Gumboot
lorcutus.tolere
- Joined
- Feb 12, 2012
- Messages
- 948
The often quoted "only one in ten Soldiers fired on the enemy" statistic comes from BG SLA Marshall's The Soldier's Load and the Mobility of a Nation, which he wrote after WW2. Like nearly everything written by SLA Marshall, his data is extremely suspect. He references his own conversations with combat Soldiers during WW2 but doesn't provide any data. Numerous studies have shown that his data is incorrect (as in when you actually interview veterans from WW2 and record the data you find that they universally fired on the enemy). Bottom line is that Marshall was full of ****, but his claims keep getting regurgitated and reworked as though we have some kind of program to turn us into killbots or something. Our pop-up target ranges train us to identify a target, acquire a sight picture, and fire before the target goes down... they don't make us lose our humanity or anything like that.
Actually, the work in question by Marshall is Men Against Fire, and the only legitimate criticism of Marshall is that he didn't keep scientific-quality records, but a vast number of subsequent studies of various historic battlefields has supported and reinforced his initial figures. In engagements ranging from the 18th Century through to post-WW2 conflicts with non-western armed forces, the rate of non-firing remains surprisingly constant.
In any event, the US military certainly believed Marshall's findings and instituted kill-conditioning training after WW2 which saw a significant rise in combat lethality of infantry, with properly conducted studies of Korea and Vietnam showing a dramatic increase in soldiers engaging the enemy in combat (the figure was around 60% for Korea and over 90% for Vietnam).
Today, all modern western armies and police forces undergo kill-conditioning training, specifically designed to overcome what is now widely accepted as an inherent psychological resistance to killing.
Having said that, you're right that this doesn't turn soldiers into "killbots" as you put it. There's a woeful lack of actual understanding about the actual psychology of killing, particularly in the public sphere.
I'd recommend reading "On Killing" by Lt Col Dave Grossman. It's a ground-breaking book on the topic.
The basics are that humans naturally have a biological resistance to killing other humans, and normally can overcome it with quite extreme social or emotional pressure, or significant distance between the killer and their target. The greater the resistance, the greater the resulting "backlash" of psychological trauma. This is why, in the civil population, most murders are "crimes of passion" between people who are very close, and also why murder-suicide is so common.
Kill conditioning seeks to lessen or ideally disable the resistance to killing. It doesn't remove empathy, or morality, or a sense of self, or any of that other nonsense. It doesn't make people want to kill or enjoy killing. It simply takes the safety off, as it were.