldiers must recognise the life of a terrorist is, on behalf of our nation, worth more than our lives,” he told them.
“If one of us die, it isn’t going to bring the peace process down. But if one of them die at this particular moment, it could do.”
The former SAS colonel argues that it goes to the heart of what distinguishes the profession of arms from civilian life: a soldier accepts that his own survival can never be the overriding objective.
His life, like his weapon, becomes one of the resources available to the state in pursuit of a political objective. Sometimes that calculation means killing the enemy. Sometimes it means exposing yourself to greater danger so that the enemy does not die.
And, at the furthest extreme, Williams says, the bargain can require a soldier to accept almost certain death.
“You signed up for this,” he said. “The unlimited liability contract. There is no health and safety, and there are no rights. You are here to die for your country and stop your country dying.”
His argument is uncompromising but not, he insists, bloodthirsty.
In Northern Ireland, he was operating as the peace process gathered momentum. The IRA remained armed and dangerous, and SAS soldiers were still being deployed against men whom intelligence indicated might be carrying weapons.
But the strategic calculation was changing. Lethal force remained available when absolutely necessary. If someone raised a weapon and appeared about to kill a soldier or his colleagues, Williams said, his men were entitled to shoot.
But the standard he expected went further than simply staying within the rules of engagement, which were called the ‘Yellow Card’ during the British Army’s deployment to Northern Ireland.
He wanted highly trained troops to exploit surprise and self-control to create the possibility of an arrest. The same philosophy underpins his much broader view of warfare.
“The currency of war and combat is death,” he said.
“We exchange our lives and our enemies’ – and unfortunately, when it happens, civilian lives – for political outcomes.”
Williams, who left the army after commanding the SAS in Iraq and elsewhere on combat operations, has been an outspoken critic of the government’s decision to repeal the Legacy Act and replace it with the Northern Ireland Troubles Act.
Many veterans argue it exposes them to years of judicial scrutiny for carrying out their duties decades ago.
He is also a critic of what he says is the UK’s lack of preparations for future wars and the enfeebling of the contract between soldiers and the governments they serve.
Death, he argued, is the one form of currency peculiar to warfare, because governments ultimately employ military force to achieve political objectives knowing that people may have to die in the process.
Williams said that he had discussed this calculation with then-prime minister Tony Blair ahead of the US-led invasion of Iraq, which led British forces into decades of war in the Middle East.
He said any prime minister contemplating military action must confront two key questions.
“How many of my men, including me, are you prepared to see destroyed to achieve your chosen mission, your chosen outcome?
“And how many of the other side – including women and children, and extend it to cultural sites and anything else of value – are you prepared to see destroyed to achieve your chosen outcome?”
Williams says Blair’s answer was essentially that casualties should be kept as low as possible. But soldiers must accept that their lives are part of the trade of war; the main commodity of exchange.
“When you’re designing an operation, you factor in how many of your men you can have killed, but still achieve the mission, and you still go and do it.
“If you don’t have that mental calculus that you’re prepared to sacrifice some of your own people, tragic as it is – and yourself – then you can’t be a combat soldier.”
It is an unusually stark description of military service at a time when Western armed forces have invested enormously in reducing their own casualties through body armour, precision weapons, surveillance, drones and remote warfare.
Williams argues that none of those advances removes the underlying obligation.
“If the value of your soldiers’ lives is so much that they can’t combat, stay at home,” he said.
His philosophy reaches its logical extreme in the defence of the nation against an existential threat. Imagine, he says, a scenario in which national survival required every soldier committed to an operation to die.
That would be “a bad day to be a soldier”, he says. But it would not invalidate the order.
The soldier has volunteered for a profession in which the country can legitimately ask him to give up his life in order that the country survives.
Northern Ireland presented a subtler version of the same bargain.
Instead of being ordered towards almost certain death, Williams’s men were being asked to increase their personal exposure to danger because the political value of restraint had risen.
The soldier therefore had to subordinate not just his life but his instincts of self-preservation to the national objective. Williams says his soldiers accepted it.
“It wasn’t an exceptional order,” he said. “It was a reminder. They were prepared to do that.”
But the new legislation, Williams and another former SAS squadron commander, Major David* insist that Britain’s most elite troops may also fear that their government does not “have their backs” when they come home from war and combat.
“If you expect young men and women to sign up and to serve the state and risk their lives serving the state,” he said, “then you owe them a duty of care in the long term.”
Listen to the full series of SAS: The Shadow War on Apple Podcasts and Spotify
