There is a unit inside the Australian Army that American special forces operators privately called the most dangerous men they ever fought alongside. Not the most skilled, not the most disciplined, the most dangerous. For years, US commanders in Afghanistan quietly told their own people the same thing.

Do not ask what the Australians are doing out there. Do not ask how they get their results. Just work with what they give you and move on. that informal understanding held for nearly two decades. It held through firefights in the mountain passes of Aruzan province. It held through rotation after rotation through debriefs and joint operations and afteraction reports that described outcomes without ever fully explaining methods.

It held until a 4-year investigation tore open the sealed record and showed the world exactly what had been happening in those valleys when nobody was watching. This is the story of the Australian Special Air Service Regiment in Afghanistan and it is not the story you think it is. The Australian Special Air Service Regiment was built in the image of the British Special Air Service after Australia’s experience fighting communist insurgents in the Malayan jungle during the 1950s.

British Special Air Service advisers helped design the regiment’s original selection and training framework. The concept was deliberate. A small, highly mobile force capable of deep reconnaissance behind enemy lines, direct action raids, and counterterrorism operations. Campbell barracks in Swanborn, Western Australia, became the regiment’s permanent home.

It still is today. Getting into the Special Air Service Regiment, SASR, was never meant to be easy. The selection course run across the punishing terrain of the Sterling Ranges in Western Australia broke the majority of applicants who attempted it. The failure rate historically sat above 80%. Weeks of navigation exercises, sleep deprivation, heavy loads, and relentless psychological pressure called candidates who might have passed the physical requirements of almost any other military unit on Earth. The regiment’s selection was designed to forge elite operators, but the physical demands were almost secondary to what the regiment was actually selecting for. The special air service regiment wanted a specific kind of soldier, self-sufficient, independent, capable of making life or death decisions without supervision, and psychologically resistant to the pressure that comes with operating completely alone. days away from

friendly forces deep inside territory where capture meant death. That combination of qualities, extreme autonomy, resistance to external authority, and a capacity to function without oversight was the precise profile the regiment had always prized. It was also the profile that when placed inside a war with inadequate accountability, structures would eventually become dangerous.

When al-Qaeda operatives flew commercial aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York on the 11th of September 2001, Australia’s response came fast. Prime Minister John Howard was in Washington at the time of the attacks, attending meetings with American officials. He watched the towers fall from a hotel room less than 2 kilometers from the White House.

Australia invoked the ANZUS Mutual Defense Treaty within days, making it the first nation other than the United Kingdom to formally commit forces to the American response. Within months, the Special Air Service Regiment, abbreviated SASR, had soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan, operating alongside CIA paramilitary officers and US special forces in the opening phase of the campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

They worked in the eastern mountains near Tora Bora in the valley south of Kandahar and eventually settled into a long-term responsibility for Urus Gan province in the country’s south. Uruan was not a posting that came with easy victories. It was a landlocked stretch of high desert and mountain passes where the Taliban had deep tribal roots going back decades where poppy cultivation funded the insurgency and where every road through every valley was a potential ambush.

The coalition had been fighting and dying there since the beginning of the war. The Special Air Service Regiment took up that ground and began running special operations missions that by the time Australia ended its combat deployment in 2013 would total well over 500. The early years produced genuine battlefield effectiveness.

The regiment’s patrols dismantled Taliban command networks, disrupted insurgent supply lines running from Pakistan, and gathered human intelligence that fed into into the broader coalition campaign. The operators conducting those missions were, by any honest assessment, among the best trained soldiers in the world. They navigated hostile terrain at night using skills that took years to develop.

They maintained radio communications in conditions that defeated standard military equipment. They made complex tactical decisions under direct fire with minimal guidance from above and minimal ability to request immediate support. American commanders working alongside the Australians during those early rotations were by most accounts genuinely impressed.

Former US special forces soldiers who later spoke publicly about joint operations with the regiment described them as relentless, aggressive, and effective. Where other units would secure a compound and withdraw, the Australians pushed further. Where other patrols would call for air support, the regiment frequently solved the problem themselves and kept moving.

In a war where measurable results were extraordinarily difficult to achieve, the Australians produced them consistently. That reputation became its own kind of protection. When you are the unit that delivers results, other units cannot match. Questions about your methods become professionally inconvenient for the people who benefit from those results.

American officers who asked too many questions about operations by the Special Air Service Regiment risked damaging a working relationship that their own chains of command valued. The informal understanding that developed, the quiet agreement not to scrutinize what the Australians were doing in those valleys at night was not a conspiracy.

It was something more ordinary and in some ways more troubling. It was institutional convenience dressed up as professional respect. But somewhere in those years of repeated deployments and diminishing oversight, something inside the SASR’s Afghanistan rotations began to change. The operators who had been to Afghanistan once came back changed.

The operators who had been four or five times came back different in ways that were harder to name. The psychological weight of repeated combat tours, the prolonged exposure to extreme violence, the absence of normal life between rotations, and a unit culture that prized aggression and results above almost everything else began to produce behavior that went beyond aggressive soldiering and into into territory that had a different name entirely.

The first public signs that something was seriously wrong came not from any official channel, but from rumors that had been circulating inside the Australian Defense Force for years. Junior soldiers returning from Afghanistan sometimes told stories that did not sit right. Stories about prisoners who had been shot when there was no tactical justification for shooting them.

Stories about rules of engagement being not just interpreted loosely but ignored entirely. Stories about a culture of silence so enforced that raising concerns about what you had witnessed felt genuinely dangerous not just to a career but in some cases to something more fundamental than a career.

A preliminary internal inquiry in 2016 confirmed enough of those concerns to trigger something larger. In 2018, the Inspector General of the Australian Defense Force appointed the Honorable James Breitton, a sitting judge of the New South Wales Court of Appeal to lead a comprehensive and independent investigation into the conduct of Australian Special Forces personnel in Afghanistan.

The Breitin inquiry ran for 4 years. Investigators interviewed hundreds of witnesses, including current and former soldiers, Afghan nationals, coalition partners, and civilian officials. They reviewed thousands of pages of classified operational records, signals, intercepts, satellite imagery, and afteraction reports that had never been intended for public scrutiny.

They traveled to Afghanistan to interview witnesses on the ground and gather evidence from the villages and compounds where the alleged incidents had occurred. It was one of the most extensive and costly military conduct investigations any Western democracy had ever conducted into its own elite forces.

The final report released in November 2020 was not a bureaucratic document carefully hedged with qualifications. It was devastating. The inquiry found credible information that Australian special forces soldiers had unlawfully killed 39 Afghan nationals across a range of incidents spanning from 2005 to 2016. 25 current or former Australian Defense Force personnel were identified as warranting referral to the Australian Federal Police for potential criminal investigation.

The report documented executions of prisoners who were in custody and posed no immediate threat. It documented the deliberate planting of weapons on the bodies of people who had been killed unlawfully to manufacture a false justification for the shooting. And it documented something that stopped many readers entirely, a practice the inquiry described as a blooding ritual.

The inquiry said patrol commanders allegedly directed junior soldiers soldiers on their first deployment to shoot a bound or incapacitated prisoner as their first kill. The purpose, according to the inquiry’s findings, was to bind that young soldier to the patrol through shared culpability to make him complicit to ensure he would never report what he had seen because he was now as guilty as everyone else.

The Breitton report also mapped the cultural environment that had allowed this to persist for over a decade. It described a two-tiered hierarchy inside deployed SASR patrols, a cadre of highly experienced senior operators who set the behavioral norms for each rotation. Younger soldiers were effectively socialized into accepting those norms as the price of belonging to an elite unit.

The report used the phrase warrior culture to describe an environment where dehumanization of the enemy inflated contempt for accountability in a genuine belief in the unit’s own exceptionalism had created the conditions for serious and sustained criminal conduct. Ben Robert Smith was at the center of the most publicly contested part of that reckoning.

On paper, Robert Smith was everything the SASR claimed to stand for. He received the Victoria Cross, Australia’s highest military honor for a solo charge against an enemy machine gun position in Uruan province in 2010 that allowed his outnumbered patrol to complete its mission. He received the medal for gallantry for a separate action.

He was physically imposing, 6′ 5 in tall, photogenic, articulate, and after leaving the military became a senior media executive. He was for years the living symbol of Australian military excellence. In 2023, a federal court judge found on the civil standard of balance of probabilities that Robert Smith had committed war crimes in Afghanistan.

The judgment described him kicking a prisoner from the top of a cliff and directing soldiers under his command to shoot the man when he landed. It found he had participated in the unlawful killing of other Afghan nationals. It found he had intimidated and attempted to corrupt potential witnesses against him. Robert Smith has denied all findings and has signaled an appeal.

The civil judgment was only one part of the accounting. Criminal referrals from the Breitin inquiry to the Australian Federal Police remain active. Prosecutions are being built. The process is slow, complicated by the classified nature of the evidence and the legal challenges of applying civilian criminal standards to events that occurred in active combat zones more than a decade ago.

The question that sits underneath all of this is one that extends far beyond Australia. Every special forces unit in every Western military operates on some version of the same bargain. exceptional capability delivered in exchange for exceptional trust and reduced oversight. The Australian Special Air Service Regiment known as SASR in Afghanistan was simply the version of that bargain that got examined most closely.

The American officers who told their people not to ask questions about the Australians were not wrong that the SASR produced results. They were wrong to believe that results without accountability were something an institution could absorb indefinitely without cost. The SASR still exists. Soldiers still attempt selection in the the Sterling Ranges.

The regiment will deploy again when the next conflict demands it. But the institution that emerges from this reckoning will have to answer a question that is successfully avoided for 20 years in Afghanistan. What exactly are we willing to look away from? And for how long? 39 deaths suggest the answer was already overdue.

If accountability failures inside Western Special Forces are a subject you want to go deeper on, the next video covers the Delta Force internal review that nearly resulted in the unit being disbanded in the 1980s. The link is on screen now. Subscribe if this kind of investigation is what you come here for.