Blood Lust, Trust & Blame

by Samantha Crompvoets

As Australia comes to grips with accusations that some of its elite soldiers committed war crimes in Afghanistan, a catchcry for certain commentators is that the ‘fog of war’ explains, justifies and possibly excuses the alleged atrocities that have come to light. The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one’s own capability, the adversary’s capability, and intent. However, the ‘fog of war’ is woefully inadequate in explaining actions that were deliberate, targeted and repeated. Abuses of power and the normalisation of deviance are at the heart of the ‘cultural issues’ that have long plagued the Australian Defence Force. In fact, this can be said of all institutions grappling with the same problems: histories of abuse and secrecy, sexual harassment, and problems of diversity and inclusion. It is always easiest to point a finger at a ‘what’ rather than a ‘who’, so ‘culture’ features prominently in analyses of what went wrong regarding the alleged war crimes committed by Australia’s Special Operations Command. But does a focus on culture provide clarity or obscurity? Does it lead to or is it a barrier to accountability? How do you know when you’ve achieved cultural change?

Genres: Military Fiction, Politics

96 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2021

Reviews

[Tilda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the core premise of this book - essentially that the concept of ‘culture’ is actually an unhelpful concept to obscure and depersonalise what can be genuine problems within an organisation. She goes against a lot of the commonly cited wisdom (e.g. ‘it’s all about leadership’, ‘big cultural change is needed’ etc) by highlighting the more nuanced ways that power works in organisational settings and the value of small, targeted measures to shift those. That said, I would have loved some more practical examples to illuminate some of the points. I read a lot of this thinking ‘oh yeah, great point’ but when I tried to take the next step to think about how it could be applied in the real world, or how I might describe some of these ideas to others, I struggled. This, I think, will make the book have less of an impact than it deserves.

[Giles Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

On a first reading (and it is a text that demands further, slower ones), I'd say that this book asks some fundamental and insightful questions about the power dynamics that result in abuse and misconduct within institutions - and that its insight goes far beyond just casting a light on the war crimes committed by members of Australian defence forces which are its primary focus.

The author was instrumental in bringing these crimes to public and institutional attention, and in a recent interview, she testified to how she was attacked and ostracised for doing so. I now realise that this was not just because she drew attention to crimes which cast the ADF in a bad light and exploded the ANZAC myth; it was also because she made practical, focused proposals for actually fixing the problem, and her insights were not welcome because there are power-brokers who do not want the problem to be fixed.

One of her most challenging assertions is that the concept of "culture" is often used as a way of dissipating responsibility and accountability. So, there is a "culture of abuse", or a "culture of resistance to change", or a "misogynistic culture", or a "culture of secrecy", but that somehow distracts attention away from the actual crimes. Worse, attempts to "change the culture", imposed from above, may cause the wrong people to dig their heels in. She thinks that the focus should be on power structures, and on knowledge and its concealment.

Equally challenging is her assertion that the power structures that open the way to abuse and misconduct are not always from the top down. She writes about "isolated cliques" which are "especially capable of developing distinct norms and behaviours... internally well-connected and globally isolated parts of a network are likely to engage in misconduct." Specifically, she writes that the epitome of such an isolated clique is the SASR patrols: "small groups of four or five soldiers who are part of a small Special Forces deployment, and who are physically separated from the Regular Army while on base... The more elite, secretive and cloistered a group is, the higher the chance of deviation, and the concealment of that deviation. This is exacerbated when that group or subgroups hold specialist skills that are not well understood outside the organisation, and are revered or despised." She finds that there may be pockets of power within an organisation that commit and conceal crimes, and succeed in hiding them from those higher up in the organisation.

A group like the one led by Roberts-Smith is clearly one such clique, enabled in its crimes by its isolation. She also compares this to the clique mentality and pockets of power in churches which have enabled child abuse.

I don't think she's writing this to in any way detract from the accountability of those higher up the chain of command; she's saying that if you want to stop it happening, you have to start by seeing that the power structure creates these opportunities for abuse through the perpetuation of isolated cliques - not by generalising about culture and letting the actual perpetrators off the hook.

In another telling passage, she also quotes Audre Lorde's critique of white feminism: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house". You don't effect real change by using the methods they always use in the institution; you do it by rigorously questioning everything about the institution. You don't fix it by making power-point presentations about changing the culture; you do it by overturning the power structures that create those pockets of abuse, bit by bit.

I'm paraphrasing, and there's much more to it than that. I can see applications to other powerful institutions in our society - police forces which have their misogynist and racist enclaves, for one. But most of all, her work is worth reading, more than once, precisely because when she published this, there were certain very powerful people who were especially keen to shut her up.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What is often not well considered in organisational change efforts is that most forms of collective identity depend on the exclusion of others, sometimes necessarily so. This is where culture starts to become less useful and more complex as a construct for the transformation of organisations."

Crompvoets muses both on what her understanding of organisations told her about the war crimes' tendencies of the SAS troops in Afghanistan and vice versa. It is, in some ways, a strange little book, but in others, this kinda works. Crompvoets is at pains for us to understand that "cultures" are relationships of power and that changing them requires more than inspiring speeches. I did feel that this was overall weakened by her fundamental view on the criminals as rebels within the military, without enough understanding of how their functioning may have been related to the way they were fighting. It is important to note, for example, that the SAS's performance was partly measured by how many "bad guys" they took out, not by how peaceful Afghanistan was. Our ways of describing, honouring and expecting conflict may influence those systems, structures, and yes, culture.
Nevertheless, this is a sharp reminder of systemic evil, a correction to the idea that bad individuals cause problems this large without institutional support.

[♡ India ♡ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Super interesting argument made by Crompvoets about the futility in blaming everything on culture and the accountability it avoids in relation to the war crimes committed by ADF soldiers in Afghanistan. However I think it could have been articulated better (too many nominalisations for example that made her writing stuffy) and there should have been more practical points made to back up her argument, since it all was pretty much spoken in theoretics.