On this occasion no one can accuse Donald Trump of hyperbole. The President praised the Delta Force team that seized Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro as “incredible.” The operation to capture Maduro – codenamed “Absolute Resolve” – was months in the planning, and Trump watched it unfold in real time. “They broke into places that were not really able to be broken into,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

According to the New York Times, the operation began last August when CIA officers infiltrated Venezuela and began gathering intelligence about the habits and movements of Maduro. They were assisted by stealth drones high in the sky overhead and the information collated was used to construct a full-scale model in Kentucky of the president’s compound. The Delta Force commandos rehearsed the operation as they waited for the order to deploy from the White House.

Maduro’s seizure is a triumph not just for Trump but also for Delta Force

Trump gave the go order on Friday evening. Even he must have been apprehensive. In 1980, a Delta Force operation to free American hostages in Iran ended in disaster; 13 years later, a mission to seize a Somali warlord went awry and US special forces suffered many casualties, an operation immortalized in the book and film Black Hawk Down. One of the lessons learned from the Somali incident was the importance of “combined arms systems” – in other words, supporting the commandos on the ground with aircraft, tanks and other hardware.

More than 150 military aircraft were involved in Operation Absolute Resolve, eliminating Venezuela’s air defenses so that the helicopters with the Delta Force commandos could reach the target. One helicopter was hit and half a dozen soldiers inside were wounded but otherwise the mission was a stunning success and arguably the most audacious and effective special forces operation in history.

In 2011, a team of US Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden at his hideout in Pakistan. Mission accomplished. But it is easier to eliminate a target on neutral territory than it is to capture him in his own well-defended capital city.

In 1944, two British Special Operations Executive (SOE) officers, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Billy Moss, aided by local partisans, kidnapped German general Heinrich Kreipe in Crete, smuggling him off the island in a Royal Navy motor launch.

The previous year, the SS captain Otto Skorzeny and a German special forces team had succeeded in springing the deposed Italian fascist, Benito Mussolini, from detention in a remote hotel high in the Apennine mountains. Landing in ten gliders, the Germans stormed the hotel, overpowered the Italian guards, grabbed Mussolini and bundled him into a light aircraft that had deftly landed on the mountainside. The important difference between Mussolini and Maduro is that one wanted to be extracted and the other did not.

The seizure of the Venezuelan president is a triumph not just for Trump but also for Delta Force. It is always invidious to make such comparisons but Delta Force has arguably now usurped Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS) as the world’s premier special forces. Their training differs little but materially the elite American unit has the advantage because of the size and power of its armed forces. The British military is incapable of launching an operation similar in scale to Absolute Resolve.

Furthermore, the morale of Delta Force has not been dangerously eroded by politicians the way it has in the SAS. Only last week, a group of former senior officers in the SAS warned that the Labour government’s “lawfare” against the regiment could result in its soldiers becoming “risk-averse.” They continued:

Defend our defenders fairly, firmly, eyes open to war’s moral mess – or keep doing the enemy’s work, one leak, one inquiry, one broken soldier at a time. A democracy that won’t back its warriors won’t long endure.

Delta Force was the creation of Charles Beckwith, an American who served as an exchange officer in the SAS in the early 1960s. Beckwith was so impressed with the SAS (which was established in 1941) that he submitted a report to the US military calling for an equivalent unit, from which rose Delta Force in the 1970s.

Beckwith led Delta Force on its first ill-fated mission to Iran in 1980, a fortnight before the SAS stormed the Iranian embassy in London. That raid, captured on camera, made the SAS famous and feared throughout the world. Delta Force has just achieved something similar in making off with Maduro.