Taran Cout Arus gun province Afghanistan forward operating base Ripley February 2007 a US Army logistics sergeant named Dale Hutchkins attached to the 82nd Airborne support element was processing base access rosters when he noticed something that did not make immediate sense.

The Australian contingent at Ripley, roughly 300 personnel in total, including engineers, infantry, and support staff, had a standard access arrangement. They moved through the base freely. They used the messaul. They attended joint briefings. They were by every formal measure coalition partners operating under a shared chain of command.

But the operators from the Australian Special Air Service Regiment were different. They lived in a walled compound within the compound, a section of the base that had been incrementally fortified with additional barriers until it functioned less like a tent city within a military installation and more like a facility that had decided quietly and without making a particular fuss about it that it would prefer to be somewhere else entirely.

[music] They did not eat in the main mess. They did not attend standard briefings. They went out at night and came back before dawn and the paperwork they generated was processed through channels that bypassed the normal joint reporting structure. Sergeant Hutchkins had been in the army for 11 years.

He understood the bureaucratic grammar of coalition warfare. This was different. The question that occurred to him standing in the administration tent with the roster in his hand was not why the Australians kept to themselves. It was why the answer felt simultaneously obvious and completely impossible to articulate.

To understand what Hutchkins was observing, you have to go back to a jungle in Borneo in 1965 and to the particular kind of warfare that shaped the regiment he was watching through the fence. The Special Air Service Regiment was raised in Perth in 1957, modeled on the British Special Air Service.

But doctrine is a living thing absorbed, filtered, and modified by the conditions under which it is tested. The regiment’s formative testing ground was the deep primary forest of Borneo during the Indonesian confrontation of 1963 to 1966, a conflict most people have never heard of, and that shaped the regiment’s operational identity more completely than anything before or since.

In Borneo, the regiment conducted deep reconnaissance patrols. Small teams of typically four men inserted into into enemy controlled territory for up to two weeks, operating without resupply, without air support, and and without realistic extraction if compromised. [music] The forest was the medium of survival.

A patrol that made noise, any noise, a snapped branch, equipment that had not been padded or footsteps with too regular a rhythm was a patrol that would not return. What the regiment developed in Borneo were skills of presence management, the ability to move through contested space without generating any detectable signature at all.

The Vietkong, who encountered the regiment’s patrols in Vietnam from 1966, gave them a name that followed the regiment through every subsequent deployment. They called them marang, phantoms of the jungle, not because they were invisible, because they were undetectable until it was too late to matter.

The United States Special Operations Forces that became the SASR’s most frequent coalition partners in Afghanistan were the product of a completely different history. The Green Beretss were founded in 1952 on a doctrine of unconventional warfare, the organization of indigenous forces, the establishment of operational bases in contested territory, and the deliberate projection of enough presence to transform a population into a coherent fighting force.

This required a different relationship with noise. Not noise in the simple acoustic sense, but operational visibility. By 2001, this inheritance had been layered with 20 years of direct action culture, including Delta Force, the Rangers, and Joint Special Operations Command, and that had produced forces of extraordinary capability.

They were also loud in the specific sense that mattered to the Australians. They traveled in vehicles when the SASR would walk. They used radio communications when the SASR would go silent. They brought a footprint to the battle space that the SASR’s doctrinal framework identified with some precision as a liability.

The friction had been building for years before it crystallized into the arrangements Hutchkins observed. The Special Air Service Regiment’s first deployment to Afghanistan in October 2001, Operation Slipper, produced results that attracted immediate American attention. One squadron group moved through the terrain south of Cabo with a speed and silence that surprised partners who had expected an allied force to require more logistical overhead and considerably more time to generate results. By March 2002, during Operation Anaconda in the Shahi Kat Valley, special air service regiment teams who had infiltrated the valley 10 days before the main assault were providing intelligence of unexpected precision, having moved through terrain that American planners had assessed as requiring vehicle support and which the Australians had covered on foot at night in silence without air cover in the way they had been trained to move since Borneo. when a US Chinuk carrying

Rangers from the 75th Regiment was shot down and its crew came under fire from an estimated 300 al-Qaeda fighters. It was special air service regiment snipers who provided the overwatch and directed the air strikes that halted the assault. Up to 300 al-Qaeda fighters were estimated to have been killed as a result of those strikes.

The Americans were impressed. The Australians characteristically did not appear to notice that an impression had been made. The problem was that the things that made the Special Air Service Regiment SASR operationally effective were precisely the things that made coalition integration difficult. They worked in small patrols that moved by night over distances conventional forces could not sustain.

Their communications were minimal. They reported what was necessary when silent when silence served the mission and they operated on cycles that created persistent difficulties for joint command structures built around continuous information flow. Their rules of engagement were classified at the Australian government level and could not be fully shared with coalition partners.

Their relationship with the Afghan population in Urosan province, built on long-term presence and local intelligence rather than periodic assault, produced a kind of situational knowledge that American counterparts found simultaneously invaluable and impossible to integrate into their own operational cycles. By 2006, when the SASR returned for its third major rotation as part of the reconstituted special operations task group, the divergence had calcified.

The Australians moved as they had always moved, quietly in the dark, generating no more signature than the terrain required. They were extraordinarily effective. They were also, by every measure, impossible to fully supervise. What followed was not a single incident, but an accumulating series of frictions.

A joint patrol in late 2006 [music] ended with the Americans filing a complaint about Australian communications discipline, specifically about the SASR practice of going to radio silence at points where United States protocols required check-ins. The SASR position articulated with the measured calm that characterizes the regiment’s institutional style was that unnecessary radio traffic generated [music] intercept risk in an environment where Taliban signals intelligence was more sophisticated than American planning had assumed. The Americans position was [music] that a coalition partner who could not maintain radio contact was a coordination liability. Both positions were correct. They were also irreconcilable. A subsequent joint operation in early 2007 produced a related friction. An SASR patrol had approached a compound through a route United [music] States planners had not

been briefed on, creating a period during which American forces on the perimeter were uncertain whether the movement they were detecting was friend or [music] enemy. The afteraction report used the word confusion. The implications were more serious than that word suggested. [music] In a battle space where uncertainty about movement could produce fratricside, the Australians practice of operating without continuous positional reporting was not an abstract doctrinal disagreement, but a specific physical risk. Quietly, without any single formal decision, the accommodation that emerged was the one Hutchkins had noticed. The SASR would operate from forward operating base Ripley, but integration with their American counterparts would be managed through liaison and decon deconliction rather than genuine joint operation. They would share a base. They would not in any meaningful sense share a battle space. The separate compound was not a punishment. No memorandum was

written. No formal order issued. The arrangement emerged through accumulated practical necessity and the gradual recognition that what they had been doing was not working in the way either side had assumed. The special air service regiment known as SASR had not been banned from American bases in Afghanistan in any formal sense.

What had happened was more nuanced. They had been tacitly recognized as too effective, too independent, and too operationally different [music] to integrate safely into a system designed around different doctrinal assumptions. The Americans were not wrong to identify this.

The Australians were not wrong to maintain it. The problem was that both things were true simultaneously. The SASR’s compound at Terran Cow was eventually described in the 2020 Breitton report with a retrospective [snorts] irony its authors may not have intended. The report, a 4-year investigation into allegations of war crimes by Australian special forces between 2005 and 2016, found evidence of 39 unlawful killings of Afghan civilians and prisoners, none of them committed in the heat of battle.

The report noted that the special air service regiment had operated with a degree of institutional insularity that had prevented the kind of external oversight that might have detected and interrupted the patterns of conduct under investigation. The physical separation that was a product of genuine operational difference of a unit so good at what it did that it could not be integrated into a system built around different assumptions had also been a structure within which a different kind of problem could propagate undetected. The secrecy that served the SASR operationally and the secrecy that served it institutionally were in practice the same secrecy. No mechanism existed to distinguish between them. This is the paradox. The history of the Special Air Service Regiment in Afghanistan keeps returning to without ever resolving. The qualities that made the regiment exceptional, independence, tolerance for operating outside normal oversight structures, and the

institutional confidence that their methods were correct. that the right response to a system that could not accommodate those methods was to operate around it rather than inside it were not separable from the qualities that made the regiment difficult to supervise or hold accountable.

You cannot have the phantom of the jungle on demand while also knowing at any given moment exactly where the phantom is and what it has been doing. The Americans who watched the Australians from the other side of the wire at Ripley understood this in one sense. The sense in which operational capability and institutional transparency are genuinely competing values and the special air service regiment had made its choice so completely and over such a long period that the choice had become invisible to the people who had made it. The investigators who produced the Beritin report understood it in another sense. The sense in which that same choice made in the jungle in Borneo in 1965 and refined through Vietnam and East Teeour and Iraq and 100 training exercises in the red dirt outside Perth had produced an institution that was in some ways

beyond the reach of the system it nominally served. Whether those two senses resolve into the same paradox, whether the thing that makes a force like the Special Air Service Regiment possible is precisely and unavoidably the thing that makes it dangerous, not to its enemies, but to itself, is the question that neither The Wire at Ripley nor the report published 19 years later has managed to answer.