Inquiry slams culture and command of Australia’s SAS during Afghanistan war

A long-secret inquiry into the cultural and command failures of Australian special forces operators during the war in Afghanistan has found that an “abandonment of curiosity” within the Australian Defence Force’s leadership and an “inversion of authority” within units helped create a culture that allowed alleged war crimes to occur.

The inquiry was commissioned in the wake of the 2020 release of the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry, which found “credible evidence” of dozens of unlawful killings. It has found deep, systemic cultural problems were rife in the ADF’s Special Air Services regiment (SASR), and that the lack of intervention to correct them indicated “an absence of effective leadership at various levels”.

The full report will not be made public because it contains sensitive evidence from the original Afghanistan inquiry, which has been criticised by some for its finding that responsibility for alleged war crimes sat almost entirely at relatively low ranks, amid a sense that more senior ADF officers should have carried more responsibility for the actions of soldiers under their command. This additional inquiry found an “extreme limitation” in the flow of information from SAS units to higher levels of command at the time in question, which limited what those higher ranks knew.

In general, the report found a pervasive belief among some SAS operators that they were “exceptional” and, as a result, “ordinary norms and standards no longer apply”. But it places some of the blame on both the government and Special Operations Command for fostering the belief that the SAS was “superior” rather than “specialist”, and it criticises the over-deployment of special forces more broadly. Further findings also include some junior officers prioritising “mateship” over “leadership”, and criticised senior officers for knowingly allowing alcohol to be consumed.

Former SAS captain turned Liberal MP Andrew Hastie said he welcomed the release of the report because he believed in “transparency”, especially when recently many important Australian military members such as Ben-Roberts Smith have been prosecuted due to discoveries of their war crimes.