Some Australian SAS officers knew that soldiers under their command were planting weapons on dead Afghan civilians to portray them as combatants, but did nothing to stop the practice, according to a military report that has only now come to light. The practice is known as using "throwdowns".
The executive summary of the 2021 investigation was posted online this week. Conducted by the inspector general of the Australian Defence Force (IGADF), it examined the "cultural context" of the special operations command. It is highly critical of what it calls a "breakdown of command" and the erosion of military discipline during special forces operations in Afghanistan, which "resulted in episodes of potential and actual egregious behaviour".
An earlier IGADF document, the Brereton Inquiry, was made public in 2020. It found credible information that Australian special forces personnel murdered 39 Afghan civilians and prisoners. However, it largely cleared officers, stating that the "criminal behaviour" it uncovered "was conceived, committed, continued, and concealed at patrol commander level". Patrol commanders in the Australian SAS are typically corporals or sergeants rather than commissioned officers.
The newly released report was commissioned in 2021, after the Brereton findings, by Angus Campbell, then the defence force chief and himself a former SAS officer. It concluded that "officers with actual knowledge of misconduct in-theatre, including notably the use of throwdowns to effect in fraudulent reporting, or rumours of misconduct, did not take effective action to investigate and address these issues."
The report said officers allowed an "uncontrolled 'warrior' ethos" to develop in the regiment. It also pointed to the long and grinding nature of the Afghan conflict, in which a small group of SAS soldiers were repeatedly sent on dangerous deployments, as a factor in moral injury and impaired decision-making. "The group dynamic within a special forces deployment influences the shift in moral compass of some individuals," it said.
Other factors included the secretive and insular character of the SAS, and an "inversion" of the chain of command in which senior non-commissioned officers dominated the officers who were nominally their superiors. This left junior officers "effectively subservient" and in a position the report described as "learned helplessness". It also noted that SAS soldiers were routinely allowed to drink alcohol on deployment despite orders applying to others, which sent a signal that "the rules did not apply to them".
False reporting was another concern. Soldiers wrote inaccurate accounts of battlefield actions, framed around the rules of engagement and filled with circumlocution, which helped perpetrators conceal their conduct. One example was the repeated use of variations of the phrase "manoeuvring to a position of tactical advantage" to describe civilian "squirters" as direct participants in hostilities. The report said the expression was used so regularly that it lost meaning.
The executive summary identifies "a significant failure of good leadership and effective command" across SAS commanders, and says reporting systems meant to prevent misconduct had become "depleted and largely unreliable", giving officers "a false level of assurance". It concluded that the culture of the Special Operations Task Group "was not the cause of misconduct but created an environment which enabled misconduct by a few to occur."
Defence had previously refused to release the report, despite freedom of information requests and an attempt in the Senate to force its disclosure.
