The Value of Respect: What Does it Mean for an Army?

ABSTRACT

The Australian Army has adopted “respect” as a new addition to the existing trio of values, “courage, initiative and teamwork.” This article explores what respect may mean as an army value. The significance of respect surrounding two incidents involving Australian Defence Force personnel while on duty in Afghanistan is considered. The first is the so-called “green on blue” attack by an Afghan National Army soldier killing three Australian soldiers on 29 August 2012. The second concerns allegations of mutilation of suspected Afghan insurgents’ corpses by soldiers attached to an Australian Special Forces Unit on 28 April 2013. The incidents have resulted in internal military investigations: in the second incident, with a view to possible prosecution for breach of the law of armed conflict and related disciplinary offences; and in the case of the green on blue attack, leading to a civilian coronial inquest. This article discusses the training and modelling of behaviour required to instil such a value as respect.

KEYWORDS:

• Australia
• military
• respect
• values

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Pauline T. Collins (PhD, University of Queensland, 2014) is Associate Professor in the School of Law and Justice, University of Southern Queensland. Published work includes “Enforcement of International Law Obligations concerning Private Military Security Corporations” (2014), University of Tasmania Law Review 33 (1): 28–55; “International Corporate Criminal Liability for Private Military and Security Companies – A Possibility?” (2015), in Responsibilities of the Non-State Actor in Armed Conflict and the Market Place, edited by Noemi Gal-Or, Cedric Ryngaert, and Math Noortmann, 177–202 (Leiden: Brill); “The Civil Courts’ Challenge to Military Justice and its Impact on the Civil-Military Relationship” (2016), in Military Justice in the Modern Age, edited by Alison Duxbury and Matthew Groves, 57–80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Notes

1 There have been 13 major related inquiries in the past 16 years.

2 The Special Air Service Regiment is a specially trained elite combat unit within the Australian Defence Service.

3 The US have suffered greater numbers of casualties from “green on blue” attacks.

4 Geneva Convention (I) for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field, opened for signature 12 August 1949, 75 UNTS 31 (entered into force 21 October 1950); Article 3:

At all times, and particularly after an engagement, Parties to the conflict shall, without delay, take all possible measures to search for and collect the wounded and sick, to protect them against pillage and ill-treatment, to ensure their adequate care, and to search for the dead and prevent their being despoiled.

5 International Criminal Court (Consequential Amendments) Act (Cth) 2002; Sch 1: s 268.47.

6 Brissenden:

ABC has learned that an investigator from the Australian Defence Force Investigative Service (ADFIS) lectured a group of special forces soldiers and told them that it did not matter how the fingerprints were taken and that if they could chop off the hands of the dead and bring them back to base for fingerprinting, that would be acceptable.

7 “There have been 66 service-related deaths in the ADF in the five years prior to 9 April 2014. Of those, 32 occurred in Afghanistan. Only one of those was investigated by a COI that of the death of a soldier in 2011 in a helicopter crash. Colonel Waddell said the higher level investigation was ordered in that case because it was a ‘major loss of capital equipment’” (Elks 2014).

8 The 2008 NSW Coronial Inquest into Private Jake Kovco's death in Iraq in 2006 was the last such Coronial inquiry. This inquiry was surrounded with a great deal of controversy.