 And welcome to this webinar which is brought to you by the International Society for Military Ethics in Europe, Euro-ISME, and the Centre for Military Ethics at King's College University of London. My name is John Thomas and I'm the President of Euro-ISME. I'm joined today by three people who are very well qualified to debate the subject of Special Forces Ethics, especially in the light of the Brayton Report, into alleged unlawful killings by members of the Australian SAS in Afghanistan. Before I introduce our panelists, allow me to stress three things. First, although the Brayton Report makes for difficult reading, we adhere very strongly to the presumption of innocence. As much of the report has been redacted, I have no idea of the identities of those concerned, but I do know that none of them have been found guilty in a court of law. Second, on behalf of Euro-ISME, I acknowledge the bravery and commitment of the very many Australians who served in Afghanistan. And thirdly, our discussion today is intended to determine if there are any lessons that could be learned from Brayton which might have general applicability. We are not here to second-guess the outcomes of the report, nor to criticise individuals. After this introduction, I will hand over to each speaker in turn. And after each speaker, if time permits, I'll ask one question before opening the floor at the end to general questions, which I would invite you to submit via the chat facility. The three distinguished panelists who would join us today are Professor David Wetton, who is Professor of Ethics and the Military Profession and Director of the Centre for Military Ethics at King's College London. He is the author of the Leadership and Ethics Review, Annex A, to the Brayton Report. Dr. Dean Peter Baker is the Associate Professor of International and Political Studies at the University of New South Wales and has a long experience of working with the Australian Armed Forces on Ethical Training and Education. And Dr. Roger Herbert is a Distinguished Professor of Military Ethics at the U.S. Naval Academy that has extensive experience of working as a U.S. Navy Seal. And I'd like to open the session with three quotations, which highlight at least some of the contradictions and difficulties at the heart of the issue of ethics and special forces. The first quotation is not strictly speaking a quotation because it cannot be attributed to any one individual. However, it is nevertheless both well known and relevant. People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. As a general rule, most civilians are happy not to pry too closely into the detail of what special forces do on operations, perhaps even preferring a degree of mystique to the full reality. They acknowledge that special forces are fighting an often implacable, fitiless enemy and one that is willing to operate far outside the established laws of armed conflict. There is also a general acceptance that special forces operate in extraordinarily dangerous circumstances in which bravery, adaptability and resourcefulness must routinely be displayed to an extent well beyond the capabilities of most people. But as Brayerton has demonstrated, there are limits to what even an admiring and grateful public is willing to accept. And there are certainly limits to what the courts will accept as in the case of Marine A in the UK. But to what extent is it feasible to demand that people in very extreme circumstances display such impeccable ethical conduct that it will withstand scrutiny in the calm and ordered circumstances of a courtroom? The second quotation is from US General Stanley McChrystal, who when asked about the importance of the British SAS's role in the fighting that followed the Iraq War said, essential could not have done it without them. So the second point for consideration is that special forces are essential to the successful conduct of operations. No ifs, no buts. Take them out of the equation and the whole balance of military capability tilts away from you and towards the enemy. The ethical risk that arises from this revolves around elitism, exceptionalism and loyalty. Elite forces should quite properly take pride in themselves and their units. The operational secrecy that surrounds almost everything they do and the nature of their missions demand a high degree of exceptionalism, whether it be in the equipment, their training or tactics. But is there a risk that such exceptionalism can mutate into a belief that they are somehow above the rules and constraints that govern the rest of the military? Total trust in each other is a hallmark of all special forces. That same trust inspires a loyalty to each other that is equally profound. But can that loyalty become so extreme that it supersedes even adherence to the law? And the third quotation is from General Richard Clark, head of US Special Operations Command. Quote, the bottom line is that we have disproportionately focused on SOF, employment and mission accomplishment, at the expense of the training and development of our force. In some cases, this imbalance has set conditions for unacceptable conduct to occur due to a lack of leadership, discipline and accountability. End quote. Which brings us to one of the other key points of today's discussion. Special forces, although part of the military, have traditionally had a different relationship to the command chain from more conventional forces. Special forces teams often have to operate remotely and must make split second decisions on their own initiative. That is why the character, judgment and adaptability of those in special forces are valued as highly as the more obvious attributes of fitness and skill at arms. But how can leadership be exercised in these circumstances when a commander might be hundreds of miles away and uncontactable? What implications does this have for the training and education, not only of special forces units, but of the command chain at all levels? I've already mentioned both operational secrecy and loyalty, which brings self-evident advantages of their own. However, there is a risk that in very close knit units, they can insulate members from proper scrutiny, especially in circumstances where such scrutiny might come from those outside the innermost circles of loyalty and membership. The Browton report has demonstrated vividly one of the most fundamental aspects of military ethics, that it cannot be considered as just an academic discipline, any more than it can be considered as an optional add-on to the training of military personnel. The full implications of the Browton report are not yet known, but what is already clear is that the actions it describes have brought the Australian armed forces to the attention of the world and even provoked a diplomatic row between China and Australia. It has, in the most unfortunate way, unequivocally demonstrated the relevance of military ethics to the sound and effective conduct of military operations. By now, hand over to Professor David Wetham for his contribution. David. Thank you very much, John. Thank you. So at the start of this year, 2020, I was asked by the Inspector General of the ADF to review the evidence gathered so far and to try and address some specific questions relating to what had gone wrong in Special Operations Command in Afghanistan. I was provided with unhindered access to a huge number of documents, including a lot of interview transcripts gathered over the previous four to five years. I'm very aware from that, I'm going to say up front, I'm very aware from the source of that evidence that my report was compiled from, that the victim's voices are completely missing from this view. They're not there in the evidence. All of the evidence that I was referring to are accounts of Australian Defence Force personnel, not the local population, and certainly not ambulance-chasing lawyers seeking to skew a view. These were ADF military personnel who were there in the theatre. Now, the results of the inquiry have received a lot of attention and some criticism from people, many of whom don't actually appear to have read the report. I'm going to limit my observations there to just one point, which is something that has been, I've noted quite a lot, which is to criticise the baritone report for not proving things to the standard required for criminal convictions. But to blame the report for failing to do this is to misunderstand what its purpose was in the first place. The Afghanistan inquiry was quite deliberately set up to be an inquisitorial process to actually find out whether or not the allegations of war crimes were credible. This process is unusual for people who are unfamiliar with it. Witnesses are compelled to give evidence under pain of law, but nothing that they say can be used to incriminate themselves or other people. Once you understand that, it becomes clearer why there are such large sections redacted from the full report and even from my much smaller annex at the end of it. Anything that might hinder, interfere or compromise a criminal investigation has been removed from that report. The point there is that a criminal investigator's goal, as with any kind of criminal prosecution, is trying to do something different. That's to prove a case about an individual beyond reasonable doubt that that person did a specific act in a specific place and that the evidence is clear that that happened. The baritone inquiry was to establish what happened, not to provide material required for such prosecutions. I'm satisfied that the number of corroborating accounts and confirmations provide a strong basis for being able to build an understanding of what happened and what went wrong. If I may, I'm going to work through some of the elements of my section of the report and try and highlight some factors that I believe are pertinent in a wider sense. I will not, for obvious reasons, comment on areas that have been redacted. My first area that I'm going to look at is the area that many military investigations over the years start with and far too many of them end with. That's the idea that anything that went wrong can be accounted for by the idea that bad apples were responsible, just a few bad apples. If we apply Occam's razor to the question and seeking the least complicated answer, it is at least feasible that all of the crimes that are alleged to have committed were carried out by a tiny number of bad apples. There's no doubting that some people are more likely to commit more crimes than others. One US study suggests that members of the military are twice as likely as the general public to have some sort of antisocial personality disorder and there's no reason to think that this ratio would be exclusive to the US military. If there's a concentration of people predisposed to a particular type of behaviour in one place, it is obvious that there's a greater chance of seeing that kind of behaviour. Now, it's impossible to know if the Special Forces selection and training processes would have removed such people or condensed them. But the evidence doesn't suggest that the behaviour of the personnel in Socombe started out as bad in 2007. The story doesn't work in that way. It isn't a case of things happening straight away. It tells a story of things emerging over time. So therefore the bad apples might, while possibly contributing fact tech, can't be a full explanation. So could it be that they just didn't know what they were doing? Well, there is evidence that soldiers who receive effective ethics education and training are less likely to commit acts of atrocity. Therefore the time spent on training soldiers to deal with the challenges they're likely to face in a coin environment isn't a central part of any examination into the possible causes of aberrant behaviour. Despite the fact that SF units operate with a very flat structure with life and death decisions in extreme and ambiguous situations pushed right down to the absolute lowest tactical levels. Ethics education as opposed to training, ethics education aimed at dealing with complexity and ambiguity as opposed to values and standards training and or law of armed conflict briefs, which focus very much upon right and wrong answers in specific black and white situations. This type of education tends to be focused almost exclusively upon officers. But that's not to say that the officers themselves were necessarily particularly well equipped either, and the lack of support for junior officers in these situations is mentioned in several transcripts. What comes across very clearly from multiple points is that the the ROE briefs back here in country, as they would say, were hated by some soldiers due to their confusing nature, apparently sometimes leaving soldiers actually in doubt about what they were permitted to do. And that was often from soldiers who had already been in the theatre. So those grey areas may have created some ambiguity for some people about what was permitted and what was not. And this explanation does have some intuitive appeal until one realises the nature of some of the allegations. And there is a huge and important difference between pulling a trigger and getting it wrong in the heat of the moment, despite trying to do the right thing, and taking a handcuffed prisoner and executing them in cold blood. And there is no suggestion anywhere in the extant accounts that anyone, including the alleged perpetrators, claim that what they were doing was not clearly and unambiguously illegal. So why were the rules broken? Why were the laws broken? I'm going to focus on a number of points to try and explain this. I'm going to look at the wrong rules, peer and wider approval, and a consequence-free environment, or certainly a lack of consequences. So for the first of those, there was a series of rules applied to special operations command personnel, who, in their view, made their missions more challenging, and put their personnel and collective safety at risk. Rules of engagement and rules regarding daily handling and processing are both frequently mentioned as being either wrong in design or wrong in application. The cultural responses to such wrong rules were to find ways to subvert and break them. So the frustrations from the ground come out again and again. For example, an understandable and even laudable desire to ensure that detainees were not abused meant that even legitimate injuries, i.e. those injuries caused in the legitimate apprehension and handling of a detainee, could become the cause of massive investigations, as far as the people on the ground were concerned. And this was resented. The policy of what became known as catch and release, which is repeatedly referred to, it came to signify for many people an outer touch chain of command, which created a them and us situation between the people on the ground and higher command. Catch and release involved releasing detainees if there was no clear evidence of serious criminal misconduct, or if the people were not considered to be important enough in terms of leadership. And from a policy position, one can see the logic. Unlawful or unfair detention leads to ill feeling that ultimately can fuel an insurgency. But the rapid release of, for the people on the ground at least, known insurgents was possibly the single most important factor in the population's lack of confidence in the government in the province they were operating in. The effect on the people who were supposed to be doing the catching was just as profound. Now it's suggested that the use of throwdowns, the planting of contraband weapons or military equipment that could be linked to hostile intent such as a grenade or a radio or a rifle was a response to this catch and release policy. And the interviews taken over a number of years build up a picture of their use gradually becoming an acceptable practice to solve what was seen as a real problem on the ground. And one can see a mindset that emerged. These are practical people being presented with what became seen as a practical rather than an ethical or legal problem. They were denied what they felt to be a sensible solution that should have supported them. And the result of this was a parallel reality was created to cope with the gap. As any reader of reports, it would have been clear that the rules were being followed. To any direct observer on the ground, it would have been evident that entirely different processes were being applied. So it came to be that it was preferred if the target that was supposed to be apprehended fired shots. As this justified a lethal response and removed the known problem of a person being briefly interrogated then possibly released straight back into the field. The second area that I want to concentrate on is the organizational culture, peer approval and a gradual decline in standards over time. A sense of exceptionalism is very evident from the accounts. As a collective, they were treated differently to other members of the military and they knew it. For example, what a clear example that comes out was that there was supposed to be no alcohol in theater, but they actually had a pub. A pub that was resupplied through the system itself justified as a coping mechanism for stress, grief and high-temperal operations and the unit was basically given the pass because it was special, reinforcing a perception of entitlement. And it's hard not to see a correlation between this kind of activity and attitudes towards things like protective clothing, field craft, equipment checks, amongst many other things. Creating the routine assumption that some rules are optional is bound to undermine the way other problems and situations are viewed. And this atmosphere combined to challenge the consistency of the chain of command and may have contributed to a degree of learned helplessness. And contributing to this gradual decline in standards was fatigue in a general sense of a loss of purpose. As the tasks that were assigned to them became less and less special, that they were still the ones being assigned to do it, the accounts filled up a picture of people just not being sure what the task that they were actually there to do, what it was doing contributing to the bigger picture. A quote from one of the many sources. We were out there fighting on a daily basis. If we didn't go out that day, I just about guarantee it wouldn't make a pinch of shit of difference. We were playing with people's lives, both ours and theirs. Now, due to the small size of the command, multiple repetitions of the same personnel returning to the deployed task group would also ensure that any ingrained behavior became reinforced and perpetuated over time. So what about instead of looking at punishment, what about rewards that the military institutional way of rewarding behavior it wishes to see at the individual level is through the use of citations and awards. While many of the awards and citations, if not nearly all of them, made over this period and no doubt well deserved and represented the best traditions of the ADF, there may also have been a number of awards handed out with far less scrutiny than should have been the case and even less merit. Let's be clear here, I'm drawing this view from the accounts of people who were there. This isn't from somebody else. This is from the sources that were there. What comes out in multiple accounts is that there was a sense that by rewarding some people who were objectively demonstrating the wrong kinds of behavior, this further contributed to the poisoning of the organizational culture and was referred to by several people who were distressed by the signals that the organization was sending to its people. So the transcripts and the accounts chart a gradual move from a justified confidence in the ability of the unit into arrogance and even a feeling of being untouchable. Soldiers became more and more confident over time, basically a law unto themselves and these behaviors became with being a good and effective soldier. For some rotations a new team member fresh into theater you hadn't yet shot someone would be required to shoot a prisoner according to some of the allegations. This was the price of entry into the group. Now while healthy competition is obviously a good thing when competition is measured by a bad or inappropriate metrics internally as well as externally it becomes corrosive. For example there was an adoption of a body count metric whether that was formally or informally but that is the kind of thing that is going to skew the way operations are conceived and executed and there's clear evidence that some elements did keep score of the number of kills. Now this isn't itself a breach of the law of armed conflict but as one of the accounts on the ground says in terms of establishing an ethical framework for your troops as a patrol commander it's a clear fail. A tally board total and a desire to take it from 18 to 20 appears linked to the death of two prisoners for example. Finally the lack of consequences for rule breaking. If you see fellow group members breaking the rules of or cheating then the chances are that you're going to do it too whereas seeing other people passing up opportunities or doing the right thing that too will tend to get mirrored and this demonstrates how behavior becomes embedded at the level of organizational culture which then determines what is considered normal. Now there's some evidence that there was a deliberate effort made to conceal some behaviors and goings on from junior officers and the rest of the chain of command. Now if true further inquiries are carrying on but if true it comes about thanks to a fractured unit command culture that has direct implications for both oversight and transparency and therefore consequence for actions. Several people referred to the idea that troop commanders effectively became figureheads. Now for those who retained enough awareness to see that the situation was dangerously wrong it was clear that doing anything about it was simply not going to be easy and there was potentially serious repercussions for those who had the temerity to speak up. If you broke that rule then it was widely understood that there would be repercussions. Dr Cromvertz who's enormously important at starting off this whole process when she raised the question to the chain of command through her extensive interviews across the army environment. She recorded that it was explicitly said to her that being a lone whistleblower in the SF world on these atrocities would be met with intense resistance, shaming, ostracizing, scapegoating, hostility and vindictiveness. Some people clearly were fearful for their own safety and for their family's safety not just for their careers but it is obviously hard to challenge an organisational culture or speak out when you're trying to fit in as well. For a junior officer not being accepted by their soldiers could mean the end of your special forces career. People who felt they had no effective way of speaking up or without making their own situation precarious at best may well have decided that discretion was the better part or a rather in this situation. Others including lawyers who couldn't reconcile what they'd seen with what they thought should have happened simply left the organisation. This environment meant that those with the specific responsibility to sustain the integrity of the chain of command and the link between operations on the ground and the operational and strategic ambition were unable to perform their task due to physical and cultural separation from operations on the ground. It was recognised before the inquiry was started there was an issue with leadership accepting practices that should not have been permitted for example the drinking on operations that I've already mentioned but it was tacitly endorsed and such things had over the years resulted in an inherited culture that was endemic across special forces and had become normalised. The the organisation had become voluntarily collectively blind to what was going on so while there was a clear feeling in the accounts of some staff officers that for example that the vast majority of the reported killings that were being seen as justified by the fog of war and nature of disruption operations there is also a sense that much of the supposed oversight and control from above was characterised by an abandoned curiosity to explore these matters further even when the reports should have demanded it for example when asked about the high death count caused by some patrols despite them not being engaged in a two-sided contest for just one example how on earth could you end up with so many casualties when there was no accounts of shots being returned. Investigations could be seen as a manifestation of the headquarters versus camp rustle mentality manifesting in the persecution of those who are just trying to get on with their job so they developed a culture a developed a culture of protecting the people on the ground from what may have been perceived as unnecessary scrutiny recurring themes involved a reluctance to assist obstruction and interference the active concealment of some evidence culminating in an adversarial resistance to any form of security or any form of scrutiny. Now the results of this interference or obstruction were that as well as pushing away issues that were regarded as trivial rightly or wrongly by those involved it also ensured that there was also almost impossible for more serious allegations to be followed up and examined. It was considered normal practice to change the intelligence summary that was supposed to drive activity to a call with what actually happened on the ground events on the ground are therefore informing what's supposed to make up the intelligence summary the activity becomes the wrong way around. Ultimately the after-action reports rather than being part of the oversight and institutional understanding process in some cases became a way of removing scrutiny for wrongdoing this would have added to the insidious corrosive effect some people believing that they were untouchable thanks to the legal whitewashing of their activities. Other actors were trying their best unsuccessfully to raise awareness of what was happening complaints made by or through the International Committee of the Red Cross the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission all local elders a number of which can now be seen to have had substance were routinely passed off as simply Taliban propaganda or motivated by a desire for compensation it's clear that there were warning signs out there that nothing happened now one can perhaps be sympathetic to a desire to push away vexatious investigations or protect one's people from the scrutiny of those who just wouldn't get it however well-intentioned some of these efforts to block or push away investigations may have been it seems clear that this feeling of protection that such actions generated would also have contributed to an attitude of untouchability for some people this may have facilitated the the escalation into the most serious of the crimes that are alleged to have taken place so in summary the accounts that I was privileged to work through over a period over at the start of this year they consistently paint a picture of a gradual erosion of standards contributed to by the character and tempo of the deployments and redeployments inappropriate metrics of success imposed from above and within the unit warping behavior within the sf task group a lack of clarity about purpose and a gradual loss of confidence in both the mission and the higher chain of command a fractured compartmentalized and dysfunctional leadership and a general lack of effective oversight aided and abetted by the very very people who should have been providing it this combination of factors led to a normalization over time of behaviors that should never have been considered normal and ultimately the effective covering up or to be charitable willful blindness to the perpetration of war crimes the recommendations that I made very briefly unsurprisingly perhaps focus very much on training and education I argue very strongly that people military ethics training should employ case studies drawn from military personnel that look like yourself people of all countries military personnel of all countries need to understand that good guys can do bad things not just it's not just bad people that do bad things understanding how good people can end up doing bad things is absolutely essential if an organization is to armor itself and its personnel from revisiting this kind of behavior I would also argue very strongly for the normalization of the right kinds of routine ethical discussion so ADF have identified specific values professionalism loyalty integrity courage innovation teamwork underpin a virtue ethics approach and these represent the institutional articulation of expected behavior I would like to see even more of the routine critical reflection on the values and standards of the ADF and how these can and should be interpreted in different situations for example courage is a value or a virtue that it's supposedly easy to understand but what courage looks like on a patrol in Helmand or Orescam province may be very different to the courage required by an administrator who wants to question the receipts submitted by a commanding officer or the chief of the defense force when faced with a questionable direction from the prime minister exploring how one demonstrates courage in different circumstances not something that should just happen in institutions during phase one training it should just be a routine part of the normalized process of healthy ethics discussion taking place at all ranks under all stages of military careers it should be a routine part of everyday activity and my final point is the importance of accountability in 2015 Major General Sengelman quite rightly stated his intent to ensure that people should not only own their mistakes but that any blame and punishment should be fairly apportioned including acting upon any clear bridges of integrity or significant character flaws I believe it is clear that a wider organizational accountability for creating a system that made those failures possible is also required my report ends with a quote from Dr. Cromfords who for whom we owe enormous debt of gratitude I put it there for a reason and she has actually had access to many of the same sources as I did and amongst the sources and transcripts consulted as you said it must be mentioned the countless references to exceptional soldiers and officers who upheld army values and whose character was unquestionably of high standing ultimately there is an important difference between pulling a trigger and getting it wrong and taking a prisoner and executing them in cold blood I argue that anyone who does not recognize this distinction or is prepared to ignore it doesn't deserve to belong in any professional military certainly not the ADF thank you David awful lot to think about there a number of things surprised me in what you said first of all the use of the body count there is a lot of evidence from Vietnam of how distorting a metric that can be in terms of the way to fight a war so I was surprised to hear that the Australians started using it in Afghanistan it was a just clarification it was I believe an unofficial metric a formal policy but it does appear to have been adopted internally possibly externally as an informal measure but certainly internally as well fine thank you for that clarification now the what I was also surprised to hear about the degree of exceptionalism that was driven bottom up in many military organizations the engine room is at the senior nco level that is where a lot of the experience lies and that is the interface between the higher command chain and the lower ranks but I was really surprised to find that effectively there was a degree of bottom up driven exceptionalism to the extent you describe so my question for you is whose responsibility is it for the future to stop this happening is it the responsibility of the special forces leadership to open the door to scrutiny or is it the responsibility of other military leaders and indeed politicians to demand it um probably all of those things but but but I think it's um one of the one of the big challenges that comes out um from from the accounts is that you have a a structure which works superbly well for what it was designed to do and then that structure is being applied on a routine daily basis in an environment for which it was not designed routine oversight of junior officers was divorced from from the activity in a in a way that might have been entirely appropriate for a very specific sf uh tasking but if it became a routine activity starts to become dangerous and removes essential oversight and I think this is part of the gradual the gradual erosion of of standards over time as a a structure which was very good at what it was designed for being applied on a routine basis for tasks that it was no longer designed for and therefore the culpability for allowing that to happen belongs with the organization but also throughout the organization going all the way to the top um in fact for not not appreciating the implications of what was going on there's lots of there's lots of discussion I'm sure Dean will get into this later about about the the the fetishization of special forces in in in in some areas that the fact that this became the single most important tool of of of the Australian government for a long period of time means that um it was basically doing things that it was not designed to do um on a routine basis um and and that means that there's that there are there are problems all the way through through that organization therefore as as a result thank you well I'll invite Dean to get into it right now if he's if he's ready to enable Dean you have the floor thank you very much um and uh it's great to to be here and thanks again for the invitation um as John said when he introduced me uh I'm a member of the faculty of UNSW the University of New South Wales and based at the Canberra campus um and so while my work does uh I'm a military ethicist while my work does lead me to interact with the ADF on a regular basis I am first and foremost an academic and so I just want to stress that anything I say here today um shouldn't be in any way taken to represent the position of the Australian Defense Force or anybody else for that matter uh these are my views and my views only um I moved to Australia a little over eight years ago now and obviously it takes a little bit of time to find your feet um so I think it was probably six years ago that I was first invited to visit the SAS regiment to speak on military ethics and that was two years before the completion of the Cromford's report which in turn triggered the Brereton report that we are focused on today so in other words that was well before any of the issues we now know about came to light so when I was asked to speak on that occasion it wasn't to address any particular issue but rather to talk about ethics for special operations and that's not something I'd addressed before um and so I started my preparation by doing some digging around to find out what had been previously written on this topic and to my surprise it turned out that very little scholarly work had actually been directed at this issue um and so I was forced to come up with my own preliminary thoughts and those initial thoughts eventually turned into a Euro-ISMI conference paper and ultimately a chapter in one of the volumes in Euro-ISMI's book series and in that I was really struck by a throwaway comment by Michael Walter one of the few things he's ever written about about special forces or special operations forces who said that special operations forces should be employed only when conventional forces cannot act or have already failed we should sustain for as long as we can the possibility of abiding by either the rules of peace or the rules of war because we have a pretty clear sense of what these rules are we know what police and soldiers can and cannot do end quote so the implication there of course is that according to Walter we do not know what special forces can and cannot do but is that really the case so I tried to interrogate that in what I wrote I did that by trying to break down the recognized mission sets associated with special operations forces to see what ethical challenges and implications might arise from these mission sets my tentative conclusion was that the rules are not different the ethical constraints that bind conventional forces apply equally to special operations forces however I also concluded that the nature of special operations can make abiding by those constraints even more challenging and I think it might be worth here repeating my conclusions regarding the leadership challenge that special operations raises I said this first those of us who work in the field of military ethics have a responsibility to take the lead in bringing clarity on ethical issues relevant to special operations that either haven't been explored in sufficient depth or remain insufficiently clear in their practical application second there is a responsibility on those leaders who have a say over the education and training of soft operators to ensure that the relevant principles of ethics are sufficiently inculcated into their training while there has in general been much improvement in recent years in the teaching of ethics to military personnel is less evidence less evident that ethical decision making is something that is sufficiently incorporated into realistic training and here I quote Peter Dillon who is the US Army Special Forces soldier who wrote an excellent master's thesis on this topic who said this teaching ethics and ethical decision making is only half the task the other half is practice proficiency comes from practice yet too often the reality is that for ethical decision making practice starts on the battlefield training opportunities allow for practice and learning the motive for a comprehensive training program is to prepare the special operations forces operator before there is a need to make operational ethical decisions to achieve an acceptable level of unsupervised predictability soft leaders should accept the Aristotelian premise that ethics is a matter of habit resolving ethical dilemmas should be practiced and finally I wrote responsibility also rests on the shoulders of soft operators themselves as self leaders all the resources education and training in the world mean nothing if operators do not take seriously the idea that grasping and being able to apply relevant principles of military ethics is among the most important professional competencies they that they must achieve being outstanding technicians of violence is not enough the degree of responsibility that is inherent in being a member of a soft unit means that soft operators must not only be outstanding fighters they must also be exceptional thinkers so I thought I'd put those three conclusions into the mix to contribute to our discussion and for you to consider how well you think those thoughts have aged given what we now know but I'm also conscious that my co-panelists are far better qualified than I am to talk about the nature of special operations and the specifics of the Brereton report so what I'd like to focus on in what remains of my time is something a little bit different the question of moral injury as I read through the report it struck me as very significant that the idea of moral injury was mentioned in it that is in my view a huge step forward and something to be welcomed I question those whether the idea of moral injury as we general understand generally understand it is not too narrow such that we are overlooking another aspect of it that could be viewed as very significant in this case and here I'm drawing on my book morality and ethics at war where I offer my own current thinking on the nature of moral injury the part of that view is a conviction that we are at some deep and fundamental level inescapably moral beings and when I say moral beings I don't mean that I think we are all good rather I'm convinced that we cannot make sense of the world or our place in it without making evaluations of better or worse higher or lower meaningful and meaningless and even good and bad and right and wrong broadly these are moral evaluations that cannot I think simply be boiled down to base self-interest so in this view I'm following as many of you will recognize the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor who argues that these strong evaluations are an irresistible clue that each of us has an inescapable moral framework which is foundational to our identity moral injury it seems to me is what happens when that framework is in some way damaged or degraded all of us of course have had morally confronting experiences life throws a range of moral shocks in our direction which jar with our sense of what is right and good and meaningful and worthwhile I call this moral affront following a colleague of mine this is the normal experience of a properly functioning moral being the moral pain we experience in is in most cases an indicator of our moral soundness the sign that all is as it should be with our moral selves it should pain us when for example we witness an act of gross injustice or we ourselves violate another's trust but sometimes the moral pain we might experience is indicative of more than just moral affront in such cases we cannot simply as a word rub some dirt on it and walk it off the intensity of the pain is indicative of injury and underlying moral trauma this can be manifest as moral emotions which have become so heightened that they have become debilitating whether they be guilt shame anger or an overwhelming sense of hurt and betrayal in such cases what has happened it seems to me is that we have suffered from a kind of moral dislocation we have done or seen or become aware of something which is so jarred as morally that our moral framework or some part of it has been displaced or even fractured the normal confidence we have in our judgments of what is right and good and meaningful and worthwhile is gone and our path through life is now fraught and uncertain and even small knocks are therefore deeply painful our sense of who we are and our place in the world has been dislocated damaged or even broken moral dislocation as i'm calling that is the form of moral injury that has been the focus of attention for those engaged in the attempt to understand and address moral injury this is because of our natural tendency to want to address moral injury in those who are experiencing suffering and i think that this is the form of moral injury the sense of moral injury that i believe has been acknowledged in the brereton report but i believe that there is also an overlooked but insidious form of moral injury which can be extremely destructive and which must also be taken very seriously my colleague dr ned doves points out that there is another way in which we can be morally damaged we can be morally damaged in the sense that we can fail to experience unjust situations as morally jarring and i think of this analogy think of the scars and calluses that build up over the career of a mechanic or a professional fighter or someone like that those scars and calluses are the body's response to injury thicker patches of tissue which numb our physical contact with the world as a way to prevent us from experiencing pain likewise when we experience morally confronting situations particularly on a repeated basis there is a tendency for us to grow increasingly numb to such situations we become as we often say callous and while we might not recognize it in some circumstances we have become morally in such circumstances we've become morally injured that numbness is to our detriment just as physical pain for all its unpleasantness is a vital signal to our bodies that we need to act so take your hand off that hot plate that physical plane tells us so in the same way moral pain screams to our consciences that all is not okay we shouldn't be doing this without that signal we are at terrible risk of participating in or overlooking circumstances that demand moral action from us and so i raise for discussion this question if this account of moral injury seems roughly right might it be to some extent applicable to those who carried out the awful actions detailed in the brereton review and if so what are the implications of that going forward thank you dean thank you very much indeed two very quick questions for you can those who didn't participate in the activities but are members of special operations forces or closely related to them can they experience moral dislocation as you put it as a result of the brereton report and secondly as you mentioned virtue ethics virtue ethics has really been the cornerstone of military ethics teaching for quite a long time now consequentialism is seen as what i would call a plebeian cousin of the more patrician virtue ethics but ethical failures tend to bring large real world consequences like brereton like abu grave like me lie and so on so should we focus a little more on consequentialism as well as virtue ethics in training and education thanks john and so to your first question i think absolutely certainly there are unquestionably people within the adf and within special operations world who weren't directly involved in anything that that has been reported upon who are experiencing very significant moral shock and could potentially suffer a degree of moral injury i think that that's absolutely definitely the case i have no doubt about that whatsoever as to your question about virtue ethics versus consequentialism i tend to think that there are shortcomings to all three of the main approaches we we use to to looking at ethics whether it be deontology consequentialism or virtue ethics and so i actually encourage the military members i get to speak to to try to employ all three i think there's a danger in consequentialism in that we're not great at calculating consequences we're also have a tendency to predict consequences that align with our immediate self-interest and therefore skew our calculations in that kind of way so i think there's risk in a purely consequentialist consequentialist approach but on the other hand i think that virtue ethics has its shortcomings as well in in that it often doesn't tell you what the right thing to do is in a particular situation it's it's good at telling you what sort of person to be but if excuse me if you don't necessarily if you're not able to translate that into a a very clear picture of what the right thing to do is that doesn't help you very much so i think each of these approaches has limits and i think we do best when we try to approach each situation through all three lenses as much as we can thank you roger would you like to give your presentation yeah hot thanks hi everyone thank you general for the for the invitation and the opportunity to serve on a panel with scholars whose work i've long admired and i'd like to start if i may by offering just sort of a few of my my gut reactions to the report first i guess like everyone i'm appalled um but you know for anyone who gets beyond the headlines of this report who actually sits down and reads it or even scans it they will be impressed by it its scope its depth its candor its humanity even its solemnity it's evident throughout that the the authors understood fully the gravity of their task and and approached it with remarkable care if i were an australian citizen um i would come away more not less confident in the professionalism of the adf and and you know likewise if i were a member of the sas regiment or or two commander i'd also feel good about this investigation i feel confident that um that needed changes will be instituted um but but also that that an overreaction isn't you know which is too often what happens in these cases is probably unlikely the bariton report never loses sight of the the strategic importance of special operations or the extraordinary almost legendary contributions of australia's special operations forces um okay so gut reaction number two we've got a problem and i choose my words intentionally here we've got a problem this isn't an australian problem the world has has been at war um or at least running a low grade fever uh since before my students at the naval academy were born and special operations from australia the u k the us and and others have shouldered a burden that that's disproportionate to their numbers we in the west um just don't have experience with a with 20 year wars and we don't yet grasp the full extent of the physical and psychological and moral stress that we're we're putting on these these men and women um but but the findings of the bariton report certainly suggests that there's some urgency in gaining this this understanding okay so gut reaction number three and this is the one that i'm going to actually spend a little bit of time with and that is that cultural narratives seem to be playing an outsized role here um in in some places uh the report is explicit about this um in in others the role of of narratives is a little more implicit um but they to me they just stand out and uh i read the report as as a content a contest a contest for dominance um between at least two major narratives in some cases the good guys seem to be losing uh in in that front um so okay let me expand a little bit on that uh when i talk about cultural narratives um i'm drawing on a conceptualization provided by uh by the american sociologist christian smith um so smith writes we not only continue to be animals who make stories but also animals who are made by stories we are animals who most fundamentally understand what reality is who we are and how we ought to live by locating ourselves within the larger narratives and meta narratives that we hear and tell and that constitute what is for us real and significant um a cultural narrative is a form of communication that that puts situations uh and events in in the context of of who we are as a community uh where we've come from uh how we ought to live our lives uh they bring out they bring our attention to features um on the moral landscape that are important and that's good but they also can obfuscate uh you know we were all swimming in in a sea of cultural narratives and for the most part we're we're unaware of them um as a as an american male uh of european descent uh i am immersed in the the narrative of the american founding and the intrepid expansion of our people westward and i probably wouldn't recognize that these stories have any effects at all on my daily life or my moral perception unless i have a deep conversation uh with an american whose ancestors were enslaved for instance or an american whose ancestors were were native to north america um as a retired naval officer i accept uncritically that the narrative of the american gi is that that humble protector of democracy uh against tyrants and terrorists um uh the america the u.s fleet as the global force for good and and not everybody would would probably see it that way so for for any association of people uh that calls itself a community there's a a cultural narrative that binds them um and so for 26 years i was a member of the seal community uh and actually for most of my career i would have been probably hard-pressed uh for an answer if you came up and asked me what is the seal what is the narrative of the seal community i mean it's there but you know for the most part narratives are fuzzy things that come together organically um but in 2005 that after witnessing a handful of behaviors that that seemed to fall outside of the fuzzy lines of the seal narrative we actually decided that we would sit down and tell our story explicitly so we we put together a group of mid-grade officers and senior nco's and sequestered them on a barren inhospitable island off the the coast of san diego california and commissioned them to craft a narrative and after weeks of naval gazing um they produced what what we call the seal ethos or the seal creed some people call it uh and i for one think they got it exactly right um and you can google this at your leisure seal ethos or seal creed um but but for now i'll just say that uh that it's a narrative that i think uh we all would hope that special operations forces of any liberal democratic um uh country would embrace um here's a couple of lines that that i particularly like um i humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow americans always ready to defend those who are unable to defend themselves the execution of my duties will be swift and violent when required yet guided by the very principles uh that i serve to to defend um in my last command tour and the navy i was in charge of the selection and the basic training for all seals uh and and we we all me and my fellow instructors saw it as our our fundamental purpose uh that all of our seal candidates really understood and embraced this narrative and that those who couldn't wouldn't become seals um as a central part of that effort uh i ensured that um that every seal that that would would go on to become a seal not only understood uh but embraced the fundamental principles of the just war tradition which is embedded in that ethos um so every graduate knew that being a true being true to the seal ethos meant always adhering to the principle of non-combatant immunity um and every graduate knew what that meant to be a non-combat so at one point during this time when i was there um i i realized that we had a problem um one evening near near the end of near the end of my tour there is the the head instructor for naval special warfare i was walking out to my car uh to head home for the evening uh and i ran into one of my former students who was currently currently assigned to one of the west coast seal team and i just asked him how things are going and you know he shared with me and everything's awesome sir and his platoon was great and his pre-deployment workouts or workups were going really well but just before we sort of went our separate ways he he hesitantly came up to me and said you know yeah um you know one more one more thing i'd like to share with you um within a week of reporting to his first seal platoon he was confronted by a couple of the sort of mid-grade nco's in the platoon people who were about the same rank as the the patrol leaders that are discussed heavily in the brereton report uh and and they cautioned him uh they did you know ensign you need to forget everything that all that ethics crap that they are teaching you over basic training you're a stone cold killer now and don't you forget it so there was a i came to realize that there was a stone cold killer uh a narrative a counter narrative in our community brereton report gives it the name of the warrior hero uh narrative um so i wonder how this young junior officer held up during his initial tour um in afghanistan or iraq or wherever he ended up which narrative dominated his his approach to leadership the narrative of the seal ethos or or the stone cold killer narrative i never spoke to him again um but honestly i'm not optimistic here's why uh in in the wake of the enron scandal a study was published arguing that corrupt organizations have evolved really effective tactics through which newcomers entering into those corrupt corrupt units are induced to accept uh unethical practices and central to these tactics is the willingness of the newcomer to compromise values for some reward for the organizations in the study that rewards money for a new member of a corrupt seal platoon or sas troop uh the reward for adopting the stone cold killer narrative is far more enticing than money uh it acceptance into the inner ring uh being acknowledged as a fellow operator by these people you idolize uh as the report highlights brand new special operators fresh out of selection they've been dreaming about this their whole eyes becoming a member of the sas regiment or us or becoming a seal or a green beret whatever it is now they're finally arrived they're standing on the outer edges of their the inner circle um they would do just about anything for acceptance uh and and once in they would do just about they would do nothing to jeopardize that new status uh and i speak as an expert on this i can think back to when i was at ensign fresh out of basic training i i believed anything my first platoon chief told me i'm just fortunate that my first platoon chief was seem chief by my own um who was an embodiment of the seal eat those and not a subscriber to the stone stone cold killer narrative so how do we explain the emergence of this this counter narrative one explanation uh is professor weddoms bad apple thesis um there are there are some that are just hardwired to flourish in a world of stone cold killers and they're keen to proselytize um a former colleague of mine called them the the pirates they're the smooth talkers the the good politicians typically they're pretty good operators but they're just bad people um but here i agree with david that if if the bad apple thesis were were the end of the story that would actually be good news it's just a matter of weeding the garden um and this is likely part of the solution but i also agree with david that eliminating bad apples is is only a necessary uh condition to restoring the primacy of those narratives that we actually want our special operators um to embrace um i think we also have to look as david recommends to those systemic causes um those causes of the emergence of the counter narrative um several years ago and i'll take a stab at this quickly since i am a little short on time but several years ago a canadian author academic politician all around awesome dude um michael and not the f uh spoke with the naval academy um and he introduced five moral dilemmas of modern war three of these i think bear directly on the rise of the stone cold killer narrative and maybe contain some insights into how to counter it um the first uh is is moral numbing um ignati f worries that technologies like remotely piloted vehicles um have made killing so mechanical that that those involved in inflicting death lose sight that it is in fact death that they are inflicting um i would offer a corollary to to for those in the special operations community it's not that killing has become mechanical killing has become routine um for special operators in the u.s the u k australia we we've been at war or they've been at war um since a few days after 9 11 and and there are special operators outside the wire right now um for for soft taking lives has long ago stopped being something out of the ordinary we've developed uh the callousness uh to which which deem refers um if killing becomes too routine if killing loses its moral salience if the callous becomes too thick we risk getting it wrong we risk getting sloppy second ignati f talks about moral frustration uh and and um david spoke about this a bit if our adversaries don't play by the rules why should we if our enemy targets non-combatants hides among civilians mutilates the bodies of our fallen comrades uh then the temptation to respond in kind is great and the stone cold killer narrative becomes increasingly attractive and finally uh and and closely related ignati f considers the what he calls the perverse consequences of doing good um a great example during operation red wings the operation that was turned into a book and later a movie loan survivor um a seal reconnaissance team was literally stepped on by three goat herds uh the the team released the goat herds knowing that that doing so would put them in grave danger but also that morally they had few options the result of doing good in that case uh could hardly have turned out worse and not only three of the four of the members of reconnaissance team were killed uh but so were 19 members of the quick reaction force that came in to recover them so what lesson do we draw from operation red wing we we hope that our our young seals and other soft learn to admire the moral steadfastness of lieutenant murphy um and and other members of reconnaissance team um but the purveyors of the stone cold killer narrative can spin that in a different way you know the lesson is take care of your brothers kill the goat herds and don't lose a single night to sleep over it so if the genesis of the stone cold killer narrative is in fact systemic and not just a product of a few bad apples um or a handful of pirates um remediation becomes far more complex you know how do you diffuse and defame a narrative that emerges organically uh from a situation that our governments and our military have placed our operators into the short answer is i don't really know and it's going to take a long time the problem is deep in vexing um i will offer three recommendations and none of which are original uh and they're they're in the report and you have just heard them so i'll move through them quickly so i can we can get to q and a first um uh we and and again i mean we in the broadest terms we must recognize that we have a moral obligation to to kill the stone cold killer narrative uh we owe it to the special operators who service and sacrifice to our countries and honestly to the world should humble us all um second as the as the report promotes uh ethics must be viewed as a core competency of special operations not just a check in the pre-deployment uh block uh and furthermore as as david alluded to ethics training and education and especially education isn't just for officers indeed i think the bariton report should alert us to the fact that the biggest bang for the training and education book uh is focusing on focusing our energy uh at that rank level of of those patrol leaders who clearly exert so much influence on newcomers uh to special operations officers and enlisted alike and and finally uh and this goes to the problem of moral numbing especially uh special operations can't become the easy button uh for our policymakers and our generals when we employ soft on missions that are are best handled by our conventional forces we are putting at risk a scarce resource uh we have to embrace the fundamental idea that special operations forces cannot uh be mass produced or easily replaced when they are broken physically mentally um or morally uh and and i look forward to your questions gorgeous thank you very much indeed they let me start with a short observation and then a couple of questions uh the observation is about your seal creed uh i think it was very positive to mention that because we spoke earlier david spoke earlier about the exceptionalism uh that can be unhealthy uh in some ways but i think we also need to recognize that the best people to come up with the right way of doing things are those who are most intimately involved and knowledgeable about them um so there can be a very positive aspect to working inside the tent as well as a negative aspect so thank you for mentioning that i'm going to press you slightly on culture and then ask you a question that's come from one of the participants uh military culture is a plant with very very deep roots and it has positive aspects it encourages camaraderie loyalty and is built up informally and formally as you have described it has to be very very durable because it has to survive extreme conditions it has to motivate individual soldier sailors and airmen when they really are with their backs against the wall so when culture becomes deficient or distorted how do we start to remedy that um and the question i'd i'd like to talk to you from a member of the audience my paraphrase slightly so i i do apologize the cases we've been speaking about today are not isolated by any means because there are precedents from other nations not just uh australia to what extent are these bad precedents used as examples in teaching and why in essence are we so bad at learning from them yeah thanks um john and i i don't know what when you asked me you know how do you remedy this i i don't know what part of i don't know what you're listening to it's this is hard this is going to be a tough um slog when we recognize that countercultures are emerging because those countercultures uh you know they're they're organic and and they emerge i think mostly from the situation so we do have to take a look at the situation um i don't know if we are bad at learning from these examples i think right now we are i see this in every in special operations around the world we are we are seeing these things becoming more and more evident and coming more and more to light and we are appalled and we are we are going to red alert with them um as the uh as the chief gallagher case was emerging out here in the us um i had a conversation with uh the the leader of war com at the time of naval special warfare command at the time so this is the two star admiral in charge of all of naval special warfare and essentially solving this problem addressing this emerging culture that commanded his full attention that was that that that was almost all he did when he walked in to work in the morning and came away from it at night um and it's going to be that's going to be the case for his successors probably for for several uh rotations i think um when i think of the answer to this though i i do go to education and training um mostly because i'm an educator probably um but i think therein lies the answer several times in the brereton report the report talks about we need to bring officers we need to maybe add an officer to the command structure a junior officer of command structure and bring them closer to the field i agree with this but maybe not as a solution to this problem i agree with it because it will it will give your officer the officer for more credibility um as operators you know make them better operators make them better understand what's going on in the field so that's good but in terms of them addressing this emerging culture i just think that they are they will typically tend to be weak agents in that result i would hope that almost all of our efforts right now or that a great deal of our efforts in education and training are focused on this level of the patrol leader and i wasn't able to quite discern what that rank was but i'm guessing mid mid-grade nco's that are just now emerging to that nco level but haven't quite taken over at the command level so that level of nco we see how instrumental they are in conveying the wrong the wrong culture just think how instrumental they will be in in in setting the the ship straight and i don't think that that's insurmountable either because even though i agree with david that the we should be looking for systemic answers if you look far and broad in any of the special operations forces that we've been talking about so primarily us uk and australia the the culture that is is pervasive that is most pervasive is the culture we want them to embrace i think i think that the stone cold culture the strong stone cold killer culture is still the aberration or at least i hope so so i think that this ship can be turned but it's going to take a long time thank you i've got a couple of questions from the audience which are really best directed at david i think although dean might want to join in for one of them in the in the year when we had black lives matter and a considerable focus on racism i'll read the question verbatim what consideration missing from professor wetham's excellent annex to the report is the place of histories of colonialism slavery etc and contemporary racism does this background make it easier for behaviors to degrade when dealing with quote brown and black people unquote and i have a second question which is here it is this is from somebody who knows former special forces operators who were in the special forces perhaps decades ago and are still quote completely morally injured or debilitated and dislocated as dean put it even 30 years on what ethics training really have helped them would it have prepared them for what they faced saw and what they had to do David thank you very much two really good questions um so i'm trying to think through all of the different accounts i read and i'm trying to get a sense from that as to whether or not there was a conscious racism at work um i i i can't say that that is something that i um captured from from my from my work um i'm trying to think of specific examples where where um the local forces were being referred to or the local population was being referred to um and on the i can think of specific examples that where um the competency of partners was questioned or highlighted or emphasized as being very good um but it was it was generally in terms of their professionalism and how good they were at what they were doing as to whether or not they were being um spoken of in a positive or a negative way um so in that sense i didn't get that feeling but in a broader sense it's it's it's it's impossible not to to feel that um we know that if you have a sense of other um if you have a sense of other then it's much easier to do bad things to them we know this um the more you recognize somebody as being uh like yourself the the harder it is to to mistreat them so the sense of otherness i would say implicitly must have a um an impact um at quite a deep level um whether or not that counts um the broader place of of the history of colonialism slavery um contemporary racism that you refer to i think i'd need to think further about that i'd be very surprised if it wasn't um but i can't think of specific examples from what i saw that i could put my finger on now um i would need to read i would need to consider it further i think um the second question about um moral injury would would um do i genuinely think that um uh uh have they been better prepared in um ethics education terms that they would be able to cope with what they were the the actual wording um what they had to do so i i do i do passionately think that it would be it would be able to make a difference uh firstly coming to terms and being able to cope with what you have done when it was genuinely required when it was when it was necessary um if you have uh if you are well equipped in in ethical terms to be able to reason through a situation and know that this is not only what is what you have to do but it is also because it is the right thing to do at that time given the circumstances given what what is at stake but also the the rules your your your values if you have a if you are able to reason through it at the time um in those terms um there is evidence that it's much easier to come to terms with it afterwards whereas if you have been forced the way that the question is framed it feels almost like people being forced into doing things that they feel was wrong if you are empowered to be able to say this is wrong through uh a well established ethics training and education firstly i would hope that those people wouldn't have been forced into doing things that they thought were wrong in the first place um they would they would be doing things they would be doing things that they they considered to be right um and if they didn't coming to terms with things afterwards is much easier uh if if you can see a situation and know that you did the best that you could with what you had available at the time it's much easier to come to terms with something rather than constantly spending the rest of your life second guessing about whether you did do the right thing or whether you should have done something else so i do think that there's a role to play there i also think one of the things that this is this is highlighted in some of the other questions i think um we spent a lot of time training people to kill that's part of the part of the job uh being able to um equip people with the with the mentality that that that enables them to do what in normal life would be considered to be a terrible thing but we spend very little time at the other end when people come out of the military in removing that element or or or dealing with that element uh enabling people to to integrate back into a situation where that again becomes abnormal that type of behavior um and i think that there could be a great deal more support there um that the the equivalent of untraining or detraining um i'm not quite sure what you would call it um but the the the ability to um change the sense of what is normal and be supported through that process i think would be something that we should spend more time thinking about roger would you like to comment on that detraining desensitizing aspect well i'd like to comment on the uh uh just sort of to back up what what david said the answer to that question is just yes yes yes and passionately yes um um and i think in two regards one is that um that ethical training in ethics training in military ethics um is first going to prevent you from doing that thing that is going to degrade your virtue or that you're going to regret um my very first time in combat was the uh the invasion the us invasion of panama in 1989 and i remember two hours before my only i guess we'll call it ethics training leading up to that um was about two hours before i was about to launch my first time in combat um i'm given a two hour roe brief by from a lawyer and i'm going to tell you i i was not paying attention i was thinking about all those things that you think about when you're about to go into combat like um am i going to be a coward am i going to uh lead my troops well am i going to get killed tonight and and so this is the extent of it and um you know i i i think back to what happened in that time and i i had some close calls in terms of making mistakes that i would have later either regretted or worse not regretted and allowed it to degrade my virtue the other thing i'll say in this is just simply this idea of moral injury it's a it's a relatively um inquiry concept meaning a couple decades that we've been talking about this i think uh it's not the same thing as physical injury it's not the same thing as psychological injury and simply to know this simply for us as leaders to know that there is another way that our soldiers can be wounded on the battlefield is profoundly important um and it should chase in us and it should make us think twice when we give orders um and also uh i think that if we have people who are wounded morally and we treat them psychologically um we might not be approaching that right so simply just knowing that this is out there i think is an important thing well there is in fact a question from the audience that um relates to that uh i'll direct you to dean if i may i'll read it verbatim what parts of an individual or group are principally affected in suffering moral injury i would maintain that it is the soldier's spirit which has been badly damaged is more discussion required in military education about the very nature of human beings i understand us broadly to be made up of body mind and spirit moral injuries are neither physical bodily damage nor mental health problems they are deep wounds to the spirit of each troubled combatant would you like to comment the thank you um yes i'm i suppose the the terminology there the spirit idea might be um perhaps not the ideal choice simply because not everyone in our in our societies thinks we have spirits but i think the the underlying idea is is entirely correct and i and i do think actually we are starting to see um some education on this starting to happen it's certainly happening in in the circles that that i work in um at these i'm pushing it but i think others are as well um so yeah i would say we can't reduce this to ptsd for example i think it is different in quality there may be some similarities in terms of brain function that we we have yet to explore that's good that's a area i think we need to look at um but but certainly i i do agree that um this is something that there's an increasing need um to equip soldiers to understand um traditionally that has happened through the the work of chaplains and i think they still have an important role in that regard but certainly in an increasingly secularized environment such as in australia um we are having to start to think about whose responsibility that is to to teach and to work through psychologists have a role as well um but part of the challenge of course is that the moral injury is a still a relatively new idea we still haven't got it all pinned down um but it's an important one that i think we still need to explore to a significant significant extent thank you i'll make this the last question if i may i apologize in advance to those who have submitted questions that we can't get round to and should debriefing of all personnel after every tour of duty or before every holiday very become the norm to find out without any dangers to them whether any dreadful or suspect thing has happened without that person going back to his unit so there is no chance of his being quill quizzed on what he reported so he can be wholly honest i'll throw that open to the three of you so debriefings do happen i don't i don't know couching a debrief in such a way would certainly put somebody's guard up but but i think after every deployment there of special operations forces there there is a debriefing and i imagine that's a place where some of those things can come out um and and i think that there would be value in that anybody else liked comment or indeed make any other final comment before we wrap up i'll just add something to that it's not a direct response to the comment but i think one of the the things that i think is important is the the role of trusted outsiders and i think one of the things that that we have to overcome is this closed loop if you like where people who are in the system are unwilling to speak to those outside the system and the the question of who those trusted outsiders are that people feel they can speak to is a very challenging one but i think that that we need to give a great deal of attention to that i i echo both of those points i think the the idea of having a being able to have a critical friend is is absolutely essential somebody who's not in your organization but is familiar enough with everything that um that they're not considered to be a complete outsider somebody who can trust now historically that role might have been played by the chapter nor the the part rate in some in some in some military organizations today that is still the case um for for some for some organizations for some some countries that's that's no longer appropriate but somebody who is is part of your organization or it's separate it but still separate that's that's absolutely essential um somebody who is not considered to be alien but somebody who can be confided in but i think that role is is is very very important um the the specific suggestion that came from the question of i i think that could be a useful part of of an oversight mechanism if timed in the way that was suggested i think i think that could be that could be a very useful part of the oversight um that that is is very very necessary in this environment thank you very much uh given that the raritan report took four years to produce and it runs to over 400 pages we were never going to solve all the problems today but i would like to thank the three panelists um david who can now go off and have tea in england roger who can go off and have lunch in anapolis and dean who in about two hours time can go and have breakfast in new south wales um thank you all very much indeed for your comments i don't think we could have had a better panel to discuss this thank you also to everybody who joined us as a participant and to those who submitted questions i'm sorry we couldn't get around to everybody but thank you for joining thank you to danielle in the back room at the school of security studies who made it all work and let me conclude by telling you about the next euro ismi webinar which will be on the 21st of january and perhaps very appropriately on ptsd and moral injury thank you all goodbye