www.csua.org/u/j99 -> greatergood.berkeley.edu/greatergood/current_issue/grossman.html
Current Issue: Summer 2007 Gratitude Hope on the Battlefield by Lt. Dave Grossman Military leaders know a secret: The vast majority of people are overwhelmingly reluctant to take a human life. During World War II, US Army Brigadier General SLA Marshall asked average soldiers how they conducted themselves in battle. Before that, it had always been assumed that the average soldier would kill in combat simply because his country and his leaders had told him to do so, and because it might be essential to defend his own life and the lives of his friends. Marshall's singularly unexpected discovery was that, of every hundred men along the line of fire during the combat period, an average of only 15 to 20 "would take any part with their weapons." This was consistently true, "whether the action was spread over a day, or two days, or three." Marshall was a US Army historian in the Pacific theater during World War II and later became the official US historian of the European theater of operations. He had a team of historians working for him, and they based their findings on individual and mass interviews with thousands of soldiers in more than 400 infantry companies immediately after they had been in close combat with German or Japanese troops. The results were consistently the same: Only 15 to 20 percent of the American riflemen in combat during World War II would fire at the enemy. Those who would not fire did not run or hide--in many cases they were willing to risk greater danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages. They simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges. As a historian, psychologist, and soldier, I examined this question and studied the process of killing in combat. I have realized that there was one major factor missing from the common understanding of this process, a factor that answers this question and more: the simple and demonstrable fact that there is, within most men and women, an intense resistance to killing other people. A resistance so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it. Indeed, the study of killing by military scientists, historians, and psychologists gives us good reason to feel optimistic about human nature, for it reveals that almost all of us are overwhelmingly reluctant to kill a member of our own species, under just about any circumstance. Yet this understanding has also propelled armies to develop sophisticated methods for overcoming our innate aversion to killing, and, as a result, we have seen a sharp increase in the magnitude and frequency of post-traumatic response among combat veterans. Because human beings are astonishingly resilient, most soldiers who return from war will be fine. But some will need help coping with memories of violence. When those soldiers return from war--especially an unpopular one like Iraq--society faces formidable moral and mental health challenges in caring for and re-integrating its veterans . Resistance to killing SLA Marshall's methodology has been criticized, but his findings have been corroborated by many other studies. Indeed, data indicate that soldiers throughout military history have demonstrated a strong resistance to killing other people. When 19th-century French officer and military theorist Ardant du Picq distributed a questionnaire to French officers in the 1860s, he became one of the first people to document the common tendency of soldiers to fire harmlessly into the air simply for the sake of firing. One officer's response stated quite frankly that "a good many soldiers fired into the air at long distances," while another observed that "a certain number of our soldiers fired almost in the air, without aiming, seeming to want to stun themselves." Missing the target does not necessarily involve firing high, and two decades on army rifle ranges have taught me that a soldier must fire unusually high for it to be obvious to an observer. In other words, the intentional miss can be a very subtle form of disobedience. When faced with living, breathing opponents instead of a target, a significant majority of the soldiers revert to a posturing mode in which they fire over the enemy's heads. A 1986 study by the British Defense Operational Analysis Establishment's field studies division examined the killing effectiveness of military units in more than 100 19th- and 20th-century battles. They compared the data from these units with hit rates from simulated battles using pulsed laser weapons. The analysis was designed (among other things) to determine if Marshall's non-firer figures were consistent with other, earlier wars. When researchers compared historical combat performances against the performance of these test subjects (who were using simulated weapons and could neither inflict nor receive actual harm from the "enemy"), they discovered that the killing potential in these circumstances was much greater than the actual historical casualty rates. Battlefield fear alone cannot explain such a consistent discrepancy.
as the main factor" that kept the actual historical killing rates significantly below the laser trial levels. Thus the evidence shows that the vast majority of combatants throughout history, at the moment of truth when they could and should kill the enemy, have found themselves to be "conscientious objectors"--yet there seems to be a conspiracy of silence on this subject. In his book War on the Mind, Peter Watson observes that Marshall's findings have been largely ignored by academia and the fields of psychiatry and psychology. But they were very much taken to heart by the US Army, and a number of training measures were instituted as a result of Marshall's suggestions. According to studies by the US military, these changes resulted in a firing rate of 55 percent in Korea and 90 to 95 percent in Vietnam. Some modern soldiers use the disparity between the firing rates of World War II and Vietnam to claim that SLA Marshall had to be wrong, for the average military leader has a hard time believing that any significant body of his soldiers will not do its job in combat. But these doubters don't give sufficient credit to the revolutionary corrective measures and training methods introduced over the past half century. Manufactured contempt Since World War II, a new era has quietly dawned in modern warfare: an era of psychological warfare, conducted not upon the enemy, but upon one's own troops. The triad of methods used to enable men to overcome their innate resistance to killing includes desensitization, classical and operant conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms. Authors such as Gwynne Dyer and Richard Holmes have traced the development of boot-camp glorification of killing. They've found it was almost unheard of in World War I, rare in World War II, increasingly present in Korea, and thoroughly institutionalized in Vietnam.
to the suffering of an enemy,' and at the same time they are being indoctrinated in the most explicit fashion (as previous generations were not) with the notion that their purpose is not just to be brave or to fight well; But desensitization by itself is probably not sufficient to overcome the average individual's deep-seated resistance to killing. Indeed, this desensitization process is almost a smoke screen for conditioning, which is the most important aspect of modern training. Instead of lying prone on a grassy field calmly shooting at a bull's-eye target, for example, the modern soldier spends many hours standing in a foxhole, with full combat equipment draped about his body. At periodic intervals one or two man-shaped targets will pop up in front of him, and the soldier must shoot the target. In addition to traditional marksmanship, soldiers are learning to shoot reflexively and instantly, while mimicking the act of killing. In behavioral terms, the man shape popping up in the soldier's field of fire is the "conditioned stimulus." On special occasions, even more realistic and complex targets are used, many of them filled with red paint or catsup, which provide instant and positive reinforcement whe...
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