Force
British SAS
The Special Air Service — the original modern special-forces regiment, born of WWII desert raiding. Who Dares Wins.
The Special Air Service began in 1941 as David Stirling's private argument that a handful of men behind the lines could do a brigade's damage. The desert proved him right: jeep-borne raids with Lewes bombs destroyed more than 250 Axis aircraft on the ground — more than the RAF's fighters in the same period — and the winged-dagger badge and 'Who Dares Wins' date from those first improvised months.
Disbanded after 1945 and reborn for the Malayan Emergency, 22 SAS wrote the modern special-forces manual: deep jungle patrols, hearts-and-minds, the Selection course over the Brecon Beacons that became the world's template, and the counterterrorism art perfected in the Killing House at Hereford. Oman's secret wars — the nine-man stand at Mirbat in 1972 above all — were the regiment's connoisseur classics.
Then came the six minutes that made it the most famous unit on earth: the Iranian Embassy siege, London, May 1980, stormed on live television in black kit and gas masks. The Falklands, the Gulf (Bravo Two Zero entering legend and its cautionary literature simultaneously), Northern Ireland, and the modern wars followed. Every tier-one unit in the Western world — Delta Force first and explicitly — is in some measure a copy of Hereford's answer to Stirling's argument.
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Bren
The Bren was the light machine gun of the British and Commonwealth armies from 1938 until the 1990s: a Czech design from Brno, re-engineered at Enfield for the rimmed .303 cartridge and named for both towns. Gas operated, fed from a curved thirty-round magazine mounted on top, with a quick-change barrel and a bipod, it was accurate, reliable and light enough for one man to carry and fire from the hip. It armed every infantry section of the Second World War, went to Korea and Malaya, and as the 7.62mm L4 was still in British hands in the Falklands and the Gulf.
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FN FAL
The FN FAL — Fusil Automatique Léger, or light automatic rifle — was the most widely adopted battle rifle of the Cold War. Designed by Dieudonné Saive at Fabrique Nationale in Belgium and chambered for the 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge, it served more than ninety nations, which earned it the name 'the right arm of the free world.' Britain and the Commonwealth carried it as the semi-automatic L1A1 Self-Loading Rifle, and it fought in the Falklands, Rhodesia, the Middle East and Africa, often on both sides of the same war.
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HK MP5
The Heckler & Koch MP5 is the submachine gun by which every other has been judged since the 1970s. It shrank the roller-delayed blowback action of the G3 battle rifle to the 9mm Parabellum cartridge and, uniquely among its contemporaries, fires from a closed bolt, giving it rifle-like accuracy in a compact package. Adopted by German police in 1966 and made famous by the SAS at the Iranian Embassy in 1980, it armed counter-terrorist units, police tactical teams and special forces in more than forty countries and remains in service today.
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HK MP7
The Heckler & Koch MP7 is a personal defence weapon: a machine pistol the size of a large handgun that fires a small, very fast 4.6x30mm cartridge able to defeat the soft body armor that stops every conventional submachine-gun round. Introduced in 2001, it uses a scaled-down version of the gas-piston rotating-bolt action of the G36 rifle, weighs about four pounds, and can be fired one-handed or shouldered from its extending stock. It serves German forces, the SEALs and special units in more than twenty countries, and was carried on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
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Sig Sauer P226
The SIG Sauer P226 is a full-size double-action service pistol introduced in 1984 for the United States Army's XM9 trials, which it lost to the Beretta 92 on price alone after matching it in every test of reliability and accuracy. A double-column development of the Swiss P220, made by J.P. Sauer in Germany and later in New Hampshire, it has no manual safety, relying on a decocking lever and a long first trigger pull, and it became one of the most respected sidearms of the late twentieth century: the pistol of the Navy SEALs, the SAS, the FBI and police forces worldwide.