SAS missions in the 2020s: From Baltic counter-sabotage to Red Sea raids

The Special Air Service has spent the past six years operating across a landscape of fragmented threats—from the frozen borders of Eastern Europe to the chaos of collapsing states and the contested waters of the Arabian Peninsula. What emerges from these deployments is a picture of a unit stretched across multiple theaters, adapting its methods to match the shape of modern conflict.

In the winter of 2025 and into early 2026, G Squadron of the SAS was stationed in Estonia and Latvia as part of Operation Northern Sentinel. The assignment was straightforward in concept but complex in execution: identify and dismantle sabotage networks targeting energy infrastructure across the Baltic region. The threat was not conventional military invasion but what strategists call hybrid warfare—coordinated attacks on critical systems designed to destabilize without triggering a formal declaration of war. Working alongside local security services, the SAS operators tracked intelligence assets attempting to slip across the Narva border. By January 2026, several high-value targets had been detained, though the full scope of the operation remains classified.

Three years earlier, in April 2023, a different kind of urgency drove SAS personnel into Sudan. Civil war had erupted in Khartoum, and British diplomats and their families were trapped in the capital. After a COBR meeting at Downing Street, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak authorized a night extraction. A joint team of SAS operators, Royal Marines, and RAF personnel boarded an American military aircraft and flew into the city. They moved through active combat zones and past multiple checkpoints to locate the diplomats, then drove them eighteen miles to an airfield where RAF transport planes waited. The operation succeeded without reported casualties, though the risk was substantial—moving through a city in the grip of armed conflict, with no guarantee of safe passage.

During 2022 and 2023, SAS deployments to Ukraine operated in a different register entirely. The unit's role was to train Ukrainian special forces and support sabotage and reconnaissance operations against Russian positions. Leaked American military documents from early 2023 revealed that the UK had deployed approximately fifty special forces personnel to Ukraine, representing more than half of all Western special forces operating in the country at that time. The scale of the commitment was significant, though the nature of the work—training, advising, conducting operations alongside Ukrainian forces—remained largely out of public view.

By late 2025, SAS and SBS teams were conducting coastal raids in Yemen against Houthi command and control centers. These were not air strikes but ground operations—small teams moving into position to disrupt the infrastructure supporting attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea. The missions targeted the guidance systems used in anti-ship missiles and the supply lines feeding drone operations. Teams recovered Iranian-manufactured missile components for technical analysis, gathering intelligence while degrading the Houthis' operational capacity.

On the domestic front, the SAS has maintained its traditional role in counter-terrorism and hostage rescue. In October 2020, special forces boarded the oil tanker Nave Andromeda off the Isle of Wight after stowaways made threats to the crew. In November 2021, SAS operators supported police raids in Liverpool following a taxi explosion outside Liverpool Women's Hospital. These operations, though smaller in scale than overseas deployments, reflect the unit's continued responsibility for what the military calls the "Black Role"—the unglamorous, essential work of protecting the country from internal threats.

What these five operations reveal is an institution operating across multiple time zones and threat environments simultaneously. The SAS of the 2020s is not the unit of legend that stormed the Iranian Embassy in 1980. It is something more distributed, more specialized, more embedded in the machinery of modern statecraft. Whether the pattern continues depends on how the world's conflicts evolve—and whether the demand for small teams of highly trained operators continues to outpace the supply.