Hi cnyndwllr; Re: "While it's true that the army learned how to teach some men to actually overcome the reluctance to kill another, it's also true that a significant number, and maybe a majority, of men still wouldn't shoot at the enemy. I don't think, however, that we were "better trained." Like many jobs, training is overrated and doing the job is the real "training.""
Few people who've not seen combat will admit that so many men are unable to overcome the reluctance to kill. Here's a USMC guide to training men to kill, it ain't easy:
mcu.usmc.mil
You're right that the figure in Vietnam was somewhere around 50%. That is, about 50% of the soldiers in a position to do so, actually used their weapons effectively. This may seem like a very small percentage to you, but if you research the figures for previous wars you will discover that the 50% "shooting rate" was incredibly high. I doubt that the Vietnamese had better than a 5% shooting rate, which is what is normal for badly trained soldiers (and every non 1st rate power's soldiers are badly trained).
Some examples of the techniques that the military uses to increase the shooting percentages are: (a) The buddy system instead of individual foxholes. That way you've got another guy to fortify your courage a little. The Greek hoplites fought shield to shield, arranged next to their kinfolk, and they achieved close to 100% effective rates. Modern fire power makes it impossible to keep infantry so close together, but the buddy system helps. (b) Crew served weapons. The highest effective firing rates in battle are the crew served weapons on ships. Even in the days of wooden ships it was normal for damn near 100% of the individuals to be effective. Humans really are pack animals. (c) Training on man shaped silhouettes that pop up and down like those fleeting glimpses you get on a battlefield. The idea is to get the soldier to shoot automatically without thinking.
Military psychologists figured out the problem in WW2, partly solved it in Korea, and then pretty much completely solved it in Vietnam. Here's a link showing that the figure for Vietnam was much higher than the figures for previous wars. (Note that the figures he's quoting are not people who manage to take useful aimed shots, but instead just the people who shoot generally in the direction of the enemy. Combat has incredibly debilitating effects on accuracy. Most people in a firefight can't hit the side of a barn from inside the barn. You'll find plenty of barns with holes in the roof, the door, pretty much everywhere but the side.)
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One major modern revelation in the field of military psychology is the observation that such resistance to killing one's own species is also a key factor in human combat. *Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall first observed this during his work as an official U.S. Army historian in the Pacific and European theaters of operations in World War II. Based on his post-combat interviews, Marshall concluded in his book Men Against Fire (1946, 1978) that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen in World War II fired their own weapons at an exposed enemy soldier. Key weapons, such as *flame-throwers, were usually fired. Crew-served weapons, such as *machine guns, almost always were fired. And action would increase greatly if a nearby leader demanded that the soldier fire. But when left on their own, the great majority of individual combatants appear to have been unable or unwilling to kill.
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Ardant du Picq's surveys of French officers in the 1860s and his observations about ancient battles (Battle Studies, 1946), John Keegan and Richard Holmes' numerous accounts of ineffectual firing throughout history (Soldiers, 1985), Holmes' assessment of Argentine firing rates in the Falklands War (Acts of War, 1985), Paddy Griffith's data on the extraordinarily low firing rate among Napoleonic and American *Civil War regiments (Battle Tactics of the American Civil War, 1989), the British army's laser reenactments of historical battles, the FBI's studies of nonfiring rates among law enforcement officers in the 1950s and 1960s, and countless other individual and anecdotal observations, all confirm Marshall's fundamental conclusion that human beings are not, by nature, killers. Indeed, from a psychological perspective, the history of warfare can be viewed as a series of successively more effective tactical and mechanical mechanisms to enable or force combatants to overcome their resistance to killing other human beings, even when defined as the enemy.
By 1946, the US Army had accepted Marshall's conclusions, and the Human Resources Research Office of the US Army subsequently pioneered a revolution in combat training, which eventually replaced firing at targets with deeply ingrained conditioning, using realistic, man-shaped pop-up targets that fall when hit. Psychologists assert that this kind of powerful operant conditioning is the only technique that will reliably influence the primitive, midbrain processing of a frightened human being. Fire drills condition schoolchildren to respond properly even when terrified during a fire. Conditioning in flight simulators enables pilots to respond reflexively to emergency situations even when frightened. And similar application and perfection of basic conditioning techniques increased the rate of fire to approximately 55 percent in Korea and around 95 percent in Vietnam.
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killology.com
Modern 1st rate infantry armies are famous for absolutely beating the crap out of 2nd or 3rd world armies despite huge inverse force ratios largely because of these techniques. What you end up with is a force that shoots about 5 or 10x as effectively as the other side. The evidence of high non firing rates during the Civil war is partly the very large number of weapons dug up from the battlefields that have multiple rounds packed into the rifle by men who imitated shooting at the enemy but didn't pull the trigger. The other part of the evidence consists of calculations for what the wound rates should have been based on historical data about the number of soldiers, and their distance to the enemy.
What happened is that these battles largely consisted of a bunch of guys yelling and shooting over each other's heads. This is normal intra species animal behavior (i.e threat display). Effective killing is not.
What I'm saying here is that you probably had a 5x advantage over the Vietnamese in your firing effectiveness. This is the same rate that every modern 1st world infantry unit has against every modern 2nd or 3rd world infantry unit, and it's enough to make a BIG difference in the kill rates. It's why our soldiers now in Iraq kick their butts in urban fighting even in the absence of all the usual technological advantages.
-- Carl
P.S. I have a comment on the concept of "battle hardened", but I'll save it for a separate post.
Here's SLA Marshall's assessment of Vietnam from late 1966:
web.usf.edu |
