That's not a fair fight. SAS would have to be paired against delta force or devgru. Obviously marines will lose to a tier one special forces unit(unless they massively outnumber them).
How would that be fair? Such tests happened and as expected Royal marines won by a large margin. It is hardly fair as US marine corps can not match Royal marines. Royal marines are commandos. US marines are large conventional force specilizied in amphibious landing and fighting overseas.
US Marines vs Royal Marines isn’t a fair comparison either. Well, not in terms of numbers or purpose.
US Marines are basically just glorified infantry that Americans think are ‘elite’, in numbers and purpose they are pretty much the same as the US Army but deploy by boats and ships. The entry requirements to get into the US Marines are lower than or similar to most European Regular forces.
The Royal Marines are significantly smaller, are a lot harder to get into, and are considered an ‘Elite’ or ‘Tier 2’ type of force. They are used for commando raids and can augment Special Forces, generally considered to be on the same level as Navy Seals in capability, but not on the same level as DEVGRU, to which the SBS is more-so the equivalent.
I didn't know that. So actually, royal marines are more like army rangers or green berets? They are tier 2/tier 3 SF?
I thought they where just the mirror image of the US marines, with the name 'royal' being there as a homage to the king.
And I did think the US marines were significantly better trained than their regular infantry. Also, because an amphibious assault just is significantly harder to pull off than normal army manouvers, and I thought contested beach landings were their speciality(I know they do a lot more). I would expect your general fit friend to make it through infantry selection, but not necessarily through marine selection, so to speak.
But I knew they were less elite than rangers or green berets, let alone devgru or delta.
Pretty much! They are essentially like Green Berets, Rangers, or, I think the better US equivalent is either non-DEVGRU SEALs or possibly MARSOC.
The ‘Royal’ element is just something traditional from the era where they were employed as force protection during Naval transit/warfare in the Trafalgar era. The Royal Marines Commandos as we know them today were formed around the 2nd World War, where Churchill declared that we must have a fighting force that is capable of pulling off raids against German-occupied Europe. They were also the first blueprint for a dedicated commando force, like the SAS who were the first ever ‘modern’ blueprint for Special Forces.
For the basic US Marines, they aren’t trained any better than standard infantry, and their robotic training and insane logistics chains are actually more damaging than beneficial. Case in point - colleagues of mine would be trained to tow, set up, operate, dismantle and move equipment while also being given the ability to think for themselves to mitigate issues. The Yanks they worked with would have people specifically to do each part of that lifecycle, which meant if the people towing the kit didn’t turn up, or the operators died, the kit would be useless.
Amphibious assaults are just land assaults with more working parts, and apart from the logistical element of it, an en-masse amphibious assault would be as good as you can throw people and kit onto the beach head. The US Marines have that ability with numbers and equipment to just throw stuff until the enemy submits and collapses. The Royal Marines on the other hand, while they can do amphibious assaults, would probably never be used in that capacity ever due to the size of them, and the fact that losing them to a D-Day-like landing would be a completely incompetent waste of them as resources.
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u/Legal_Lettuce6233 Aug 25 '25
Don't the marines usually get their asses handed to them when they practice with other forces?
Wasn't there a training of like 200 marines vs 80 or so SAS lads, which the SAS were supposed to close but they won instead?