What Australian Commando Regiment Officers Said After Their First Exercise With the SASR
The exercise lasted two weeks and had been designed by the Joint Command as a comparative evaluation, an opportunity for two of Australia’s premier special operations forces to operate against the same training objectives under conditions that would allow both forces approaches and outcomes to be assessed on the same evidentiary basis.
The Australian Commando Regiment officers who participated brought professional expectations calibrated by an operational tempo in Afghanistan that was among the highest in the regiment’s history. They expected to learn something from the exercise. They had not fully anticipated the nature or the cost of that learning in terms of professional recalibration.
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Now, let’s get into it. The Australian Commando Regiment and the SASSR occupied adjacent spaces in the Australian Special Operations Community without being interchangeable. The commandos were a direct action force operating at a scale that the SASR structured for small team operations was not designed to replicate.
A commando company conducting a deliberate assault on a defended compound brought capabilities of fire, mass, and sustainment that an SASR patrol could not match. The commandos had developed those capabilities through operational experience in Afghanistan that had been extensive, intensive, and conducted at a pace that tested the regiment’s planning and logistics infrastructure as thoroughly as it tested its operators.
By the time the exercise was designed, the commando officers who would participate had conducted multiple operational rotations in the country, had managed firefights at platoon and company scale, and had developed professional confidence in their forces approach to direct action problems that was grounded in operational evidence rather than institutional assumption.
What the commandos had not done extensively before the exercise was operate at the SASR’s end of the special operation spectrum. The small team long duration high independence missions that required a different relationship between the patrol and its command chain. A different intelligence preparation methodology and a different approach to risk management than the direct action model the commandos had been optimized for.
The exercis’s design provided the opportunity to observe that end of the spectrum directly over two weeks against the same training objectives. The first significant observation the commando officers made was about tempo, not speed of execution, but pace of operational cycling. The SASR element was moving through its preparation, execution, and exploitation cycle at a rate that the commando officers had not expected from a force of that size.
The conventional assumption about small team operations was that their reduced manpower imposed limitations on how much they could accomplish across an operational period. The SASR’s two-week performance against the exercis’s objectives challenged that assumption in ways the commando officers engaged with honestly because honest engagement with challenging professional evidence was part of the culture both forces shared.
The second observation was about planning economy. The SASR elements planning products were shorter, more targeted, and more rapidly produced than the equivalent planning products the commandos generated for comparable missions. The commando officers were familiar with detailed planning. Their operational culture required it because the direct action model they used depended on thorough preparation to coordinate the multiple elements of a company scale assault.
The SASR’s planning products were thorough in a different way. thorough in their analysis of the specific variables that most affected the specific mission and sparse in everything else. The difference was not between careful and careless planning. It was between planning systems designed for different operational problems.
The third observation concerned the relationship between planning and execution at the individual operator level. The commando officers were familiar with a model in which planning established the framework and individual operators executed within it. The SASR model involved a different distribution of planning and execution across the element.
One in which the operator level understanding of the overall task was deep enough that operators could adapt the execution framework as conditions required without reference back to the patrol commander for every decision the adaptation involved. This was not a criticism of the commando model which was appropriate for the direct action scale and complexity that commando operations required.
It was an observation about how a different operational problem had produced a different solution at the level of individual operator preparation. The exercise’s first week tested the two forces against the same direct action scenarios. These were the commando regiment’s operational home ground and the commando officers went into that week with the expectation that the SASR would be competitive but that the commando’s specific depth of experience and the scale advantages their force structure provided would generate a meaningful performance
differential in the scenarios that favored direct action. The performance differential was not as clear as the expectation had suggested. The SASR’s approach to direct action scenarios was not identical to the commando’s approach, but it produced comparable results at the small team scale the exercise used, and it produced them through a planning and execution process that was notably different from the commando process.
The observations this generated were useful precisely because they were not what the commando officers had expected. The second week tested both forces against the scenarios in which the SASR had the depth of experience, longduration patrol operations, small team surveillance tasks, and the kind of high independence missions that required the element to operate without external support for extended periods.
The commando officer’s observation of the SASR in these scenarios was the more professionally challenging part of the exercise because it required engagement with operational approaches that the commando regiment structure and training had not been built to replicate. The SASR’s performance in these scenarios was qualitatively different from what the commando officers had observed in the first week.
The regiment was operating in its specific professional domain, and the domain’s particular demands were visible in how the SASR element managed the extended timeline, the information uncertainty, and the absence of external support that the long duration scenarios imposed. The commando officers responses to what they observed were varied in the way that professional observations of a different force’s superior performance in a specific domain always produced variety.
Some of the responses engaged directly with the operational methods the SASR used and attempted to identify specific practices that might be adapted to the commando context. Others engaged with the structural differences between the two forces. the selection and training investments, the unit size, the command culture that produced the performance differential and that were not easily transferable.
Others engaged with the question of which scenarios the performance differential actually applied to and concluded that the SASR’s domain advantages were real but bounded in ways that preserve the commando’s value in the scenarios where scale and direct action depth were the decisive factors.
The commando regiment’s direct action performance in the exercise’s first week had been assessed by the SASR observers in a manner that the exercises design had deliberately facilitated. The SASR had its own observers watching the commando element through the first week’s scenarios applying the professional assessment framework that the SASR used to evaluate any force it might operate alongside.
The assessment was by the account of those observers substantively positive. The commando regiment was doing the direct action work that it was designed and trained to do with the effectiveness that its operational history in Afghanistan had built. The SASR observer’s positive assessment of the commando performance was not courtesy.
It was professional recognition of a force doing its specific work well. What the SASR observers also noted was the commando regiment’s planning overhead. The planning products for a commando company assault were detailed, comprehensive, and thorough, designed for a force structure that required the coordination of multiple platoon and the integration of supporting fires and aviation assets in a way that the SASR’s small team operations did not.
The planning was appropriate for the task it was designed for. In the exercise’s first week scenarios which were scaled to company level, the planning was proportionate. When the exercise introduced scenarios at smaller scales below the level where a company’s integrated capabilities were the relevant tool, the planning overhead became visible as a cost relative to the SASR’s lighter planning process, and the cost showed in execution timelines that ran longer than the SASR’s equivalent scenarios.
The commando officer’s engagement with this observation was the professional quality that made the exercise valuable for both forces. They did not dismiss the observation as a function of the exercise’s scaling, as if the scenarios had been artificially tilted toward the SASR’s home ground. They engaged with it as a genuine operational question.
What did the SASR’s lighter planning process produce at small team scale that the commando process did not? and what did it cost in the scenarios where the commando process’s thoroughess paid its dividends? The answer to the first question was speed and operational flexibility. The ability to adapt the execution framework mid mission without the replanning cost that the commando processes more comprehensive planning structure imposed.
The answer to the second question was coordination certainty. the assurance that complex multi-element operations with integrated supporting fires would proceed as planned because the planning had been thorough enough to anticipate and address the coordination requirements. The exercises design had not produced a verdict.
It had produced observations and the professional quality of the two forces engagement with those observations was what the exercise was actually measuring. Both forces took the observations seriously. Both forces engaged with the implications for their respective operational practices. The SASR officers who observed the commando regiment’s direct action performance came away with a calibrated understanding of what the commando regiment could do at scale that the SASR’s small team structure was not built to replicate.
The commando officers who observed the SASR’s performance in the long duration and small team scenarios came away with a calibrated understanding of the specific operational domain where the SASR’s preparation and culture produced results that the commando structure was not optimized for. Both understandings were worth having.
The specific statements the commando officers made in the exercises afteraction discussions were shared between the two forces in the professional forum the exercise had created for exactly this kind of exchange. The forum was not a formal assessment board. It was a structured discussion in which both forces participants could share observations from their two weeks without the institutional defensiveness that formal assessments sometimes generated.
The structure was the exercise design team’s most significant contribution. Not the scenarios themselves, but the forum for discussing what the scenarios had produced. The commando officer’s statements about the SASR covered several specific operational dimensions. On the long duration patrol scenarios, the most consistent observation was about the SASR’s comfort with uncertainty.
the ability to operate for extended periods without the information updates and command check-ins that the commando officer’s operational model built into its longduration tasks. The SASR elements communications during the long duration scenarios were sparse in a way that the commando officers initially read as a potential vulnerability.
If something had gone wrong during a communications quiet phase, how would the element communicate and be supported? As the scenarios developed, the commando officer’s reading changed. The SASR’s communications discipline was not an absence of communication capacity. It was a deliberate management of the communication signature that long range patrol operations in hostile environments required.
And the elements actual communications when they occurred were precise enough and timely enough that the sparse communications model was producing better outcomes in the scenarios than a higher communication model would have. on the intelligence exploitation scenarios. The parts of the exercise where the elements work at the objective generated material that had to be processed and reported within the mission timeline.
The commando officers observed the SASR’s approach to field intelligence exploitation in a way that was new for several of them. The commando regiment’s direct action model produced intelligence as a byproduct of its primary activity, and the commando officers were experienced with the tactical procedures for handling and reporting intelligence in the context of a deliberate assault.
The SASR’s approach treated intelligence exploitation as a primary activity that could be the main effort of an operation, not a byproduct of kinetic action. The distinction produced observable differences in how the two forces organized their work at the objective and how they prioritized the competing demands of time, security, and thoroughess in the exploitation phase.
The commando officer’s most consistent observation across both weeks of the exercise was about the SASR’s planning economy. The SASR produced planning decisions quickly, adapted those decisions during execution, and did both without the planning and rebrief cycle that the commando model required when conditions changed significantly.
The commando officers were not critical of their own planning model. They were accurate in their assessment that the model was necessary for the scale and complexity of the operations the commando regiment conducted. But the observation of a force that could plan, adapt, and act at a speed that the commando planning model did not generate produced a sustained professional discussion about the relationship between planning thoroughess and execution responsiveness that both forces took forward from the exercise into their subsequent operational
practice. The exercise’s final day produced a joint session in which the two forces officers summarized their observations for the exercise design team. The summaries were candid in the way that professional summaries produced in a protected forum were candid, not the diplomatic summary of a formal report, but the direct professional account of what the officers had observed and what they had concluded from it.
The commando officer’s summary covered the three dimensions that had been most professionally significant over the two weeks. Tempo, planning economy, and the long duration patrol capability that the second week had demonstrated. On all three, the summary was honest about what the SASR had demonstrated and about the structural reasons the commando regiment’s approach differed.
The commando officers did not characterize their own approach as inferior in the SASR’s operational domain. They characterized it as different, built for a different set of operational requirements and producing different strengths and different costs. The characterization was accurate and the SASR officers in the room received it as such rather than as a hedge against honest engagement.
The SASR officers summary covered the direct action week with a professional honesty that the commando officers appreciated. The SASR acknowledged that the Commando Regiment’s integrated company assault capability was something the SASR’s small team structure was not designed to replicate and that the commando officer’s operational experience at that scale had produced an expertise that the SASR whose direct action work was typically at patrol level had not developed in the same depth.
The acknowledgement was genuine rather than courteous, and the commando officers received it in the spirit it was offered as a professional assessment of comparative capability by operators capable of making accurate comparative assessments. What both forces took from the exercise was a more calibrated understanding of what the other could provide in the specific operational contexts where their distinctive capabilities mattered.
The commando officers who had participated were better prepared to work alongside SAS elements in coalition operations, better prepared to understand what the SASR could contribute, what it could not, and how the two forces different capabilities could be combined productively rather than used in competition.
The SASR officers had the same calibrated understanding of the Commando Regiment. The exercise had produced exactly what the joint command had designed it to produce. And it had done so because both forces had brought the professional quality and honest engagement that made the exercises design achievable. The observation had been made.
The professional record was complete. The exercises design team produced its own assessment after the two-week exercise and the final joint session. The assessment was a formal document that went to the joint command as the exercise’s principal output. It covered the exercise’s objectives, the scenarios used, the two forces performance, and the professional observations that the exercise had generated.
The assessment was not a ranking. It did not conclude that one force was better than the other or that one force’s approach should be adopted by the other. It documented what each force had demonstrated in its respective domain, what the professional exchange between the forces had produced, and what modifications to the joint command’s planning for future exercises the experience recommended.
The modifications the assessment recommended were primarily structural. The exercise had worked well, but had run the two weeks in a sequence that front-loaded the direct action scenarios and backloaded the long duration patrol scenarios. The recommendation was to interle the two types of scenarios throughout the exercise rather than sequencing them in separate blocks so that each force’s observations of the other were built across the full two weeks rather than concentrated in one week each. The interle would produce a
richer ongoing professional exchange and would reduce the risk of each force forming settled assessments of the other before observing the full range of scenarios the exercise was designed to cover. The commando regiment officers who had participated in the exercise carried the experiences professional observations forward in the way that significant professional experiences were carried forward not as a formal product separate from their operational work but as a recalibrated understanding of their own forces capabilities and
those of the SASR applied in the planning and operational decisions that their subsequent careers required. Some of the officers had subsequent deployments alongside SASR elements in Afghanistan. The calibrated understanding the exercise had produced was exercised in those deployments in the specific ways that genuine professional understanding was exercised, not as a reference to the exercise itself, but as a working knowledge of what the SASR could contribute and how the two forces capabilities could be combined. The
exercise had worked. The professional relationship between the two forces was more effective for it. The Australian Special Operations Community’s effectiveness depended on both the SASR and the Commando Regiment functioning at their respective levels of operational excellence and understanding each other’s capabilities with the precision that effective interforce coordination required.
The exercise had contributed to that understanding in both directions. The commando’s understanding of the SASR and the SASR’s understanding of the commandos had been refined by two weeks of direct observation in conditions designed to reveal each force’s capabilities honestly. The broader implication for the Australian special operations community was one the joint command had been investing in since the community’s restructuring.
That the SASR and the commando regiment were complimentary forces whose effective combination produced a special operations capability greater than either could provide alone and that producing effective combinations required the two forces to understand each other at the operational level rather than at the institutional level.
Institutional understanding was the understanding of organizational charts and formal capability descriptions. Operational understanding was the understanding of how each force actually worked, what it could do, at what pace, under what conditions, and with what limitations that only direct observation in operational or realistic training environments could produce.
The exercise had produced operational understanding in the specific ways that two weeks of joint observation always produced it through the specific scenarios, the specific performances and the specific professional exchanges that the exercises design had generated. The understanding was held by the specific officers who had participated.
It would be transmitted to broader audiences through the formal afteraction documentation through the conversations the participants had with their colleagues and through the operational decisions the participants made in subsequent years when the relevance of what they had learned in the exercise was directly applicable.
The transmission would be imperfect. Institutional understanding degraded over time and personnel turnover. The Joint Command’s investment in exercises of this kind was an investment in continuous renewal of the operational understanding that degraded between exercises. The investment was worth making.
The exercise had demonstrated that the specific statements the commando officers had made in the exercises afteraction session were direct enough that several became reference points in subsequent professional conversations within the commando regiment. not reference points in the sense of celebrated or widely distributed observations.
The afteraction session was an internal professional forum and its content was managed within the appropriate security and professional contexts. Reference points in the informal sense that significant professional observations became reference points. the specific phrases or formulations that captured a professional insight clearly enough to survive in professional memory and to be applied when the insight was relevant.
One such observation attributed in subsequent commando conversations to one of the officers who had spent the exercise’s second week observing the SASR’s long duration patrol scenarios concerned the SASR element’s apparent comfort with not knowing where the mission was going. The observation was a professional paradox.
The SASR’s preparation was thorough. Its planning was specific. And yet, the element in the field operated in a way that absorbed the deviation between the plan and the reality with a comfort that the commando officer had not expected from a force whose preparation he had observed to be as detailed as the SASRs. The observation’s resolution was that the comfort with operational uncertainty was not a product of insufficient planning, but of planning that had been thorough enough to identify the variables that mattered, the
contingencies that were addressable and the decisions that would need to be made in the field without reference back to the plan. A patrol commander who had planned that thoroughly was comfortable with uncertainty because the uncertainty had been built into the planning’s margin. The space between what was specified and what was left to operational judgment.
That space was deliberate, sized by the patrol commander experience and manageable by the operators who would work within it. The commando regiment’s direct action culture built a different relationship with operational uncertainty. One where the planning reduced uncertainty rather than managed it by specifying as much as possible in advance and coordinating the multi-element execution around that specification.
Both relationships with uncertainty were correct for the missions each culture had built them for. The observation was professionally useful because it named the difference clearly, and naming it clearly was the first step toward the calibrated understanding of when each approach’s relationship with uncertainty was the appropriate one.
The commando regiment’s Afghanistan deployment following the exercise included rotations in which commando elements operated alongside SASR elements in the provincial environment. The professional understanding the exercise had built was tested in those rotations against the actual operational conditions that Afghanistan presented.
Conditions that the exercise had approximated but inevitably not exactly replicated. The testing produced the expected outcome. The calibrated understanding developed in the exercise was applicable and accurate in the specific cases where the conditions matched what the exercise had presented and required adaptation in the cases where Afghanistan’s specific operational context presented dimensions the exercise had not covered.
The adaptation was professionally managed by the commando officers who had participated in the exercise. They approached the Afghanistan deployment with the exercis’s lessons as a starting point for calibration rather than as a fixed framework, updating their understanding of the SASR’s capabilities and approach as the operational evidence accumulated.
The SASR operators alongside whom they worked were not performing for the commando officer’s benefit. They were doing the operational work the deployment required and the commando officer’s understanding of that work was updated by observing it directly rather than in a training context. The update was in the main consistent with what the exercise had produced.
The SASR was doing the work that the exercise had demonstrated it was capable of doing in the way that the exercise had shown it approached the relevant mission types and to the standard the exercise had established as the regiment’s professional norm. The specific observations from Afghanistan that modified the exercise’s lessons were in the dimensions that the operational environment’s specific character introduced.
The exercise had been conducted in conditions that the exercise design team had calibrated to be realistic. Afghanistan was realistic in the uncompromising way. That actual operational environments were realistic. The variables were not controlled. The adversary was not cooperative. And the conditions that mattered most were the ones that the exercises design team had not anticipated.
In those conditions, the SASR’s performance provided the commando officers with additional calibration data that refined the exercises lessons in specific and professionally useful ways. The commando regiment was across the deployment a more effective partner to the SASR for having conducted the exercise before the deployment and for having approached the deployment with the exercise developed understanding as a foundation that the deployment could build on rather than as a starting point that the deployment had to establish from scratch. The Joint
Command’s investment in the exercise produced a return that was measurable in the professional development of the officers who participated, in the operational effectiveness of the joint activities that followed, and in the institutional understanding that the exercise contributed to the broader Australian special operations community’s self-nowledge.
The return was not uniform across all participants. Some officers engaged with the exercis’s professional content more deeply than others, and the depth of engagement correlated with the depth of the learning the exercise produced for each individual. The officers who engaged most deeply came away with the most specific and most operationally applicable understanding of what the SASR could do and how it differed from the commando regiment in the specific dimensions the exercise had exposed.
The commando regiment and the SASR were after the exercise not different forces from what they had been before it. The exercise had not changed either forc’s capabilities, structure, or professional culture. What it had changed was the understanding the two forces officers had of each other. A change that was invisible in the institutional records of either force but was present in the professional judgment of the people who had participated and who would apply that judgment in the subsequent years of their careers. Professional
understanding of allied and sister forces was not listed in any order of battle or capability document. It was held by individuals and transmitted through the informal channels of professional culture. the conversations, the planning contributions, and the operational decisions that reflected what the people making them understood about the forces they were working with.
The exercise had put better content into those informal channels. The channels had carried it forward. The Australian special operations community was incrementally more effective for the investment the exercise represented. The exercise’s contribution to the Australian special operations community’s self-nowledge was one investment in a longer process of institutional development that the community pursued through multiple channels simultaneously.
Exercises between the SASR and the commando regiment were one channel. Shared operational deployments were another. Professional development programs that brought officers from both forces into the same learning environment were a third. The channels were complimentary. Each produced a different form of mutual understanding and the understanding developed through multiple channels was more robust than the understanding developed through any one channel alone.
The commando officers who had participated in the exercise and subsequently deployed alongside SASR elements in Afghanistan had the most complete understanding of what the SASR could do and how it approached its operational problems. The deployment had added the operational dimension to the exercises training context dimension had shown the SASR’s capabilities and methods in actual operational conditions rather than in the best available approximation of those conditions that a training environment could produce.
The combination was the full picture. The exercise had been the preparation for understanding the SASR. The deployment had been the understanding’s operational confirmation and refinement. The commando officer’s accounts of what they had observed in both contexts shared with colleagues through the informal channels of professional culture were the primary transmission mechanism for the understanding the exercise and the deployment had built.
The formal records were complete and accurate. The informal transmission was the more operationally influential pathway. Professional understanding of sister and allied force capabilities was held and applied by individuals transmitted through professional conversations and exercised in the planning and operational decisions that individuals made over careers that continued long after the specific exercise and the specific deployment had concluded.
The exercise had worked. The deployment had built on it. The professional understanding the combination had produced was in the hands of officers who would use it well. The commando officers who came through the Australian special operations system in the years following the exercise and the Afghanistan deployments entered their careers with a baseline understanding of the SASR’s capabilities and methods that the exercise had contributed to building.
The baseline was one of the things the Australian special operations community’s investment in joint training had been designed to produce and the production was measurable in the quality of the planning and operational coordination that the community’s elements brought to subsequent coalition commitments. The exercise had been one investment in a community whose effectiveness depended on the mutual understanding its components had of each other.
The understanding that made joint planning efficient. joint operations coherent and the coalition contributions the community provided more operationally effective than independent contributions from forces with no established working relationships. The SASR officers who participated in the exercise carried the same mutual understanding in the other direction.
A clearer picture of the commando regiment’s capabilities, methods, and professional culture than they could have built from any formal capability description or institutional document. The exercise’s value was symmetrical in this way, and the symmetry was part of what made joint training between professional forces valuable in the specific operational sense rather than just the politically demonstrative sense.
Both forces understood each other better after the exercise. The understanding improved their subsequent collaboration. The collaboration produced better operational results than the forces operating independently without that understanding would have produced. The exercise had worked. The commando officers had said what qualified professionals said about each other’s qualified work, and the SASR officers had heard it in the spirit it was intended as professional assessment from qualified observers specific and useful and worth integrating into the
understanding of how the community operated as a whole. The Australian Special Operations Community’s development across the Afghanistan deployment period was visible in the coordination quality that its elements demonstrated in the latter phases of the deployment relative to the earlier phases.
The improvement was not primarily a function of individual capability development, though that development was real and documented. It was primarily a function of the mutual understanding that sustained joint service built between the community’s elements, the commando regiment and the SASR, developing a working picture of each other’s capabilities and methods that was more accurate, more detailed, and more operationally applicable than the picture that had existed at the deployment’s beginning.
The exercises had contributed to building that picture. The deployments had confirmed and refined it. The accumulated experience of multiple rotations, multiple joint operations, and multiple professional relationships built across years of shared service had produced a community that planned and operated with an integration quality that earlier exercises and earlier deployments had been building toward.
The commando officers who had described what they had seen after their first SASR exercise were the early stages of that building process. Professionals making their first detailed observations of a sister forces operational methods and beginning the integration of those observations into their own professional understanding of how Australian special operations forces worked and what they were collectively capable of.
The observations were specific and professionally grounded. The integration was genuine and operationally useful. The process that the observations initiated continued through the subsequent exercises and the subsequent deployments and the subsequent professional conversations that the community’s ongoing development produced.
The exercise had worked not only in the immediate sense of producing mutual understanding between its direct participants, but in the longer sense of initiating a development process whose products were still accumulating when the Afghanistan deployment concluded and the next coalition commitment began. 10.
