Just as I was ready to move on from the creeping civilianisation of military justice, the news out of the United Kingdom drags me straight back in. We are beginning to see a pattern. However bad things feel here, the mother country seems to have it worse.

Against our wide brown land, the green and pleasant land now feels even more up against it. On economic stagnation. On debt to GDP. Worse. On freedom of speech? Unfathomably and grievously worse. On policing and the intrusion of the administrative state? God awful. And now, on the theme of the month, the civilianisation of military justice. In Old Blighty it has become something of a debacle.

It turns out that reports last week that SAS soldiers are seeking early release in the UK in significant numbers – framed as another culture war skirmish about lawfare, human rights lawyers and a demoralised regiment – are not the whole story. What is unfolding is not simply a row about a handful of investigations.

While the United Kingdom has not experienced a single political rupture over charges laid against a war hero of Roberts-Smith’s stature, in the mother country they have been grappling with the civilianisation of military law of war for years.

In the years following the Iraq war, the United Kingdom constructed an elaborate investigative apparatus to deal with allegations against its forces. The Iraq Historic Allegations Team, established in 2010, examined thousands of claims before eventually collapsing in disrepute amid concerns about the credibility of many allegations and those bringing them. Running in parallel, the Al-Sweady Inquiry – announced in 2009 and reporting in 2014 – became one of the most high-profile of these processes, ultimately rejecting the central accusations of murder and torture after years of litigation and tens of millions in public expenditure.

Afghanistan followed, first through Operation Northmoor and now a full public inquiry into alleged unlawful killings. Even Northern Ireland has never quite gone away. Cases from the 1970s and 1980s continue to resurface through inquests and judicial review, long after many thought them settled.

And even though there have been attempts to stem the tide through legislation, governments have not been able to get on top of it.

However it is worse, much worse. Because of the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law, British courts have taken on an expanded role in scrutinising military operations. Decisions made in the field are revisited, often years later, in a steady stream of private civil litigation. Claims brought in UK courts, including by foreign claimants, challenge the conduct of individual soldiers or units long after deployment has ended.

What matters, though, is not how these processes are classified. It is how they operate together. Soldiers find themselves moving from one form of scrutiny to another over time – criminal or civil claims, inquiries, fresh investigations – each one reopening matters that were thought to have been dealt with. For some, it never ends.

The Battle of Danny Boy litigation has brought that into focus. Soldiers decorated for bravery in 2004 found themselves, years later, defending allegations of murder and torture advanced through civil proceedings – claims that ultimately collapsed, but only after triggering a £31 million public inquiry and years of reputational damage.  However, in a turn that has struck a nerve in Britain last week, it emerged that one of the lawyers involved in advancing those claims sits at the apex of the system as Attorney General.

The current Labour Attorney General, Lord Hermer KC, built much of his career acting in human rights cases against the British state. As the Times reported this week, Hermer is under pressure to explain his past involvement in litigation arising out of the Iraq war, including claims connected to the Battle of Danny Boy. Those claims ultimately formed part of the Al-Sweady saga, in which the most serious allegations were rejected after years of inquiry.

The questions now being asked are straightforward enough – whether he advanced the claims as counsel suspecting they were bogus, and whether he should  recuse himself from advising on related matters, and what he knew, and when.

Putting aside personalities,  and viewing the system as a whole, it is clear that what emerges is something that is very difficult to sustain over time. Scrutiny of war conduct never concludes; it carries over, from one process to the next. The desperate mood now evident within parts of Britain’s armed forces is not hard to understand.

Again, the comparison with the United States becomes instructive. America has retained a genuinely parallel system of military justice. The United States has never ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, preferring to keep primary responsibility for judging its soldiers firmly within its own institutions. Britain and Australia, by contrast, embraced it with little hesitation. That choice reflects not just a difference in system design, but a broader disposition: a willingness to embed civilian and international legal norms ever more deeply into retrospective assessments of war.

Back to Australia. The prosecution of Ben Roberts-Smith now carries its own troubling features: the spectacle of arrest, the sense of forum shopping for the ‘right’ jury, and the granting of immunity from prosecution to fellow soldiers in exchange for evidence expected to damage the accused. Even in civilian criminal practice, such measures are used sparingly. I’m told by senior military justice experts that this is unheard of in courts martial. Military justice was never designed to operate in that way. It proceeds on the basis that all wrongdoing must be prosecuted, but in a way that is proportionate and allocates culpability precisely where it lies.

As the American congressman, and former Green Beret, Pat Harrigan observed last week, once governments allow combat activity to be replayed as civilian courtroom exercises, the effects are not confined to the past.

If the United Kingdom is the future, the warning for us is already here.