Private Jason Challis was accidentally shot in the head in an urban warfare exercise in the Northern Territory

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The death of an inexperienced 25-year-old soldier during a live-fire training exercise occurred because of a “catastrophic systemic failure” by Australian army commanders, a coroner has found.

Private Jason Challis, 25, from Geelong, was accidentally shot in the head while crouching behind a building in an urban warfare exercise south of Darwin on 10 May 2017.

He died because of a systemic failure in which army brass refused to enforce their own safety policies ensuring a mandatory walk-through or dry rehearsal before a live fire exercise, coroner Greg Cavanagh said in findings released on Wednesday.

Australian soldier Jason Challis killed in training exercise in Northern Territory Read more

Challis had been in the army for 10 months and, as with most of his section, had not previously trained on a complex urban warfare range. Despite that, they were not given the benefit of a blank-fire rehearsal and did not know the layout of the mock village.

The exercise was stopped but no one noticed Challis missing or saw him at a dangerous no-go zone behind the mock building made of plywood and hessian. Another soldier shot a dummy target inside but two bullets passed through the wall and hit Challis in the head, killing him.

Despite the army agreeing to coroner’s recommendations after the 2009 death of Lance Corporal Mason Edwards in similar circumstances, it was not ensuring practices such as walk-throughs or the marking of no-go zones for exercises were mandatory.

That was partly due to a strongly held army tenet and mindset that live-fire exercises should be “dynamic” rather than staged to better prepare the troops for real combat.

“It’s a hard job to maintain a training level,” the acting commanding officer of Challis’s section told last November’s coronial inquest.

“I still believe you can’t continuously have to start from the beginning again and work your way up or we’ll never meet the directions of the Australian government to protect this country if you continually do that.”

Cavanagh accepted it was a difficult balance for the army but said “I encourage them to resolve the competing requirements between safe training and dynamic training (or testing) in an explicit manner”.

“In my view, the evidence establishes that the exercise that led to the death of this young man was a shambles,” he said. “If he had been given a walk-through, a dry-fire rehearsal or a blank-fire rehearsal, it is unimaginable that he would have been at the back of the building in line with the concealed target.

“In this case it was not simply ‘human factors’ that intervened. There was catastrophic systemic failure.”

Cavanagh made three recommendations, including that the army make it explicit what rehearsals are mandatorily required and that they be highlighted and easily noted by troops when they read the documents.

No-go areas behind concealed targets should also be clearly marked, he said.

The report comes in the same week another soldier died during a training drill at an army base in Victoria’s north.

The soldier collapsed during training on Tuesday morning, the Herald Sun reports, adding ADF personnel tried to resuscitate him as paramedics were called.

The soldier’s family had been notified and the Department of Defence says it is providing support.

“The death of an Australian army member, regardless of the circumstances, is a tragedy and deeply felt by the army family and the broader defence organisation,” a defence spokesman said.