Believe or not the Russians also come to mind.  Russian Interior Ministry SOF units experienced a couple of botched operations as well.  The hostage rescue operations against Chechen terrorist at the Moscow theater and the school in Beslan are two prime examples.  A lot of mistakes were made and a lot of civilians died because of them. 

as i said before GOP a lot of african SF's are really just presidential or head of state protection units (not to say they're not elite) but they just don't handle the same area of responsibilty as many western and asian SF units. however, there are some fairly credible SF units among them, SDF is a competent fighting force, and other african SF units hold a vast number of indigenous persons in their ranks so they have been brought up in the land and know how to survive

Yeah, but I don't think Spetsnaz Alpha handled the Beslan incident. From everything I have heard about Russian Spetsnaz is that they are extremely tough mother's, but aren't technically profecient at all.

I'd also say that the Russians sort of got a bad rap for the whole Moscow theatre op...I mean, the gas they used killed a few civilians, but it also put the terrorist to sleep (and I read that Alpha put *ALOT* of rounds into the "sleeping" terrorist) and saved many lives. It was sort of a tossup...

 

option a) use the gas, kill a few innocents, kill the terrorists, save alot of hostages

 

option b) don't use the gas, rush the theatre, run a very high risk of Chechens igniting their bombs.

 

option c) wait on the Chechens to kill the hostages

Very good point. I have even read that merc's were used during the battle of Thermopylae! I was referring to the modern PMC (like Dyncorp, blackwater, etc).

I think this comes from a very loose definition of "special".  In some nations it seems "special forces" can consist of any unit that can be trusted with 20 rounds of ammunition a man and not try to over throw el-presidente.

Then you have nations that seem to "mass produce" special forces - see Russian Speznatz, North Korean (whatever they call ems), heck the Iraq Republican Guard was supposed to be an elite force wasn't it?  I think this list could get pretty long is with a wide variety capability versus incompotence.

 

Then you have the media / hollywood special forces that believe anyone in a beret is triple secret double probation ninja like our friend Braddock.   Since I haven't vented on this for at least two day... Damn who ever it was that decided the US Army should wear berets!    We are not the firking French or some other Euro army.. 

 

Then you have the general sort of acknowledged special forces like the SAS or US special forces.

 

Then you have those folks that say the above are still too big to really be special and you run into all these really tiny groups with strange names (or various letters) and people that go off to write books about how cool they are but can't really talk about it.

 

So which group are we talking about in the reverse pecker competition? 

You beat me to the punch, with the Iraqi Republican Guard.  I don't know if they where SOF, but they were supposedly the elite soilders.