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Is it any wonder that Australian Defence Force recruitment is in the toilet, while US military recruitment is surging? Two stories this week tell us everything we need to know: the US threw everything it had into a daring mission deep in enemy territory to rescue a single soldier. Meanwhile, the Australian establishment throws everything it has into hounding the nation’s most decorated soldier.
Why would young Australian sign themselves up for such betrayal?
Ben Roberts-Smith has been arrested at Sydney Airport in relation to multiple alleged war crimes and is expected to appear before court later today.
An AFP media release said the accused was due to be charged with “five counts of war crime – murder” under a joint investigation between the Office of the Special Investigator and the AFP.
This is just the latest in a relentless campaign by every arm of the state apparatus, from the ADF top-heavy command, to the legacy media, to the woke judiciary, to betray and humiliate the young men it sent to the Middle East, most especially its most famous son. It’s just an extension of the asymmetric warfare these soldiers faced in Afghanistan, only this time the legal ‘blue on green’ attacks are coming from their own side. The soldiers of the ADF, especially the special forces, were expected to fight a brutal, unscrupulous enemy with their hands bound with bureaucratic red tape.
The charges relate to the decorated former special forces soldier’s alleged murder of unarmed Afghan civilians and prisoners between 2009 and 2012.
Except that this was a conflict where the difference between civilian and combatant was often thin to non-existent. And Australian soldiers are held to a purity test that their grandfathers would have laughed to scorn in WWII and WWI.
Mr Roberts-Smith, 47, a Victoria Cross recipient and Australia’s most decorated former soldier in Afghanistan, was arrested at Sydney Airport on Tuesday morning by waiting officers as he arrived on a flight from Brisbane shortly after 11am, the Age reported.
Federal Court judge Anthony Besanko in mid-2023 found that Mr Roberts-Smith broke the moral and legal rules of military engagement and was therefore a criminal, after the former war hero sued Nine Newspapers for defamation and lost.
Justice Besanko found Mr Roberts-Smith had murdered four prisoners, including a farmer who was kicked off a cliff in the village of Darwan, and a one-legged man dragged from a tunnel at the compound known as Whiskey 108.
And Albert Jacka, Australian war hero par excellence was likely asleep at his post immediately before the action that won his Military Cross at Pozières. Instead of being court-martialled, Jacka was merely quietly denied his second Victoria Cross. The media didn’t hound Jacka relentlessly. Because, back then, there was a tacit understanding that war is a hell of blurred lines.
Now, we have a military establishment that’s top-heavy on public servants who’ve never got their uniforms dirty and literally whine that the grunts who do have a ‘warrior culture’. Because they expect literal warriors to share their public servant mentality.
I personally know coppers who, technically, mistreated prisoners. But, if a child molester who tortured a little girl ‘accidentally’ falls down a flight of stairs during arrest, no one should ask too many questions.
Instead, though, we have a military run by men who prance around in high heels, and a bureaucracy which has more ‘Aunties’ and hijabis than warriors? A bureaucracy which pettifogs about ‘war crimes’, but tries to collectively punish the ranks by stripping every single soldier of their decorations and citations? Which dispatches units to Pride Parades, but chickens out of helping take down the regime that has relentlessly exported anti-Semitic terror to our shores?
A country where more Muslims rushed to join Islamic State than the ADF – and are welcomed back with open arms by the same government which hounds our most decorated soldiers?
We are not a serious country any more.
At least America’s soldiers and pilots know their country will pull out all stops to save them. All ours can bet on is betrayal.
