The Effective Boundary of the SAS: Lawfare and the Reversal of Power

I write as a neutral observer, from a philosopher’s perspective. The desert origins of the British Special Air Service provide a practical starting point because the SAS was built around a discovery about power: a small force could produce effects vastly disproportionate to its size by recruiting a much larger field of geography, intelligence, mobility, logistics, concealment and enemy response. The National Army Museum records the SAS emerging in North Africa in 1941 as a small raiding force, with the Long Range Desert Group providing essential mobility and support (National Army Museum, n.d.). The effective SAS was larger than the SAS. More than eighty years later, the reversal is striking. A force built to exploit asymmetry now operates inside legal and informational systems capable of generating asymmetric effects upon it. The relations that extended its power beyond the organisation can now be understood alongside relations extending vulnerability back into it.

This reversal is no longer merely theoretical. At the 2026 Hereford Military History Festival, the Stirling Memorial Series included The SAS: Past, Present and Future, involving former 22 SAS commander Ed Butler, long-serving SAS and intelligence veteran Bob Parr, and George Simm, whose SAS service included the conflict with the IRA in Northern Ireland (Hereford Military History Festival, 2026). Contemporary discussion around British special operations increasingly includes the legal consequences of operations in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan. Australia provides a related but institutionally separate case: the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry examined allegations concerning possible breaches of the Law of Armed Conflict by members of Australia’s Special Operations Task Group between 2005 and 2016 (Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force, 2020). These histories should not be conflated. Their significance here is structural: military action now continues through legal and informational environments long after the immediate operation has ended.

This is where the word lawfare requires precision. It is commonly used in two different ways that should not be allowed to slide into one another. The first is strategic: the deliberate use of law or legal process to produce effects contributing to an objective. Dunlap’s influential formulation concerns law used as a means of accomplishing military objectives, and his later work explicitly discusses lawfare as a form of asymmetric warfare while rejecting the assumption that it must necessarily be malign or illegitimate (Dunlap, 2001; 2017). The second meaning is looser and often polemical: legal action experienced by its target as excessive, hostile or politically motivated. These are not equivalent. An investigation, prosecution, civil action or adverse judgment does not become lawfare merely because it imposes severe consequences. Whether a particular proceeding constitutes deliberate lawfare is an evidential question about its use, purpose and circumstances.

Beneath both meanings, however, lies something more fundamental. Lawfare is possible because legal systems already contain asymmetries that can be exploited. A relatively small input, a claim, referral, filing, piece of evidence or legal argument, can recruit machinery vastly larger than its point of origin: investigators, courts, governments, lawyers, administrative systems, media and obligations extending across jurisdictions. A legitimate allegation supported by strong evidence can activate the same machinery. An investigation may be necessary, a prosecution justified and a judgment correct while still demonstrating the underlying structure. Lawfare does not create this asymmetry. It strategically exploits a property already present in the system.

That is the critical reversal. The early SAS organised geography, logistics, intelligence and enemy response so that small interventions could recruit a much larger field into producing disproportionate effects. Contemporary legal processes organise information, obligation and institutional response so that relatively small inputs can also recruit a much larger field. The comparison does not equate military raids with legal proceedings, nor does it establish that proceedings involving British or Australian special forces constitute lawfare. It identifies the same abstract relationship operating through different material systems: consequential power need not be proportional to the size of whatever initiates it. The tactical insight has, in this sense, escaped the battlefield.

Law is only one particularly powerful expression of a wider asymmetry in contemporary information systems. A statement can activate journalists, investigators, courts, governments, markets, archives and digital networks. Transmission can take seconds while verification takes years. A claim can cross the planet almost without friction while reconstructing the event it describes may require enormous resources. One actor can introduce information while hundreds become institutionally obliged to respond. Whether that information is true, false, useful, mistaken or malicious does not remove the asymmetry. Truth concerns the status of the information. Asymmetry concerns the architecture through which information becomes consequential.

The deeper difficulty appears when those consequences return. A claim prompts institutional response; response becomes news; news changes political attention; attention changes institutional behaviour; institutional action produces documents and events that become new information. No conspiracy or common intention is required. Different systems can act rationally according to their own rules while collectively producing a pattern none controls. The relation among them becomes an organised process in its own right, carrying memory in archives, procedures, precedents, incentives and expectations. Each response changes what becomes possible or probable next. The signal does not merely circulate. Its circulation changes the conditions of its return (Wallace, 2025; 2026). This is consistent with work on complex adaptive systems, in which collective behaviour emerges through interactions among adaptive components rather than being reducible to any one of them (Holland, 1992).

The critical failure occurs when consequence begins to masquerade as evidence. An investigation establishes that an investigation exists. Publicity establishes circulation. Political concern establishes political concern. Institutional caution establishes that precautions have been taken. None independently establishes the originating allegation. Investigations can uncover independent evidence and courts can evaluate it according to explicit standards; those distinctions are precisely what must survive circulation. Without them, one source repeated through a hundred institutions can acquire the social appearance of a hundred sources. Consequences can become enormous while the underlying evidential base remains unchanged. A system can then begin manufacturing apparent confirmation from its own responses.

The intervention follows directly: decouple consequence from recurrence without decoupling consequence from evidence. Preserve provenance through recurrence. Preserve independence through aggregation. Preserve uncertainty through amplification. Reports must distinguish new evidence from repeated transmission, allegation from investigation, investigation from finding, and institutional response from independent corroboration. Corrections must travel through the relations that gave the original information its force. Otherwise the informational object can be corrected while its consequences continue reproducing themselves. The practical test is whether the larger arrangement can change course when its evidence changes.

This is why the SAS example reaches beyond either special forces or lawfare. Contemporary institutions have become extraordinarily powerful by extending themselves through law, finance, media, technology and information. Those extensions also create pathways through which they can be acted upon. Scale produces capability and exposure simultaneously. Connection extends reach in both directions. Responsiveness provides control and susceptibility. The same architecture can expose genuine wrongdoing, protect the vulnerable, coordinate societies, propagate error or be deliberately exploited. Good, bad or ugly, the asymmetry remains. Power increasingly generates its own exposure.

There is some sense in which this reversal belongs to the zeitgeist. The underdog principle has not disappeared into a world dominated by enormous states, corporations and institutions. It has migrated into the infrastructure connecting them. A small actor can potentially stand at one end of an enormous chain of consequence, while an institution with extraordinary material power can stand at the other. The SAS makes the reversal unusually visible because its history begins with the opposite direction of travel. It demonstrated that understanding the field changes what large and small can do. The same insight now applies to the field surrounding it. The safeguard is not to suppress allegations, weaken accountability or privilege institutions over individuals. It is to preserve the difference between evidence about an event and consequences generated by responses to it. We have built a civilisation in which the wheel can turn towards whatever its own turning makes consequential. The task is not to stop the wheel. It is to stop mistaking its turning for the road.

Companion pieces

Crime and Punishment: The Generative Structure of Law and Disorder
https://daedeluskite.com/2026/09/13/crime-punishment-generative-structure-systems/
Examines how law, enforcement and disorder recursively produce the conditions to which they subsequently respond.

The Open System: Technology, Security, and the Management of Permanent Exposure
https://daedeluskite.com/2026/04/23/the-open-system-technology-security-and-the-management-of-permanent-exposure/
Explores how extending a system’s capabilities simultaneously extends the relations through which it becomes vulnerable.

Disinformation Wars
https://daedeluskite.com/2022/12/21/disinformation-wars/
Examines information environments in which recurrence and replicability can acquire consequence independently of evidential quality.

References

Dunlap, C.J. Jr (2001) ‘Law and Military Interventions: Preserving Humanitarian Values in 21st Conflicts’, paper presented at the Humanitarian Challenges in Military Interventions Conference, Washington, DC, 29 November. Available at: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/3500/

Dunlap, C.J. Jr (2017) ‘Lawfare 101: A Primer’, Military Review, May–June, pp. 8–17. Available at: https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/May-June-2017/Dunlap-Lawfare-101/

Hereford Military History Festival (2026) ‘The SAS – Past, Present and Future’, Stirling Memorial Series, Hereford Cathedral, 26 September. Available at: https://www.herefordmilitaryhistoryfestival.com/events-26

Hereford Military History Festival (2026) ‘Our Speakers for 2026’. Available at: https://www.herefordmilitaryhistoryfestival.com/speakers-26

Holland, J.H. (1992) ‘Complex Adaptive Systems’, Daedalus, 121(1), pp. 17–30. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20025416

Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force (2020) Afghanistan Inquiry Report, Public Release Version. Canberra: Department of Defence. Available at: https://www.defence.gov.au/about/reviews-inquiries/afghanistan-inquiry/resources

National Army Museum (n.d.) ‘David Stirling: The Phantom Major’. Available at: https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/david-stirling (Accessed: 2 October 2026).

National Army Museum (n.d.) ‘Origins of the Special Forces’. Available at: https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/special-forces-origins (Accessed: 2 October 2026).

Wallace, G. (2025) ‘The Logic that Lives’, Daedelus Kite, 29 October. Available at: https://daedeluskite.com/2025/10/29/the-logic-that-lives/

Wallace, G. (2026) ‘Semantics Follows Frequency: Why Meaning Repeats and History Rhymes’, Daedelus Kite, 8 August. Available at: https://daedeluskite.com/2026/08/08/semantics-follows-frequency/