Ex-SAS leader says war crimes common in conflict, accuses generals and ministers of dodging responsibility

A former Special Air Service commander has called on Australians to consider mitigating circumstances for soldiers who may have committed war crimes, which he said might happen in most major wars.

Ben Pronk, the SAS’s commanding officer when NSW judge Paul Brereton began pursuing misconduct allegations in 2016, said the investigation “needs to happen” but special forces were over-used during the war and the army’s overall strategy was unclear.

“I struggle to think of a high-intensity conflict where they haven’t occurred and this should be part of the decisions in terms of how we deal with these particular cases and also how we use this tool of government,” he said in an interview with The Nightly on Friday.

“I don’t think any of them would have woken up one day and decided to do something untoward.”

Mr Pronk, who retired from the army in 2017 as a lieutenant colonel, is the first senior special forces officer to publicly suggest breaches of the laws of war are common throughout history and should be considered when SAS veterans are prosecuted.

As an SAS squadron commander, Mr Pronk helped lead a helicopter-borne assault on a Taliban base in 2008 called Operation Rattey. One of the biggest air assaults in Australian special forces history, the mission captured about half-a-dozen Taliban leaders without any loss of life, according to other soldiers involved.

A year later, then-Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith allegedly was responsible for the execution of two prisoners at what was known as the “Whiskey 108” compound in the same province, according to federal prosecutors.

Mr Roberts-Smith has said he will plead not guilty to those charges and three others of the war crime of murder, which allegedly took place in 2012 in conjunction with other Australian soldiers, who have agreed to testify against him in return for immunity from prosecution.

Splitting society

A debate over the charges has split society, triggered public rallies and helped drive the rise of One Nation, which has campaigned for Mr Roberts-Smith.

Many veterans complain that no officers have been publicly held accountable for the 39 Afghan prisoners and civilians who Mr Brereton alleged in a 2020 report were executed by Australian soldiers.

In a book published this week about personal resilience and happiness, We’re All Going to Die, Mr Pronk lashed out at governments and the Defence Force hierarchy for refusing to accept responsibility for crimes that may have been committed during the war.

“I have found it incredibly disillusioning to watch the politicians and generals who thrust these people — time and again — into such an extraordinary and dehumanising environment refuse to accept even the slightest responsibility for creating the preconditions for their occurrence,” he wrote.

“The total pointlessness of the venture was hard to reconcile, particularly as I saw many friends wrestle with ruined lives as a result of the psychological damage from their service.”

In the interview Mr Pronk said he included the passages as part of his views on how to achieve happiness rather than to allocate responsibility for mistakes during the war.

He said he was not defending war crimes and supported the investigations.

Who to blame?

He said army leaders, including himself, knew the SAS regiment was “running hot” from continual fighting from about 2005 to 2013 which offered “a fair bit of mitigation” to the alleged war crimes and “needs to be part of the discussion more broadly”.

“When in this particular example we’re using this sort of same group of humans chronically in this kind of high-tempo operation for a couple of decades, it I think contributes to the preconditions that have led to these alleged acts,” he said.

The Brereton report, which triggered the prosecutions of SAS veterans, largely absolved the regiment’s leaders and wider army of responsibility for abuses in Afghanistan.

The then-chief of the Defence Force, former SAS officer Angus Campbell, abolished the SAS’s 2 Squadron as punishment and what he said was the “collective accountability” of the company-sized unit, which was led by a major.

Mr Pronk, now a management consultant, said the army should have considered whether accountability for abuses in Afghanistan needed to be broader to ensure similar problems did not emerge again.

“If we’re looking back on this, trying to learn from this and trying to better the organisation, then that level of accountability needs to be reviewed as well, and I haven’t seen that personally to this point,” he said.

For much of the war, SAS teams were assigned Taliban leaders they were responsible for capturing, or killing if they could not be taken alive. Because the insurgents did not wear uniforms, it was often unclear after fighting had ended which prisoners were civilians and which were fighters.

Prosecutors say Australian soldiers knew they were not allowed to execute prisoners in any circumstances. Some were murdered under a tradition known as the “blooding” of new soldiers who had not killed anyone before, prosecutors alleged in court documents.

An SAS veterans group, Wandering Warriors, has started a parliamentary petition to shut down the Office of the Special Investigator, which has been allocated more than $300 million from the Defence budget to pursue veterans. Two SAS veterans have been charged, Oliver Schulz and Mr Roberts-Smith. Ten investigations continue.

The petition has received 3838 signatures. A separate petition calling for authorities to free Mr Roberts-Smith from remand in April, which is no longer active, received 32,000 signatures, according to organiser and activist Drew Pavlou.

The OSI’s director-general, Chris Moraitis, is one of Australia’s best-paid public servants, receiving $878,760 a year, or 33 per cent more than the new Chief of the Army, Lt-Gen. Susan Coyle.

Mr Schulz’s trial is due early next year. He has pleaded not guilty. A date for Mr Roberts-Smith’s trial has not been set and is likely years away, lawyers involved say.

Approximately 40,000 Australian military personnel were involved in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, although the peak number of soldiers at the main Australian base in southern Afghanistan was about 1500, led by the SAS and commando regiments.