AARON PATRICK: SAS soldiers accuse ‘chateau generals’ of failing to understand the brutality of war

Soldiers from the Special Air Service Regiment have accused the army leadership of abandoning them after ordering the elite soldiers to hunt down and kill Taliban leaders from their offices in the United Arab Emirates and Canberra.

Two former senior SAS members last week published an article in a prestigious military journal based on interviews with 33 ex-SAS members describing their leaders as “Chateau Generals”, a derogatory phase from World War I for senior officers who issued orders from well behind the front line.

Although written in academic jargon, the Journal of Military Ethics article represents the strongest attack on the integrity of the army’s leadership by SAS veterans following the 2020 Brereton Report, which concluded 25 soldiers — mostly from the SAS — executed 39 people in Afghanistan during the war.

Two of those soldiers, Ben Roberts-Smith and Oliver Schulz, are being tried for the war crime of murder. Another 10 investigations could lead to further prosecutions likely to stretch into the next decade.

In the article’s most provocative assertion, the veterans accuse officers of using the Brereton report to “exculpate legal responsibility” for war crimes in defiance of the “Yamashita standard”.

The standard is a part of international law named after the head of Japanese forces in the Philippines who was executed for failing to learn that his soldiers were committing massacres and stopping them during World War II.

“In Afghanistan, senior administrators had the means, motive, and opportunity to distance themselves from the risks they engineered, and accountability from the consequences,” the article by Martin MacCarthy and Wayne Weeks says.

“At one time a general would do well to be with his/her soldiers sharing the risk, but nowadays there is no imperative to be heroic in this regard.

“They were tasked by generals headquartered in a peacetime country yet, unlike the generals, risked their lives daily in a war zone and now, a decade later, are being held accountable by a managerial class who do not understand, and care less about them than they should.

“Most operators believe their senior leaders are simply too remote and disengaged to understand the visceral nature of warfighting.”

‘Some merit’

The Defence Department ignored the attack on some of the most senior military leaders of the past decade, refusing to comment.

The article was praised for making a “useful” contribution to the debate about the conduct of the war by former army history and intelligence officer Neil James, the head of the Australia Defence Association, a lobby group.

“What they are saying is the people at the top didn’t understand the war we were fighting and how we had to fight it,” he said. “There is some merit in the argument.”

Mr James referred to a “catch and release” policy cited by Mr MacCarthy and Mr Weeks as a problem for Australian forces. The authors wrote that Taliban leaders on a list of fighters who could be killed, known as the JPEL, were sometimes released by Afghan authorities within days of being captured by the Australians.

The authors also complained that Australian soldiers were forced to conduct raids during the day when the Taliban were more prepared and willing to fight.

Dr MacCarthy was a lieutenant who resigned his commission in the 1980s to join the SAS. After leaving the army, he became an academic in the Business and Law Faculty at Edith Cowan University in Perth.

Mr Weeks joined the SAS in 1991, fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, and was appointed the regiment’s sergeant major in 2018. He now works for a security consulting firm.

The authors did not name any generals in the article, but former SAS officer Angus Campbell was recently attacked by another SAS veteran for his role in setting up the Brereton inquiry and implementing its recommendations as chief of the defence force.

Former SAS sergeant Andy White wrote in a book published two weeks ago that Mr Campbell “bears direct and personal responsibility for the allegations arising on his watch”.

Mr Campbell, who is now ambassador to Belgium and NATO, did not respond to a request for comment made through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade overnight.

Forces split

Maj-Gen. Paul Brereton’s four-and-a-half-year investigation into the special forces concluded there was “no evidence to suggest senior officers knew of or were recklessly indifferent to war crimes”.

That finding contributed to a split over the war crimes scandal between special forces officers and non-officers.

Officers have said SAS soldiers knew they were not allowed to execute prisoners and need to be prosecuted to uphold military discipline and protect the army and Australia’s reputation.

The most prominent veteran supporting prosecutions is Liberal MP Andrew Hastie, who was a captain in the SAS’s 4 Squadron, which conducts clandestine intelligence missions, and was briefly in Afghanistan at the same time as Mr Roberts-Smith in 2012.

Some non-officers say it is unfair to prosecute SAS soldiers for they way they fought a war in which both sides assassinated their opponents. They point out the enemy did not wear uniforms and often pretended to be civilians immediately before and after shooting at Western forces.

Among the active defenders of Mr Roberts-Smith and Mr Schultz is Scott Jones, an electronic warfare operator in 2nd Commando Regiment during the war. He said today that no war crimes were committed and the charges should be dropped.

Mr Schultz has pleaded not guilty. His trial is due to be held next year. Mr Roberts-Smith has said he will plead not guilty. Lawyers involved say his trial is years away.

The debate over who is to blame has created tensions among military leaders too.

A former deputy head of Special Operations Command, Dan Fortune, last week called, on social media, a fellow ex-brigadier invited to give a speech on ethical leadership a “desk chair” staff officer. “Thank you for your service,” he wrote, sarcastically.

Complicating the debate is the role of four SAS veterans who have agreed to testify against Mr Roberts-Smith in return for legal immunity for murders federal prosecutors allege in court documents they committed in Afghanistan.

A parliamentary petition to shut down the Office of the Special Investigator, which has been allocated about $300 million from Defence funds to pursue veterans, closed after receiving 8,036 signatures.

Most electronic petitions receive between 500 and 1500 signatures, the organisers said.