Category: Soldiering
Look how young and thin they all looked like! Grumpy
Ronald Reid-Daly was a Rhodesian military officer renowned as the founder and commander of the elite Selous Scouts special forces unit, noted for their unconventional counter-insurgency tactics during the Rhodesian Bush War.
Ronald Francis Reid-Daly was born on 22 September 1928 in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia.
Initially aspiring to become a farmer, he instead pursued a military path and joined the Southern Rhodesian contribution to the British Special Air Service (SAS) during the Malayan Emergency, serving with “C Squadron” in counter-insurgency operations against communist insurgents.His experiences in small-team jungle warfare and pseudo-operations there profoundly shaped his later approach.
Returning to Rhodesia, Reid-Daly helped form the Rhodesian Light Infantry (RLI) in 1961, becoming its first Regimental Sergeant Major and later commissioned as a captain, earning recognition as a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for his early counter-insurgency successes.
In 1973, at the behest of the Rhodesian Army commander, Lieutenant General Peter Walls, he came out of near retirement to establish a new elite unit, the Selous Scouts, named after the famed African hunter Frederick Courtney Selous. Reid-Daly recruited highly skilled personnel and employed rigorous training to prepare teams for pseudo-operations; small squads would disguise themselves as guerrillas from ZANLA or ZIPRA, infiltrate insurgent groups, gather intelligence, and direct air or ground .
These operations made the Scouts extraordinarily effective, achieving a high operational impact despite a relatively small force, though they drew controversy for their morally ambiguous methods, including alleged poaching incidents and unorthodox psychological tactics.
The Selous Scouts under Reid-Daly became a highly feared counter-insurgency unit. Teams typically operated in pairs or trios across Rhodesia and cross-border into Mozambique, blending intelligence gathering, sabotage, and misinformation tactics.
The unit capitalized on Reid-Daly’s Malayan experience, particularly using turned insurgents for infiltration and applying aggressive, precise engagements to disrupt guerrilla . Despite their military effectiveness, this independence and the Scouts’ secretive operations created tensions with the Rhodesian command hierarchy, culminating in a court-martial for Reid-Daly following disputes with senior officers.
He resigned in August of that year and eventually moved to South Africa in 1982.
In South Africa, Reid-Daly commanded the Transkei Defence Force from 1981 until his expulsion in 1987 following political changes in Transkei. He later led a private security company and lived near Cape Town, focusing on writing about his military experiences.
His main publications include “Selous Scouts: Top Secret War” (1982) and “Pamwe Chete: The Legend of the Selous Scouts” (1999).
Reid-Daly was known as “Uncle Ron” among his troops for his approachable, yet determined leadership. His awards include the Legion of Merit (Commander – Civilian, CLM), Defence Forces’ Medal for Meritorious Service (DMM), and MBE. He passed away on 9 August 2010 in Simon’s Town, South Africa, after a prolonged illness.
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