It was November when the Brereton report dropped — a comprehensive, highly redacted account of dozens of alleged civilian murders and a toxic warrior culture among the elite echelons of the Australian Defence Force in Afghanistan.
But months later that moment is all but forgotten. When reports dropped this week that Special Air Service soldiers facing the sack after the report had been quietly given a medical discharge, they barely made a ripple.
It’s a classic example of how quickly the report, with its powerful assessment of a cultural malaise deep within the SAS, has been forgotten. And that’s probably just how the ADF likes it.
How quickly we forget
In the days after the report was released there was a brief moment of hand-wringing. Then politics started getting in the way. At first it looked like Defence Force Chief Angus Campbell was going to strip the SAS of its meritorious unit citation. But after backlash from veteran groups, political pressure from the prime minister, and a media attack from The Daily Telegraph (called “Save our medals”), the ADF backed down.
Then outrage moved on from the report itself to a familiar target: China. Just weeks after the report was released, China’s foreign ministry attack dog Zhao Lijian tweeted a (clearly doctored) image depicting an Australian soldier cutting an Afghan child’s throat.
The fury over Zhao’s “shitpost” from senior politicians and some gallery journalists drowned out anger over the alleged war crimes. Despite the performative anger the post was a “gift” for the government, Australian Defence Force Academy Associate Professor James Connor says.
“It allowed them to reframe the narrative and thus avoid dealing with the serious issues in the actual report,” he said.
Since then, the report has faded from view, as seemingly bigger news stories took centre stage and as new (or old) culture wars took over. Now it’s barely mentioned.
“Silence. It’s really weird, it’s just gone,” Connor said.
Monash University Associate Professor Kevin Foster, author of Don’t Mention the War: The Australian Defence Force, the Media and the Afghan Conflict, says the narrative after the report amounted to a clean-up — a flurry of outrage followed by a pivot to recharacterise Australian soldiers as the true victims.
“There’s been victim shifting and outrage shifting: the victims aren’t the Afghans; the victims here are all the soldiers,” he said.
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Ever since the campaign to save the medals there’s been one voice conspicuously absent in the silence around the report: that of veterans.
Veteran and Flinders University military sociologist Associate Professor Ben Wadham says while the response from the community has been mixed, there was always a general feeling — even before the report landed — that the Diggers would shoulder the burden while the command come off unscathed.
“I think amongst most of the veterans sector there’s a wounding — this isn’t us, this isn’t what we do. It’s not in our DNA,” he said.
The response from those involved in the allegations documented has been one of denial — some told Wadham they earnestly believed they were doing their job, just following orders.
“To me that’s a bit divorced from the volume of barbarism,” he said. “There’s still a level of denial I guess, amongst the lads on the grounds, and the hero worshippers.”
Breaking through the silence from veterans’ groups are anecdotes about soldiers’ children being harassed, heightened mental health problems, a feeling among some that young men won’t sign up while the government doesn’t have their back.
For Wadham, the quiet is a reflection of a broader distrust of civilian institutions among military institutions.
“When you’re a soldier, there’s a sense you’re doing a difficult job that nobody will do, that people in society don’t understand,” he said. “It’s: ‘Why would we engage with society on this?’ “
ADF wins PR war
The broader trajectory of the Brereton report, from the apologetic fronting up to the current silence is a classic example of how the ADF deals with reputational challenges, where much of the reform work is hidden from public view.
“There’s a quiet, barely discernible reputation-management,” Foster said.
And there’s a good reason for some of that quiet. A special investigator appointed by the Morrison government in the days after the report’s release is looking into potential criminal prosecutions. It’s a criminal process which will be inevitably opaque, but which could deliver a disappointing outcome.
Wadham agrees that while the response to the report has been typical military deflection, there were some positive noises from Campbell about scrutinising the culture, rather than pinning the full blame on rogue individuals.
“It’s always been the bad apples arguments,” he said. “What we’re moving from now is bad apples to bad orchards.”
Still, it’s undeniable that media coverage of the SAS and the report has dwindled since November. And what little there is tends to frame the ADF far more positively than the report. A recent story in The Australian about a veteran’s widow which described the children of SAS soldiers being bullied after the report. This week’s medical discharge news also furnished the narrative of soldiers being victimised by the process.
“On the one hand you want to be very supportive and not minimise veterans’ mental health,” Connor said.
“But the question you wonder is whether [the discharge] is about what they did in Afghanistan, or the investigation into it. It almost starts to look like a tactical ploy.”
But there is one challenge to the ADF’s stage management of the fallout: the upcoming defamation trial of Ben Roberts-Smith, who is alleged to have been involved in war crimes while on deployments. Roberts-Smith denies the allegations.
This week, lawyers for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age revealed in a court submission they have details of two more alleged incidents of serious criminal conduct. Roberts-Smith’s former wife will now give evidence against him.
The army, says Foster, is “trying to PR their way out of” Brereton. But Roberts-Smith, once their golden boy, might get in the way.
““It’s always been the bad apples arguments,” [Wadham] said. “What we’re moving from now is bad apples to bad orchards.”
We are frequently told about ‘bad apples’ and usually there is little evidence of understanding what it refers to or the implication. Here is Wadham simultaneously suggesting it just means very few cases and then connecting it orchards.
Apples used to be stored in barrels. They’d keep in acceptable condition for a long time, but only if there was no bad apple in the barrel. The bad apple is not supposed to mean the rest are all right – so no reason to worry, keep things in proportion, it’s just an isolated case or two. The point is that the one bad apple must be removed quickly else the whole lot goes rotten. Ignore or tolerate the bad apple and you soon lose them all.
Society trains these men to be killers, so they kill.Blame society not the individual(we glorify and valorise Killers).
One of the slogans US Marines chant during training (certainly during the Vietnam era) was “We are Not Killers – we are Highly Trained Fighting Machines!”
That is eerily similar to the slogan above the gate of Gitmo – “Honor (sic!) Bound to Defend Freedom” which is clearly perfect for an extra judicial hell hole where neither Law nor Justice are worth a pitcher of warm spit.
You know how Americans spell? Sic!!
After all that training? I think not.
You know there is something unsavory about the Defence Force on course to hit the fan when the War Memorial advertising machine goes into diversionary overdrive as it did in this case.
At this time in the investigation, report and mop up cycle not a sound is to be heard. The Minister and the Defence Force Chief are both recovering their composure after self inflicted foot wounds and the Government/Defence Force complex has yet to decide how close to the tree trunk the apples will be permitted to fall.
The quiet grinding of teeth or gears can be heard even outside the Canberra bubble. However, not to be concerned, it is just another advertising response to be managed – and we all know how well that strategy has been going of late.
The ADF now sits in ignominious company, the SS from WW2, the nasty tin-pot militaries of Africa, and the US forces that murdered in My Lai. Only the ADF can remove themselves from that company and prove themselves to be something other than a military that commits war crimes. It has to be done publicly, and explicitly and soon. Otherwise every uniformed member of the ADF (irrespective of service, rank or unit) wears the title ‘War Crimes complicit’ badge of shame. If those soldiers, sailors and aircrew really do believe they are above these heinous acts, it should be them making the loudest noise demanding change. Sadly, those folks are silent, and thus complicit.
Politics is, for most participants, a very dirty and shameless game where the only rule is that there are no rules.
Politicians use our Defence Force to further their domestic and international fantasies – agendas, I was going to say, but that is to give their motivations far too much moral, ethical substance or national importance.
Despite their numerous claims to the contrary, politicians find it much more convenient and certainly less dangerous personally to devolve their values and their priorities upon Defence Force personnel rather than place their own skins in the firing line in a life threatening enterprise.
I cannot count the number of Defence Force unit departure events with politicians of the day waving their surrogate warriors off as saviours of the nation. In contrast very few, if any, of the political class are actually present to personally and individually welcome back or thank the depleted and wounded ranks of survivors. The Veterans Affairs portfolio then proceeds, with political endorsement, to stonewall, limit or deny claims for assistance or medical treatment from the survivors.
Defence Force personnel are, as with the general Australian population, just collateral damage in a confrontation of political ideologies and egos.
I cannot end without saying that the Australian War Memorial is indeed well named – it is, for the most part just a Memorial to War and not a Memorial to Veterans. Whenever I visit I am struck by the war-themed fun park, the boys own adventure, the mechanical representations of the practice and equipment of war with little or no confronting representation of the realities of the prosecution or human outcomes of war, particularly for the combatants. For example, I have yet to see anything approaching a line of wheelchairs representing the number of veterans who have lost their mobility in the service of their nation, of those who have lost their sight, of those who have lost their connections to humanity or of those who have been unable to reconnect with their family members on return to our country. These are some, but not all, of the true, living tragedies of our time.
I am often very critical of the USA, even though I have lived there and have very close and respected American friends. One thing I have noticed in travelling around the USA is that, as a country, they mourn and memorialise their Veterans, not War. As in Europe, there are museums for the exhibition of the machinery and paraphernalia of war. But their memorials are for the rememberance people, the human beings who fought and suffered and their family members who also serve many years after in support after their loved ones return home.
I especially liked your reference to wheelchairs.
During the victory parades after the Falklands misunderstanding it was decreed, by MrsT’s press secretary Bernard Ingham (now ‘Sir’ for services to mendacity), that no injured troops were to take part on the grounds of their being “unphotogenic and lowering the tone” – FFS!
Some things have changed since the 1980s.
Yeh, the price of private property real estate has gone up and low % rates life is even cheaper..
Really? Do tell.
We tend not to remove PWD from the public gaze with quite the zeal it was done then.
They are not PWD by happenstance – they are wounded.
Usually as a result of following orders, consciously, obediently and presumably willingly.
Howard’s war just keeps on giving.
Little Johnny and his successors have dragged this country into the gutter.
Ably abetted by the electorate, most of which seems quite comfy there.