![]() Time and again when discussing the Panorama report with my ex-military friends the same question is asked what were the officers doing during all of this? The SAS famously has a relaxed attitude to such things as rank and dress, both staples of most armies’ ethos, but in their case it perhaps was allowed to go too far and morphed into a kind of canteen culture where the tail began to wag the dog?Īs the old army adage has it, there are no bad regiments just bad commanding officers. As an officially sanctioned “elite” organisation, senioro fficers became wary of interfering with their modus operandi and became increasingly hands-off, maybe too much hands-off. Through this and subsequent actions the unit developed a guid’ conceit o’ itsel’, much of it undoubtedly deserved. The unit was lionised by the media and politicians alike and became globally famous. Their famous assault, abseiling from the roof and blowing out window frames, was carried on live television to an incredulous audience and became one of the defining moments of both Margaret Thatcher’s Premiership and British military history. The SAS was a relatively obscure and unheralded outfit until they burst into the public conscience at the Iranian Embassy siege in London in 1980. How could a disciplined military unit “go rogue” like this and become an outlier in the British military? The question then arises as to how this could happen. ![]() If proven, such charges are quite clearly illegal and totally at variance with the laws of armed conflict, and the perpetrators are essentially war criminals who should face justice. To compound matters, it is claimed that they then planted weapons on the dead to justify their actions. The most serious charge is that they summarily executed unarmed Afghan boys and men of fighting age, some of whom had already been restrained and rendered helpless, in some macabre competition between units over who could achieve the highest number of kills. Briefly, the Panorama programme suggested that the SAS, and their little brothers the SBS, were basically a law unto themselves in Afghanistan, operating outside the in-theatre chain of command. The favourite tabloid phrase “judge-led” springs to mind.īut let’s look at the allegations which have been made. No, it needs to be carried out by someone or some organisation with no military links whatsoever. And by independent I mean truly independent the Royal Military Police, God bless’em, come under the army chain of command and cannot be described as independent by any stretch of the imagination. However, I do agree with the band of assorted senior retired military officers that the allegations are serious enough to warrant some sort of independent inquiry. I am in neither camp but somewhere in-between. On the other side of the fence, various leftie journalists and commentators have already called for the immediate disbandment of the SAS and the arrest and trial of all those allegedly involved in the killings. ![]() Predictably it has led to an outburst of spluttering from the usual Bufton-Tuftons who spend most of their days in the leather armchairs of various London clubs, whose consensus view seems to be that it is an outrage that the reputation of Britain’s elite warriors has been smeared in this way. If you would like to submit your own article on this topic or any other, please see our submission guidelines. This article is the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the UK Defence Journal. Last week’s BBC Panorama programme “SAS Death Squads Exposed” raised some serious questions about the exploits of Britain’s elite special forces in Afghanistan in 2010-11.Īpparently some four years in the making, the programme took a measured and appropriately inquisitive look at how Britain’s best-known special forces outfit operated and how it might have transgressed the normal laws of war during that conflict.
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