Greens Senator David Shoebridge stood up at Senate Estimates last week and went after US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth's views on rules of engagement. Hegseth's argument is simple. Our soldiers are being asked to fight under rules the other side ignores entirely, and the lives lost as a result are the cost of pretending the rules still work. Shoebridge thinks that view is so dangerous it should disqualify Hegseth from command. He's also the senator who called Australia's embedding of three RAN submariners on USS Charlotte the "bedroom defence", on the basis they were sent to their sleeping quarters while the torpedoes were fired.

The man Australian Defence sent to answer for it was Vice Admiral Mark Hammond AO RAN, the Chief of Navy and the incoming Chief of the Defence Force. Hammond is a career submariner who commanded HMAS Farncomb in the Indo-Pacific and is Australia's most senior submarine officer. He corrected the public record at Estimates.

The Australians on USS Charlotte weren't asleep in their bunks. "Their duties were defensive in nature, and they were standing there, their assigned stations alongside their shipmates," he told the committee. Hammond called the suggestion the Australians had been hiding "insulting" and said it showed "a complete lack of understanding for what submarines on operations actually do".

The honest answer Hammond didn't give Shoebridge on the bigger question is that Hegseth is right. Australia's own rules of engagement were written for a war that ended in 1945. They've been applied to enemies who refuse to fight by the same standards. The soldiers who get sent into the gap are the ones paying for it.

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Video: Senate estimates. Greens Senator David Shoebridge questions Vice Admiral Mark Hammond AO RAN, Chief of Navy, at Senate Estimates on 3 June 2026.

What Shoebridge was grandstanding about

The flashpoint last week was the IRIS Dena. The Iranian Moudge-class frigate was torpedoed by the US Navy submarine USS Charlotte on 4 March in the Indian Ocean, about 40 nautical miles south of Galle in Sri Lanka. The Dena had about 180 crew on board. The Sri Lankan Navy, with Indian assistance, rescued 32 survivors and recovered at least 87 bodies. Around 61 crew members remain missing and are presumed dead. US Indo-Pacific Command stated that American forces had "planned for life-saving support to survivors in accordance with the Law of Armed Conflict that Sri Lanka then provided".

The Dena was a uniformed warship of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is at war with the United States. Iran's foreign ministry has openly declared Australian military assets in the Persian Gulf "legitimate targets" for Iranian self defence. The strike took place in international waters. The vessel struck was a commissioned navy frigate of a hostile state. That hasn't stopped the Greens from treating the sinking as a moral catastrophe and the embedded Australian personnel as evidence of Australian complicity in a war crime.

Three Royal Australian Navy personnel were on USS Charlotte at the time of the strike, as part of AUKUS Pillar 1 training. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirmed on 6 March that the three Australians didn't participate in offensive action. The Telegraph in London reported they were sent to their cabins while the torpedoes were fired.

Video: via Republic World. US Sub Torpedoes Iranian IRIS Dena Warship 

Why Hegseth is right

The lever Shoebridge has reached for is Pete Hegseth's book. The War on Warriors was published by Broadside Books in June 2024. Trump made Hegseth Defense Secretary in January 2025, and renamed the department to the Department of War by executive order in September that year. The book had been on the public record for more than six months by the time he was nominated.

The passage Shoebridge keeps reading into Hansard, in Hegseth's own words:

"If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren't we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules? Who cares what other countries think?" - Pete Hegseth, US Secretary of War

The same book recounts Hegseth, then a junior officer in Iraq, rejecting a Judge Advocate General officer's legal briefing on rules of engagement. He writes that he told his platoon: "I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains."

The language is combative and meant to be. The underlying argument is one most Western soldiers who served in Afghanistan and Iraq would quietly recognise as true. ROE doctrine built for state on state war has been ported, almost unchanged, into asymmetric campaigns where the enemy doesn't wear a uniform. The other side has never pretended to follow the rules. On the ground, civilians and combatants weren't reliably distinguishable to the people being shot at. Hegseth's view isn't a fringe one.

It's the view a lot of people who actually did the fighting have held quietly for two decades. He's the first senior figure in the West with the political weight to put it on the public record, and the responsible response from a country with embedded sailors and a generation of veterans on trial is to engage with what he's saying, not perform moral outrage at it.

Rules that only one side follows aren't rules

The Geneva Conventions and the laws of armed conflict were written on the assumption of reciprocity. Both sides in a uniformed war would accept restraint on the basis that the other side did the same. That assumption hasn't survived the wars Australia has actually fought since 2001. ISIS executed captives on camera. Iran funds the proxies that fight from civilian cover and Iran's own foreign ministry has now declared Australian military assets in the Persian Gulf "legitimate targets" for its self defence.

The IRIS Dena, had the positions been reversed, would not have stopped to fish American sailors out of the water for humanitarian reasons. The Taliban would not have observed surrender protocols for an Australian SAS patrol. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard isn't reading Additional Protocol I before deciding what to do with a downed pilot. The ROE conversation in Western capitals is still conducted as if the enemy were bound by the same law. The Greens conversation certainly is. The enemy has been clear for two decades that it isn't.

Pete Hegseth said it out loud and Canberra called it dangerous. The honest version is the one nobody in Defence wants to put on the record. Rules that only one side follows aren't rules. The doctrine Australian soldiers were handed in Afghanistan was written for a war that ended in 1945 and applied to one the enemy refused to fight by the same standards. The case for keeping it as it stands gets weaker every year, and the cost of the pretence is the soldiers who get sent into the gap. One of them is now sitting in Silverwater.

What Australia signed up for

The architecture that put Ben Roberts-Smith in Silverwater was built by successive Australian governments who signed Australia up to rules other major militaries refused to touch. Bob Hawke's government ratified Additional Protocol I and Additional Protocol II of the Geneva Conventions in 1991. John Howard's government signed the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 1998 and ratified it in 2002. The same year, Howard passed the International Criminal Court (Consequential Amendments) Act, which inserted Division 268 into the Criminal Code Act 1995. Division 268 is the war crimes provision Ben Roberts-Smith is being prosecuted under right now. The legal chain runs straight from a Labor signature, through a Liberal one, to a cell at Silverwater.

The United States never signed up to any of it. Ronald Reagan formally rejected Additional Protocol I in 1987, telling the US Senate it was "fundamentally and irreconcilably flawed" because it gave legal status to terrorists and guerrilla fighters. George W Bush withdrew the US signature from the Rome Statute in 2002 and the same year signed the American Service-Members' Protection Act, which authorises the President to use "all means necessary" to free any US personnel held by the ICC. It's known in Washington as the Hague Invasion Act. That's been the US position for nearly forty years on AP1 and for nearly a quarter century on the ICC. Pete Hegseth's "who cares what international tribunals think" line isn't a fringe outburst. It's the operational US position since Reagan, restated in plain language.

Israel, India, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey never ratified Additional Protocol I either. China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, North Korea and around seventy other countries are not parties to the Rome Statute. The Taliban and ISIS were never bound by anything. In Afghanistan, the soldiers actually held to the full set of rules were the Australians, the British, the Canadians and a handful of European allies. Their American partners weren't bound to it. The enemy never claimed to be. The only people prosecuted under it on the ground in Afghanistan are Australians.

Additional Protocol I is the layer that matters most for the wars Australia actually fought. It extended Geneva protections to "national liberation movements" and to combatants who don't wear uniforms in some circumstances. Article 44 effectively gives legal status to guerrillas. That's the clause Western soldiers spent two decades trying to apply to Taliban and ISIS fighters who openly refused to reciprocate. The Reagan administration looked at Article 44 in 1987 and said no. Australia looked at it in 1991 and said yes. Ben Roberts-Smith is in Silverwater because of what Article 44 and Division 268 say, and the men he was fighting in Uruzgan are not in Silverwater because they never accepted either of them.

The Australian rules of engagement Roberts-Smith and every other Australian soldier in Afghanistan operated under flow out of the following stack, and every layer of it needs to be reviewed.

  • The four 1949 Geneva Conventions
  • Additional Protocol I (1977), ratified by Australia in 1991
  • Additional Protocol II (1977), ratified by Australia in 1991
  • The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, ratified by Australia in 2002
  • Customary international humanitarian law as Australia interprets it
  • Domestic implementation via the Geneva Conventions Act 1957 and Division 268 of the Criminal Code Act 1995
  • The ADF Manual on the Law of Armed Conflict
  • Mission-specific ROE issued by the Chief of the Defence Force for each deployment

The honest review nobody in Canberra wants to run is whether any of these layers can be applied to wars the enemy never agreed to fight by the same rules. Hegseth has said it publicly. Most Western soldiers have known it privately for twenty years. Pauline Hanson has been clear about who's been left holding the bill. The cost of the pretence is paid by the soldiers who get sent into the gap, and by the one currently sitting in Silverwater for following the orders his country gave him.

Pauline Hanson stood with Ben Roberts-Smith. Shoebridge stood against him

The same Greens senator now demanding Hegseth answer for his views on rules of engagement gave us his own answer to the question in April. When the Australian Federal Police arrested Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith at Sydney Airport on 7 April, Shoebridge posted a screenshot of the news on X with one word: "Good".

That is what Shoebridge thinks rules of engagement should look like in practice when an Australian soldier is on the receiving end. Pauline Hanson gave the country a different answer the same day. The One Nation leader posted on X.

"I remain steadfast in my support of Ben Roberts-Smith despite news of his arrest today," Hanson wrote. "Ben, his immediate and broader defence family need the Australian people's support right now and I will not abandon him like so many other politicians." She noted that he had been arrested in front of his twin daughters, aged 15, and that the Office of the Special Investigator and the Australian Federal Police have spent more than $300 million over a decade getting to this point - Pauline Hanson

Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott took a similar line in a Facebook post on the same day. "It's wrong to judge the actions of men in mortal combat by the standards of ordinary civilian life," Abbott wrote. He also asked the question Defence leadership has not publicly answered. If there really was a "culture of brutality" in Australian special forces, why didn't the chain of command pick it up and deal with it at the time, rather than letting it fester for more than a decade.

Both interventions describe the same problem. The doctrine put Australian soldiers in an impossible position in Afghanistan, while the senior officers who signed off on the operations and shaped the culture have not faced the same scrutiny as the soldiers who carried the consequences. The corporals face the courts while the brass are retired.

Roberts-Smith has consistently denied wrongdoing. He brought the original defamation case against the Nine newspapers in 2018 and lost in the Federal Court in June 2023 under the civil standard of balance of probabilities. The High Court refused to hear his appeal in September 2025. On 7 April 2026, he was arrested at Sydney Airport. He has been charged with two counts of war crime murder and three counts of aiding or abetting war crime murder. Each carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. He hasn't applied for bail and remains in custody at Silverwater. The criminal charges must be proved beyond reasonable doubt, the higher legal standard, and the trial is expected to take years.

Image: 7NEWS. Pauline Hanson speaking at a fundraising barbecue for Ben Roberts-Smith's legal defence in a Brisbane park, June 2026.

The Rules of Engagement need rewriting

The hard version of Hegseth's argument isn't "kill everyone and lie about it later". It is that the doctrine itself, the rules of engagement Australian and American soldiers were operating under in Afghanistan and Iraq, was unworkable from the start. The Brereton Report, the Inspector General of the Australian Defence Force's inquiry into Afghanistan, was released in November 2020. It found credible information of 39 unlawful killings of Afghans by or involving Australian special forces personnel, and recommended 19 referrals for criminal investigation. The Office of the Special Investigator and the Australian Federal Police have since run 53 investigations and 10 remain ongoing. None of that has been accompanied by an honest public conversation about whether the rules the soldiers were operating under could be applied to the war they were actually sent to fight.

Pauline Hanson and Tony Abbott put the right question into the public record on 7 April. The political class ignored it. Pete Hegseth wrote a book that put the same question in front of Washington. The Greens are demanding his removal for it. Canberra owes its own soldiers, and the next generation of them, a rewrite. Not a review and not a polite footnote in a defence white paper. A rewrite, on the record, that says out loud what ROE Australia actually expects soldiers to operate under when the enemy follows none.

Pete Hegseth runs the US Department of War and commands a military of two million people. Shoebridge is a Greens senator from NSW. The chances Hegseth has heard the name David Shoebridge are zero. The senator from NSW still thinks he can put the US Secretary of War on notice from a Senate committee room in Canberra and have him removed from command. He can't. The whole performance was for the cameras, with three Australian sailors and one US Secretary of War used as props.

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