Failure all the way up.

So, Ben Roberts-Smith. That’s a bit awkward, isn’t it, when His Honour finds your decorated war hero is a murderous war criminal. A bit awkward for Kerry Stokes, who funded Roberts-Smith’s now failed defamation tilt against The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times. A bit awkward for the SAS and the Army, who now have to decide what to do with the smoking bomb Justice Besanko just dropped into their laps. And totes awkward for Roberts-Smith, whose prospects probably don’t extend much beyond casual work with the Wagner Group.

(Although in a surprise late-season cross-over with another high-rating legal drama, it turns out the notorious PWC—fucking baller name for a rap artist, when I think about it—was quite recently looking to hire the keen collector of prosthetic legs novelty drinking memorabilia as a partner. I imagine they hoped he could hunt down tasty government contracting work with the same rigour and focus he brought to hunting down one-legged Afghan peasant farmers).

For the media, of course, it was all about them, with the Ninefax mastheads sending themselves celebratory baskets of delicious headline victory muffins, which was at least understandable. And NewsCorp doing what they could to dig a tiny nugget of culture war gold from the steaming pile of atrocity doo-doo, which was, of course, entirely predictable. Pick of the crop: “Top historian says Ben Roberts-Smith should keep his medals.”

Because, er…

Largely forgotten are the victims, only one of whom, Ali Jan, seems to have been accorded the dignity of even being named in death. He was the villager, unarmed and handcuffed, who Roberts-Smith kicked off a cliff. He then ordered soldiers under his command to open fire on the man.

Not really the stuff of Anzac Legends, was it?

Not quite in keeping with “the finest traditions of the Australian Army and the Australian Defence Force,” as they say at the end of all of the Army’s Victoria Cross citations.

Still, it wasn’t a failure, as such.

The word failure implies an omission. A short-coming. Some sort of mistake or inadvertence.

But Roberts-Smith didn’t fail to do something. Quite the opposite. He consciously and actively took a life without justification. He committed murder.

The failure occurred after that and higher up. It occurred repeatedly. It was a command failure within his unit, his Regiment, the Army and the ADF as an institution.

When Roberts-Smith did what he did, he was not some liberated Russian rapist or murderer lifted out of a prison cell by Yevgeny Prigozhin and set loose in Ukraine to sow as much violent havoc as possible. He was a soldier of the Australian Defence Force, sanctioned to act in our interests and entrusted with the terrible power to kill, to maim and to destroy in our name. Because that power is so terrible, we constrain it.

It is, in theory, what sets us apart from the Putins and Prigozhins of the world.

In practice, the theory failed in Afghanistan.

It failed because those who should have constrained Roberts-Smith did not. It failed again and again and again and again. Every time he took a life that was not his to take.

The failure travelled up the chain of command every time command disowned, resisted or shirked its responsibility to enforce those constraints.

And the failure bled out of the military into the realm of civilian oversight when successive governments failed to act. In the case of the Morrison government, that failure by omission was compounded when Peter Dutton overruled the Chief of Defence Force, Angus Campbell’s, decision to “revoke the meritorious unit citation for Special Operations Task Groups who served in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2013.”

However, the original seed of failure was almost certainly planted well before Roberts-Smith necked his first prosthetic leg beer. It was sown when the entire Australian deployment to Afghanistan was hidden inside a black box from which no information could emerge unless it suited the interests of whoever was polishing the government benches in Canberra.

Secrecy and accountability are anathema to each other.

No doubt Albo would love to throw this whole stinking mess into another black box. But it’s his mess to clean up now.

Starting with a man found to have committed at least four murders.