Accountability in US forces - Matty Hull

Today’s paper reports on the death of a British soldier, Matty Hull, through US friendly fire. The inquest heard yesterday that if the Americans had followed the same combat rules as the British, then the mistake would not have happened.

A relevant piece of research overlaps with my studies of accountability: Romzek, Ingraham, “Cross Pressures of Accountability: Initiative, Command, and Failure in the Ron Brown Plane Crash”, 2000, in Public Administration Review Vol. 60, no3.


As in the Matty Hull case, this paper indicates that wrong procedures were followed. However, the focus of the research is on accountability, and identifies a conflict between “institutional rhetoric and managerial conditions (that) encouraged entrepreneurial behaviour and initiative” and an administrative reality that “emphasized a risk-averse, rules-oriented approach to accountability when things went wrong.”

From what I read in today’s newspaper on the Matty Hull inquest, and from seeing the video published on the web, I’d guess that this conflict still exists ten years after the Ron Brown crash.

I notice in the research that the American authors comment on hierarchical accountability that reflected in disciplinary actions and a “combination of different accountability standards”. They refer, not to a disaster, but to a ‘mishap’. Their reflections on damage to career do not express a concern for the human loss and the pain of the victims’ families. How odd! I notice that an MP comments that the US military has failed to help the soldier’s family in their question to find out the truth about his death.

It seems to me that 10 years after that crash, the US military still apply different standards of accountability, and particularly when non-Americans are involved.