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Royal Marines

Special Boat Service (SBS)

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SBS Unit Profile

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How Buster Crabb Died

Note: The SBS was formerly known as the Special Boat Squadron, however it has been officially redesignated the Special Boat Service.

Web Sites

Special Boat Squadron (SBS) - Special Forces of the World

Special Boat Squadron (SBS) - SpecWarNet

The Royal Marines train their landing craftsmen at Poole in Dorset. Here, specialist training is provided for marines, corporals, sergeants and officers in the handling and navigation of craft from small, fast assault craft, up to the heavy lift landing craft of over 100 tons. It also prepares marines for service on board ships of the Fleet and it is the home of the Special Boat Service.

Deployments:

1997 - Under the cover of darkness, it took 12 men in black no more than a few minutes to break into the Dounreay nuclear plant in Scotland. In an exercise designed to test the plant's security last year, commandos from the Special Boat Service apparently gained control of the site before the UK Atomic Energy Authority's police even knew they were there Anthony Pointer, chief of the armed force whose job is to safeguard nuclear installations in Britain, had set up the exercise to test security. When he saw the result he wisely asked his employer, the UKAEA, for more staff. But the response soon led to his own resignation. "The UKAEA have consistently failed to provide adequate resources for the UKAEA Constabulary," he wrote in a secret memo quoted in The Sunday Telegraph. These are disturbing revelations. They suggest that the highly enriched uranium and plutonium at Dounreay could be stolen by terrorists and made into atomic bombs. They raise doubts about the security of one of the world's largest stockpiles of plutonium at the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria, which is also guarded by the UKAEA police. The 50 tonnes stored there is theoretically enough to make 10 000 nuclear weapons.

Comments from former SBS member:

After reading your description regarding the SBS, I feel that it is important for me to encourage you to make some amendments. It is the general mistake for people to make the assumption that the SBS is inferior to her special 
forces cousin, the SAS. However, this is untrue.

Her majesty's government hold the SBS in higher regard than the SAS, and there is one important reason for this. The recruits for the SBS are of a higher calibre due to the fact that they have already been through the arduous training required to become a Royal Marine commando in the first place. Members of the SAS are drafted from all areas of the British Army and therefore would have received inferior basic training to those members of The Royal Marines who have already attended the longest basic infantry course within NATO and indeed the world.

There is another reason why the SBS is regarded higher than the SAS, and this is the contrast between the regiments attitudes to service. Because the SAS are forever in the public eye, members of the regiment usually have inflated egos. This has been known to regularly interfere in their professionalism, most notably during the Falklands conflict where order were disregarded on many occasions, putting the task force deployed at enormous risk. The Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher straight away put heavy reliance on the SBS due to the fact that she now held a great deal of mistrust for the SAS.

Selection for the SBS is also more arduous in comparison of that undertaken by the SAS. Not only do recruits have to cover the syllabus required to become a member of the SAS, they also have to be educated in methods of diving, submarine insertion, advanced marine reconnaissance, canoeing and other specialist waterborne methods of warfare.

As far as the amalgamation of the special forces goes, this is as good a speculation. If it was to happen, an SBS officer would most certainly be in charge of the newly formed regiment. Although training has become more integrated between the two services, SAS servicemen still feel a certain amount of jealousy for not being able to become SBS members, and tensions between the two regiments exist today stronger than ever!

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) keeps the SBS regiment size down to 250 in strength. This is to maximise efficiency, mobility and the level of secrecy, which the SAS can never have due to it's sheer size in numbers and profile in the public eye. High profile missions are therefore always undertaken by the SAS, but the ones that really do directly relate to the security of the United Kingdom and the safety of Her majesty ( the missions which are kept secret in order to prevent panic within the nation!) are always, in my experience anyway, undertaken by members of the SBS Regiment.

I Hope that i have been able to convince you. Also there is reading material avaliable, a book entilted "Not by Strength but by Guile" by a former collegue of mine, written in an attempt to set the record straight about which is the most elite service.

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