What happened when Silverstone transmitted sensitive information orally and without confirmation?
Like the CCC's Smith's Beach fiasco, the Children Overboard political fiasco was also a massive waste of taxpayer's money and resources.
The Desert Rat was interested to read a submission by Commodore Sam Bateman (ret.) to the Children Overboard Inquiry. Under the heading "Communications", he writes:
" The Minister for Defence has acknowledged that there was a breakdown of communications within his portfolio with the “"children overboard”" incident (3) but I believe the causes of confusion are deeper than that.
Developments in communications over the last decade or so, particularly email and mobile phones, have meant that an unofficial and informal channel of communications has developed within the Defence Force that to some extent runs counter to the formal chain of command and formal message channels.
Frequently the informal channel will run ahead of the formal channel leading to the risk of “Chinese whispers” as information is passed from one person to another. Chinese whispers” clearly were happening during the “children overboard” incident as demonstrated for example, by the controversial phone conversations on 7 October 2001 between Commander Banks and Brigadier (Mike) Silverstone and then further “up the line”.
As now appears accepted, the conversation between (Commander) Banks and Silverstone was the main source of the myth that was passed onto Air Vice Marshall Titheridge then to Ms Jane Halton and then seized upon by the political “spin doctors”.
At the meeting of the People Smuggling Task Force on Sunday 7 October (4), Group Captain Walker appears to have had the formal messages but by then, the informal channel had jumped ahead and “the horse had bolted”.
As Dennis Shanahan, Political Editor of The Australian, has suggested, the entire episode was the result of senior professional military officers hurriedly transmitting information orally and without confirmation”.(5) I agree with this assessment but in defence of the senior military officers, I must also say that they were responding to a heavily politicised environment created by aggressive, “shoot from the hip” bureaucrats in senior positions in Canberra.
What can be done about this situation? It is a consequence of technological advances and to some extent, it is inevitable that in a highly political charged situation, bureaucrats and ministerial staff in Canberra are going to seek information from the operational level on which to base their advice to the Minister.
However, for officers at the operational level, these phone calls are highly disruptive. The same might be said within the Defence Force about phone calls from further up the operational chain of command. As Greg Sheridan has rightly observed in The Australian, these phone calls are “a dysfunctional aspect of modern military organisation”. (6)
While Brigadier Silverstone, as Commander Northern Command, was notionally in command of border protection operations, he is an Army officer and not experienced in maritime operations.
His (Silverstone's) phone call to Commander Banks (7) in the heat of the operation on October 7 would not have been helpful, particularly as Banks may have found the need to explain carefully some basic issues of seamanship, seaworthiness, life saving at sea, navigation and so on.
The present system of operational command and control in the Defence is a joint one and officers trained in one military environment (air, land or sea) can find themselves in command of operations in another environment. However, it is most important that they do not move personally into a mode of giving advice or asserting influence outside of their experience. I suggest that this was a feature of the phone calls between Silverstone, Titheridge and Halton. "
The Desert Rat thinks history is repeating itself with Brigadier Mike Silverstone (ret.)
(3) John Kerin, “Communications breakdown, says Hill”, The Weekend Australian, The Nation, February,
16-17, 2002, p. 4.
(4) Marian Wilkinson, “Tampering with the evidence”, The Sydney Morning Herald, News Review, February
16-17, 2002, p.23.
(5) Dennis Shanahan, “A damning indictment of bureaucrats”, The Weekend Australian, The Nation,
February 16-17, 2002, p. 4.
(6) Greg Sheridan, “Out of the blue, a big whopper”, The Weekend Australian, Inquirer, February 23-24,
2002, p.23.
(7) Marian Wilkinson, “A few good men”, The Sydney Morning Herald, News Review, February 23-24,
2002, p.27.
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