‘This is crazy’: Anger erupts among SAS veterans over command ‘culture’ finding blaming them for war crimes

A couple of weeks ago, Ben Roberts-Smith sat down at his home in Brisbane and began watching himself on YouTube.

His first interviews since being charged with war crimes in April had been published on YouTube to coincide with the launch of a personal merchandise line. As Australia’s most famous living ex-soldier watched himself take questions from Sydney radio host Ben Fordham, there was a loud knock on the door.

A Queensland police officer was standing outside. Almost apologetically, the officer said he was checking the Victoria Cross awardee was abiding by his bail conditions, which require Mr Roberts-Smith to live at the house, according to two sources.

A coincidence? Or was the Office of the Special Investigator, which investigates military veterans, sending a warning to the former Special Air Service corporal about his publicity campaign, which accused authorities of arresting him in NSW to exploit favourable court rules?

The OSI and the Australian Federal Police, which arrested him at Sydney Airport, declined to comment.

There is a simple question here that no one has the balls to ask.

Mr Roberts-Smith, who has said it could take five to seven years for his charges to be resolved, continues to promote his clothing line on social media, where he has amassed 95,000 Instagram followers in 19 days, a phenomenal growth rate for a non-entertainer or professional sportsperson.

Meanwhile, other former SAS soldiers became involved in a debate about one of the most important questions raised by allegations 25 Australians executed prisoners and civilians during the Afghanistan war: should officers or even generals accept some blame if privates, corporals and sergeants went rogue?

Jo Hotai, a New Zealand veteran of the Australian SAS, was among those who complained that junior soldiers are being held legally responsible for one of the greatest military scandals in history.

The prompt was a four-year-old report by the Defence Force’s Inspector-General, posted quietly online last Tuesday, that said sergeants and corporals took control of operations and officers allowed themselves to be excluded from decisions in “an inversion of authority”.

“This is crazy,” Mr Hotai said on his YouTube channel. “The retards have apparently allowed the bikie gang of non-commissioned officers to run riot and allegedly do whatever they want.”

The report — possibly the most-important independent analysis of the war after the Brereton Inquiry — remains a military secret. Only a 22-page summary has been published. The two authors’ identities are confidential, although one is a retired lieutenant general, the second-top rank. The other is described as a “senior civilian legal practitioner in government law”.

The summary said the military hierarchy should have realised something was amiss when enemy deaths spiked without a corresponding increase in wounded or Australian deaths. Defence Force Chief Mark Hammond last week said no disciplinary action would be taken against officers beyond a handful who lost service decorations, a decision even some members of the officer class found hard to take.

“As an officer of 4 deployments to Afghanistan, if officers can be awarded the accolades and medals of deployments, then they should also bear the responsibility if things go wrong,” a former captain who headed SAS and commando recruitment wrote on Instagram Sunday.

Concerns were also raised by Wayne Weeks, who was the regiment’s sergeant major — the senior non-commissioned officer — when the Brereton Inquiry into war crimes was concluding after four-and-a-half years.

Apart from being offended by the criticism of the regiment’s culture, Mr Weeks pointed out that the Defence Force used the SAS as one of the primary units to fight the insurgency — and allowed it to be blamed for going too far.

“There is a simple question here that no one has the balls to ask or no one wants to answer,” he said. “Why does accountability keep expanding within SASR, yet stop short of the senior leaders who directed, approved and sustained its employment in Australia’s longest war...? It is no wonder that SASR veterans are frustrated.”

Andy White, who saw his SAS colleague Jason Brown killed by the Taliban in 2010, was another who felt senior officers unfairly escaped responsibility.

“All this report does is shift the blame for allegations that remain unproven one rung up the ladder from SAS enlisted soldiers to SAS officers,” he wrote on Instagram. “It’s a Fkn joke.”

The soldiers’ anger is based on what they see as a fundamental injustice: the finding by judge Paul Brereton that officers did not know, and were therefore not responsible, for the killing of 39 prisoners and civilians by Australian forces.

Further upsetting the soldiers was an endorsement by the Chief of the Defence Force, Angus Campbell, of Justice Brereton’s conclusion.

“I fully accept the Inquiry’s finding that these commanders did not suspect that this alleged conduct was occurring, nor encouraged it, nor turned a blind eye to it,” he wrote to the Chief of the Army, Rick Burr, in July, 2021.

It would take five years for that position to be publicly challenged by another inquiry.

A month or two before the letter to Lt-Gen. Burr, then Gen. Campbell had told the Defence Force’s Inspector-General — a semi-independent investigative agency — to examine the “cultural context” of command of the SAS and commandos in Afghanistan.

He ordered another inquiry to assess “the indirect contribution of command” to the special forces’ “deviant behaviour”. In other words, if prisoners were being murdered, why didn’t any officers realise?

The two authors hired by Inspector-General James Gaynor to conduct the inquiry wanted to interview soldiers involved in the war. Mr Gaynor banned them from doing so, arguing it would interfere with the Office of the Special Investigator’s criminal investigations.

Even without access to the principals, the authors found enough evidence to conclude that warning signs reached the military hierarchy. How high is not specified.

“The breakdown in command occurred in an incremental way over an extended period of time,” the summary of their report says. “Signs of broader decline appear to have been evident to some in higher headquarters. That there was no effective intervention and that this decline was allowed to continue, suggests an absence of effective leadership at various levels.”

Some people feel accountability for any war crimes should extend as far as the politicians who allowed a small but aggressive unit, the SAS, to be over-used in a long, dirty war.

“The command failure isn’t just a military command failure,” said Neil James, the executive director of the Australia Defence Association, a defence policy lobby group. “It’s a cabinet-level command failure. Cabinet is made up of politicians who didn’t want casualties. The service chiefs should have argued back with them and didn’t.

“You can’t just blame the generals.”

Which helps explain why the whole war may be on trial when Mr Roberts-Smith finally reaches a court room.

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