What is the dumbest idea that a high ranking military officer has ever proposed?
Operation Mikado gets my vote.
This was a plan for the SAS to crash land two Hercules on to a mainland Argentinian airbase during the Falklands War. The planes would then disgorge their load of SAS troops who would run around the base with the intention of destroying any Exocet missiles the found, before then walking overland to Chile.
This whole crack-brained idea was only dreamed up in the first place because the British military finally wised up to the threat of the Exocets to the task force.
It was a threat they they didn’t really have an effective counter to, and it was really, seriously, only blind luck that the Atlantic Conveyor took one for the team instead of one of the two carriers.
If the Hermes or Invincible had been hit, it would have been game over.
Thankfully, France was pulling every dirty trick in the book not to deliver more missiles to Argentina, missiles that had already been bought and paid for. France also strong-armed Peru not to hand any of theirs over.
But Britain still only had a best guess idea about how many Exocets Argentina had, and so destroying them became a priority, hence Operation Mikado, which was the ‘brain’ child of Peter de la Billière, the then commander of the SAS.
Unfortunately, there were several huge gaps in the plan. The first one was that no one actually really knew where the Exocets were stored, and no one really knew how well they were protected. Added to that, how the hell were the SAS supposed to trek across a foreign, hostile country undetected and unfollowed, to reach Chile? And, once they got there, what guarantees were there that Chile would open the borders and let them in?
It was a hard option to sell to the SAS, and several members of the unit voiced concerns, said they wouldn't do it, and actually called the whole thing a suicide mission.
And for context, this is the SAS, a unit that could tell us all we need to know about surviving suicide missions. This is the SAS, a unit that regularly took fifty per cent casualties in world war 2, but kept coming back for more. If the SAS are saying ‘no’ to a mission and saying the whole thing is suicide, then that is absolutely the best advice on the block, and you’d better listen.
So, true to form, the British high command sort of listened. The operation was quietly shelved, the SAS troopers who objected to dying in a mission that patently wouldn’t work had their careers ruined. And Peter de la Billière? Well, he clearly went to the right schools and knew the masonic handshake, because eight years later, he was in charge of the British forces on Operation Granby, advocating for more SAS involvement, including the Bravo Two Zero patrols, which went really well. If I’d ever been in the SAS, I’d have been breathing a huge sigh of relief the day that Peter de la Billière finally retired to write his memoirs.
Post-war intelligence revealed that the Argentinians anticipated a mainland raid against the Exocets, and the target airbases were heavily defended. Had it gone ahead, Operation Mikado would have been an absolute disaster.
So, yeah, the British forces are good, but they’re not infallible.
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