Ex-Special Forces chief: ‘There are still people who would like to saw my head off’

“People sleep soundly in their beds,” George Orwell is often said to have written, “because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” Sir Graeme Lamb is just such a rough man. By his own account, he is “comfortable with violence”, and has spent 35 years dealing it out in Europe, Africa and the Middle East as a member of both the SAS and the broader Army. The aphorism is perhaps the most famous condemnation of pacifism ever committed to paper. And yet the lines most often proffered in defence of his profession clearly annoy him. “That’s actually a misquote. An American [Richard Grenier, a Washington Times columnist] came up with that,” he says. “What Orwell originally wrote was something along the lines of, ‘Civilised men basically can kind of go about their business because less civilised men are there to guard and feed them.’” The distinction is important, says Lamb, because Orwell’s point is not to set the men of violence aside from the public they serve. Otherwise, he says: “We assume that people like Putin and the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] are running on the same moral compass, and it’s just frankly not the case. [Britain is] intrinsically different.” The rough men of Britain are as much a part of that civilisation as teachers, dustmen and Oxford dons. They’re not indestructible. They have the same frailties as the rest of us. Despite the extraordinary demands of the job, they must be subject to the same rules. “We’re all part of the same pool,” he remarks. “I don’t have any demons. I’ve eaten them all. We are by nature comfortable with violence. But that’s not necessarily a normal state of mind. “The fact that I have a sort of preparedness to bring violence to somebody out there who’s going through Victoria Station today means I’m in a different place [from most people]. But my moral compass is absolutely clear.” The moral quandaries around a peaceful society’s relationship to its soldiers are as old as war itself. But the current era of global conflict has brought them into sharper relief than at any time in decades. In Israel , a recent film about the war in Gaza raises uncomfortable questions about what happens when you bend the rules around collateral damage, for example. In the US, there are calls to reconsider the role of artificial intelligence (AI) following the bombing of an Iranian school. But in Britain, the public debate centres on the Special Forces. Over the past year, the Government’s Northern Ireland Troubles Bill and Lord Justice Sir Charles Haddon Cave’s inquiry into alleged SAS war crimes in Afghanistan have raised urgent questions about what the country asks of the warriors in the shadows. The revelation last week that SAS operators were arrested in 2023 on suspicion of murder – and the regiment’s commanding officer placed under criminal investigation – after an operation against Isis terrorists in Syria added further fuel to the debate (last year, military prosecutors decided not to seek charges against anyone over the incident). Should the SAS or SBS operators fighting in the most remote, risky and ambiguous corners of the modern battlefield be held to the same moral and legal standards as civilians or even regular infantry soldiers? Or does the grim reality of what Winston Churchill called “ungentlemanly warfare” mean, unpalatable as it might be, that they must be judged by a different standard? Are the military, the Government and the Right-wing press engaged in special pleading to cover up the most heinous of crimes? Or are ideologically driven activists and lawyers waging a witch-hunt against innocent – and often elderly – men? Lamb, 73, has deliberately avoided the public debate because, he says, he has no desire to become a talking head or to spend his retirement dwelling on “something I once was.” He declines to comment on any of the specific cases. Yet on the questions of principle – how strictly the rules of law should or should not be applied – he has much to say. And he proceeds from a hard-line premise. “I have never had any doubt that the law of armed conflict – Queen’s regulations, and the like – has been anything other than what I call an absolute ceiling,” he says. “Absolutely [Special Forces] have to accept it. Most people say: ‘Nah, you’re lying. Don’t trust you. You would say that, wouldn’t you? You’re one of them.’ Yeah, well, the answer is that I’ve been absolutely clear. We must not lose that position of humility and humanity which differentiates us from the rest.” He may not air them in public, but he clearly does have views on the state of the nation and its defence. He thinks cutting foreign aid to fund defence is probably a false economy; that lavishing more money on the Armed Forces (though he has no objection to that) will not solve all the country’s security problems; and that the biggest current national security threat today is a false narrative of British decline pushed by adversaries via social media. Lamb speaks with a rare degree of authority. He was commissioned into the Army in 1973, passed selection to the SAS three years later, and went on to serve in Northern Ireland, Iraq, the Balkans and Afghanistan. He rose to director of the Special Forces and Commander Field Army, before retiring in 2009 as a lieutenant general. He was, by all accounts, held in high regard among the soldiers under his command, who called him “Lambo”, to rhyme with “Rambo,” and admired both his skill as a soldier and coarse sense of humour. One legend, repeated approvingly by those who served under him, holds that he once responded to a fellow officer who admitted to feeling depressed about losing a leg: “You stupid c---, we can park anywhere now.” Lamb himself claims to have no recollection of that particular incident, but confesses that it is “well within the foul language of my sort of approach”. “Often leadership isn’t saying: ‘Everything’s going to be wonderful.’ It’s about being honest about the reality one’s in,” he adds. “I think most soldiers are probably instinctively or intrinsically stoic. So we accept what you cannot change, and you change what you can. It’s straight out of Epictetus.” Even in the Armed Forces, however, he says he felt like “a misfit who fitted”. Born in Stanmore, he has retired to Surrey , and speaks Home Counties English. But his upbringing and roots are firmly Scots – his mother from Greenock, his father from Renfrew. A military career was not so much a choice as an inevitability. His father, a banker, joined the Cameron Highlanders at the start of the Second World War, and enjoyed soldiering so much that he stayed on afterwards. A scholarship paid for Lamb to board at Rannoch School, a now-closed private school in a remote part of the Highlands where he “picked up the skill of being pretty comfortable when cold, wet, rain-and-wind-swept”, but struggled academically. “I’d never have got to university because I’d never had the qualifications. Only one A-level, one Scottish Higher and five O-levels. I struggled through education. I didn’t have many choices,” he recalls. He entered Sandhurst just before his 18th birthday and was commissioned into the Queen’s Own Highlanders, the successor to his father’s regiment, in 1973. He deployed immediately to Belfast, then at the height of the Troubles. Three years later, he passed selection to the SAS, then still a highly secretive unit almost unknown outside the Army. There was no extra pay, no glamour, and, he says, incomprehension in the Highlanders that he would want to leave the regiment. Lamb himself says he did not really know what he was signing up for, beyond “physical and mental challenge with the prospect of operations, which was alluring”. Applicants were issued with a single sheet of printed paper telling them they would have to walk long distances with heavy packs, but no further detail of what the regiment did. It turned out to be a good choice, however. He continued to serve in Northern Ireland and “around the bazaars” (he declines to go into further detail). In the first Gulf War, he worked alongside General Peter de la Billière to plan SAS operations in Iraq, which means he knows the story of Bravo Two Zero patrol from the inside. On Sept 11, 2001, he was director of Special Forces and helped lead Britain into what would become the war on terror. But one of the proudest moments in that role came earlier that year, when a young SAS officer in Macedonia warned him that a third Balkan war was likely to break out. The fact that it did not, he says, was down to a flurry of military diplomacy that gives the lie to the “assumption that we are all about victory”. He is no less of a misfit in retirement. Bald and clean-shaven except for two unusually bushy eyebrows, he eschews the unofficial ex-general’s uniform of Tattersall shirt and tweeds for something more akin to Christopher Eccleston-era Doctor Who – battered leather jacket, open-necked shirt, crumpled chinos. Unlike some of his peers, he has deliberately avoided making public interventions on defence or other worthy causes. Many of those who do, he says, he rates highly, but “I’m not f---ing interested”. H adds: “No, that’s not true. I’m interested, but I’ll be dead soon. So the trick is therefore to not waste my time trying to be somebody I was or wasn’t or want to be. I’m beyond that.” He is much happier “going out with a cup of tea or over the hills or whatever the case may be with the dogs – one Rhodesian ridgeback and two all-sorts rescues – and such, and just thinking about what I’m looking at”. The comfortable hills of Surrey are about as far from the sodden heather of his youth as it is possible to imagine, but it is his wife’s home county and convenient for London. He asks to keep details of his family and children to himself, on the grounds that “there are still people who would be grateful to come and saw my head off”, and he would rather not place his relatives in danger. He is not someone who worries unduly about the legends surrounding the SAS and SBS. The myths are operationally useful, and also great soft power for the country. Asked whether fame and exposure have changed the ethos inside the regiment, he pauses, as if he has never considered that question before. Eventually he says: “No, I don’t think so.” He reaches for a quotation from Thomas Paine: “Reputation is what men and women think of us – character is what God and angels know of us.” It takes character to pass selection. Those motivated by reputation, he says, generally can’t hack it. (For a dyslexic who failed academically, Lamb deploys literary quotation with disarming ease. He claims he just memorises lines he comes across and agrees with, rather than being as well-read as he sounds. I’m not entirely sure I believe him.) That said, there are a couple of things that should be better understood. The first is “the assumption is that we are all indestructible, what I call ‘mental neutrals.’ And we’re not. We’ve got families, we’ve got stuff. We get on with life. At the end of the day, when you have to bury...” He doesn’t finish that particular sentence. The second is that war zones are basically horrible, and that those who fight in them are “hanging on between fear, adrenaline and anxiety.” He adds: “If you’re on your third target of a night, and the assumption is every time you go on target, somebody’s going to kill you. Then this is a challenging mental sort of order. That doesn’t mean you’re out of order. You’re holding this moral ceiling, while knowingly climbing into the aircraft that