The nation’s elite soldiers will be soon have a new piece of kit, body cameras, to help stamp out Ben Roberts-Smith-style rogue elements. But, as Lisa-Jane Roberts writes, the culture of the SAS has deep roots and is unlikely to be fixed by technology.
The Australian Defence Force’s top brass is supporting a push to have special forces wear body cameras in a move aimed at stamping out bad behaviour. But is the camera push simply window dressing? Will it address a deeper problem within our defence forces?
Australia’s elite Special Forces are modelled primarily on the British SAS whose earliest exploits have become the stuff of legend, depicted most recently in Stephen Knight’s award-winning, quasi-historical drama Rogue Heroes (2022), based on the book of the same name by Ben McIntyre.
The series follows David Stirling, Jock Lewes, Blair “Paddy” Mayne and a handful of other young men who, freed from the shackles of conventional army regimentation, carry out daring raids on German and Italian airfields in North Africa 1941, disabling hundreds of enemy aircraft and killing dozens of enemy troops. Heroes indeed.
Paddy Mayne remains one of the most decorated British soldiers of all time and is commemorated by a life-size statue in the SAS Headquarters in Hereford, UK. Yet, on at least one notorious mission led by Mayne — the raid on a German-held airfield in Tamet, Egypt — the enemies these men killed were unarmed and off duty. They were enjoying downtime in their mess hut.
Cold-blooded murder or a justifiable act of war?
Mayne’s raid is finding resonance in Australia at the moment, with our own special forces under enormous scrutiny in the wake of the Ben Roberts-Smith defamation trial.
The high-profile case has brought to light thorny issues for our elite troops and their commanders. When do justifiable wartime killings segue into criminal acts of murder and cruelty? And who is ultimately responsible when the scales do tip towards barbarism and unlawfulness?
A vast cache of the documents tendered in the Roberts-Smith defamation case has been released for public scrutiny by the Federal Court of Australia, and a number of them shed an unflattering light on segments of our Special Forces. Evidence in the BRS case and the Brereton inquiry into the actions of defence personnel in Afghanistan indicate that the rogue nature of the early British SAS, with its penchant for secrecy and frequent disregard for the normal rules of engagement, may have seeped deep into the DNA of its Australian descendent.
All’s fair in war…until it’s not
Killing enemy soldiers in times of war is one of the many things our defence force is trained and paid to do. However, there are international agreements, to which Australia is a party, that prohibit cruelty to or murder of all civilians and any enemy soldiers who are hors de combat because they have been captured, injured or otherwise incapacitated to act in their own defence.
A frequent defence of the questionable tactical practices allegedly carried out by Australian troops in Afghanistan is that we can hardly expect our troops to adhere to the Laws of Armed Conflict if the enemy does not.
Yet, perhaps surprising to some, we find among the documents available in the bundle of Federal Court files a handwritten document (Exhibit A143), which reads “[illegible] like to think we are hard, tough but fair. But some of the incidents…the Taliban are bastards…but they never did war crimes against us. They used the weapons available to them … IED, we say it is cowardly.”
An IED is an improvised explosive device, much like the famous Lewes bombs that Lt. Jock Lewes, one of the founding members of the British SAS, came up with after much experimentation in 1941 to wreak havoc during the notorious and celebrated SAS raids of 1941. Is it fair that in the hands of our allies, IEDs become legendary, while in the hands of the enemy, they are “cowardly”?
A question of accountability
In an article published by the ABC earlier this month, retired Australian Army Major General Mick Ryan discusses ADF leadership in regard to the Brereton Report and “unethical conduct” among the Special Forces.
He ruefully notes that “[n]o senior special operations commander has been held accountable. If they have, it has been done in secret, which ensures the wider military institution is unable to learn.”
The Brereton Inquiry “found no evidence that there was knowledge of, or reckless indifference to, the commission of war crimes, on the part of commanders at troop/platoon, squadron/company or Task Group Headquarters level, let alone at higher levels such as Commander Joint Task Force 633, Joint Operations Command, or Australian Defence Headquarters.”
Although command ignorance may stem, at least in part, from the common practice alluded to in some of the court-released documents of keeping anyone “inside the wire” ignorant of what happens outside, it represents a failure in leadership and, as Brereton notes, “does not relieve commanders of all responsibility.”
Keeping information from superiors is redolent of the early British SAS, who, according to former SAS Commander and author Tom Petch, “kept virtually no records” and whose actions were shrouded in secrecy. And it’s a custom that appears to continue today.
An affidavit from Scott Lee, who is the Australian Federal Police Force’s Assistant Commissioner Counter Terrorism and Special Investigations, shows that some soldiers “outside the wire” prefer those inside to remain in ignorance. It records an exchange between Ben Roberts-Smith and the soldier referred to as Person 67 in the mess at Camp Russell. Roberts-Smith is reported to have said words to the effect that “you know, officers shouldn’t be on the ground, you guys should be sitting on a hill away from it all. You know, we’ve got to do certain things, so, you know, you shouldn’t be around.”
In 2016, Dr Samantha Crompvoets carried out extensive interviews with Special Forces (SF) troops who had been stationed in Afghanistan for a report entitled “Special Operations Command Culture and Interactions: perceptions, reputation and risk.” In a companion paper to the report, she refers to her “impression that there had been a large number of illegal killings (often gloated about)” and that reports of these killings had been “muted by SF leadership (in Afghanistan).”
Brereton, allowing unethical culture to prosper
Crompvoet quotes one interviewee as saying that “these behaviours becomes [sic] permissible and equated with being good and effective soldiers,” while another quote reveals the extent of power given to god-like patrol commanders “who wield so much influence that officers find it very difficult to manage […] they are hero worshipped and unstoppable.”
An interviewee also notes that “if they didn’t do it, they saw it. If they didn’t see it, they knew about it. If they knew about it, they probably were involved in covering it up.”
In light of these comments, it’s clear why Brereton affirms that “ethical leadership was compromised by its toleration, acceptance and participation in a widespread disregard for behavioural norms.”
The laxity of command that allowed a “grow your hair, rock up to work when you wanted mentality” to creep into the ADF is absolutely unacceptable and, regardless of any criminal charges brought against individual soldiers, should be thoroughly investigated. Leadership – be it military or governmental – must be made to answer for their lack of oversight, and fundamental human changes that answer to an underlying malaise must be wrought throughout these elite forces to avoid future calamities such as those alleged to have taken place in Afghanistan.
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