Get a longer rope.

Here is an amusing footnote from British special forces history. In short (pun not intended) there was a distinct shift from Orde Wingate’s 1940s self-reliant “long line” marches by “Chindits” into Burma, let alone F. Spencer Chapman‘s work in Malaysia… to the British SAS getting slightly “hung up” when parachuting in the 1950s:

Equipped with 100 feet of rope, the paratroopers would tie the rope to the tree and abseil down to the ground. The technique was first instigated in 1953. However, it was found that many trees were taller than 100 feet, so the amount of rope carried was doubled to 200 feet.

Perhaps the rank incompetence of the Colonial Office (e.g. Sir Shenton Thomas’ retreat) was foreshadowing?

Whitehall bungling and incompetence leading directly to the fall of Singapore in 1942 has been disclosed for the first time by Whitehall officials. Papers relating to the wartime defence of Malaya and Singapore were considered so sensitive that they have been withheld from public inspection for 50 years – 20 years beyond the normal release date for official files. But the newly published government papers confirm that British efforts to scapegoat Australian forces and the Governor of the Straits Settlements for the most humiliating debacle in the history of the Empire could well have been motivated by a wish to deflect attention from Whitehall’s far greater dereliction of duty.

A need for better knowledge of the environment and risks seems like exactly what the British military should have taken from WWII; as Chapman himself published details in his 1949 public memoir…

Yet somehow someone in the 1950s didn’t bother to check in with Chapman, let alone the height of trees before jumping into them, especially after at least a decade of prior military missions run beneath them?

Speaking of being bad at estimating environment/size, I’m reminded of a Delta memoir that made some obvious cultural errors.