from Hacker News

Ex-UK Special Forces break silence on 'war crimes' by colleagues

by tartoran on 5/12/25, 4:34 PM with 81 comments

• by axus on 5/12/25, 5:36 PM

  The evidence presented by the BBC in 2020: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-53597137

  And apparently Australia had already released their report and investigation of their own behavior: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-55088230

  But only the whistleblower and one other were tried and convicted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brereton_Report

• by huhkerrf on 5/12/25, 6:00 PM

  When I read about terrible things done in a group like this, my first thought is: would I have done the right thing?

  I like to think I'm a good person, but these people probably do, too. It sounds like there's something rotten in the culture of the special forces that encouraged or at least overlooked these actions. What would I have done if I had been there? Would I have stood up against people I saw as my brothers in arms?

  Before anyone gets this twisted, this is not an excuse of their behavior or saying that it should be discounted.

• by rich_sasha on 5/13/25, 2:51 AM

  To add to the list, this article [1] alleges that a number of Afghan special forces were refused a UK visa upon withdrawal, so they couldn't testify in the UK against the UK special forces. Then when the Taliban took over, the predictable happened. Pretty shocking.

  [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3q5xl9wqwo

• by harddrivereque on 5/12/25, 5:51 PM

  It should be obvious to everyone, not just about UK, but all sorts of war invoke this. I mean, we all know about torture in Guantanamo and even on European soil, and it wasn't even that long ago. What makes anyone think anything has changed? Why would it change? Is there an incentive? Sure, there are courts and theoretical conventions, but the system is not perfect, there is no enforcement and also no incentive to enforce it. For all I know there is lack of enforcement for all kinds of crime - just extrapolate the mess with simple street crime to warzones and it doesn't seem as surprising anymore, does it?

• by sys32768 on 5/12/25, 5:31 PM

  There's a fantastic documentary on Apple TV called The Line about war crimes and the fog of war: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/the-line/umc.cmc.4u53f7zokr7g40...

• by psunavy03 on 5/12/25, 7:29 PM

  Australian SASR already had a major scandal. There's been open reporting in the past about some bad actors over the years in USSOCOM. It'd be interesting for someone to do some serious psych research on how many of these people were psychopaths who slipped through the cracks as opposed to people who broke bad after several combat deployments.

  The general public never payed much attention to GWOT as it was, but one of the consequences of it was that the special operations forces as a community were "rode hard and put away wet" as they say for 20+ years. Take someone, put them through a grueling selection process to become "the best of the best," which can cultivate a corresponding ego. Then pound the hell out of them over a full career with combat deployment after combat deployment, raid after raid.

  It doesn't excuse what happened by any means, but is there legitimately a limit that needs to be known about how much violence someone can take before they give in to the beast within? Military aviators have crew rest limitations because it was discovered that beyond a certain level of fatigue, you are literally killing people. The experience of Vietnam POWs forced changes to military training for being taken captive, because they found out that if you torture anyone enough, they will eventually break.

  So is the solution here that the SOF communities are attracting too many psychopaths and screening needs to be changed, or is it that people were being broken by war, which is a totally different problem?

• by moomin on 5/13/25, 8:16 AM

  When we say that extremists hate our freedom, bear in mind this is the one of the kinds of freedom they hate. To win against these people, we have to be better than them and stop providing them with recruitment material for the next generation.

• by WatchDog on 5/13/25, 12:03 AM

  So Australian and now UK special forces have been implicated in similar war crimes.

  How is it that US special forces haven’t been implicated in similar war crimes?

  Does the US have a genuinely better culture, or are they just less accountable?

  People like Chris Kyle are treated as heroes, but it seems unlikely that he got so many kills by following the rules of engagement properly.

• by Yeul on 5/12/25, 8:36 PM

  Western countries should never send their citizens into the heart of darkness.

  I will never forget the footage of Serbians chaining Dutch officers to lampposts to act as living shields against NATO airstrikes. The poor bastards were time machined into the dark ages.

• by tiahura on 5/12/25, 5:58 PM

  It's hard to know what to make of an article like this because of the lack of context. Killing the kids of your enemy is bad, but was happening long before humans showed up. So, the question is, given comparable conditions, how did SAS perform vs others? Are they 1/2 as cruel as the French and 1/4 as cruel than they used to be? If so, we should be happy they're improving. We don't know.

  This seems like a systemic problem with war fighting and requires system improvements. The Heinlein in me is uneasy with a prosecutorial focus. Improve the culture, make it easier to take a couple of weeks off, whistleblow, whatever--but telling someone who volunteered to fight for their country to go get shot at and dodge bombs for a few hours, watch their friends get their faces blown off, and then flip a switch, seems unreasonable.

• by PicassoCTs on 5/12/25, 5:44 PM

  Well, should be easy to account, given that the same prop-weapons were used over and over again. Find a unique scratch or dent and start counting.

• by croes on 5/12/25, 5:57 PM

  Seems like Kurt Tucholsky was right

• by blotfaba on 5/13/25, 3:14 AM

  Decades of war crimes and they still lost, that's gotta bite. Master race hard at work?

• by throwaway48476 on 5/12/25, 9:52 PM

  Cobra effect.

• by aatd86 on 5/12/25, 5:54 PM

  then yhey criticize the wagner militia but they are not any better apparently. Maybe it's even hearsay.