I didn't want you to miss this. I think it is one of the best posts I've ever read on SI. So I stole it and brought it here.
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Hi all; Some comments on the effectiveness of 3rd world soldiers...
I've previously commented that history shows that there every single military advantage, invented in the advanced parts of the world, eventually becomes standard in the less advanced nations as well. One of the most important military advance for infantry in the advanced world has been a change in their training so as to make them more likely to shoot to kill. I thought I'd comment on some changes in the playtime habits of teenagers around the world, and how this is likely to alter the military balance of power between the advanced and (let's call a spade a spade) backward nations.
The training change in the 1st world is called "operant conditioning". S. L. A. Marshall made a study of WW2 battles and it was his observation that only a small percentage of the front line riflemen, in the presence of enemy soldiers, actually pointed their weapons and fired at the enemy. The vast majority of soldiers were not cowardly, but instead simply were not killers. The US Army required some time to come to the point of realizing that this observation, but by the time Vietnam came around the Army realized that there was a problem, and set to work fixing it with psychological training methods. A typical change was to stop teaching soldiers to shoot round bullseye targets, and instead begin teaching them to shoot at targets that look like men, and that fall over when hit. These methods turned out to be wildly successful, and account for some of the remarkable victories that nations which used this technique made over nations which didn't. Here's a US Marine Corp link that talks more about this subject:
mcu.usmc.mil.
Richard Holmes has noted the ineffectiveness of an army trained in traditional World War II methods as opposed to an army whose soldiers have been "conditioned" by modern training methods. Holmes interviewed British soldiers returning from the Falklands War and asked them if they had experienced any incidence of non-firing similar to that observed by Marshall in World War II. They replied that they had not seen any such thing in their soldiers, but they most definitely had observed it in the poorly trained Argentineans, whose only effective fire had come from machine guns and snipers.
mcu.mcbbutler.usmc.mil
Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman wrote a fascinating book "On Killing", which I recommend to those wishing to read more about this. Here's a book review:
216.239.53.100.
There is nothing that would prevent backward nations from taking up these modern psychological techniques for training soldiers except the recognition that these techniques are needed. They'd have done this years ago but for the fact that 3rd world militaries are considerably more macho than the US military, and so they are still operating in a state of denial about human nature on the battlefield. In this, the more realistic training of the 1st world would seem to be a permanent advantage except for one thing: video games. Video games are realistic even to the extent of showing spurting blood and internal organs, something which virgin soldiers typically find disquieting (and therefore causing them to be less effective). The military itself has modified Doom for use by the Marines, I wonder if they removed the blood and gore, or made it more realistic:
tec.army.mil
Some military men now blame our high level of youth violence on these video games. A good website is the one run by Grossman:
killology.com
Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response: soldiers or police officers experience hundreds of repetitions. Later, when soldiers are on the battlefield or a police officer is walking a beat and somebody pops up with a gun, they will shoot reflexively and shoot to kill. We know that 75 to 80 percent of the shooting on the modern battlefield is the result of this kind of stimulus-response training. Now, if you're a little troubled by that, how much more should we be troubled by the fact that every time a child plays an interactive point-and-shoot video game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex and motor skills.
killology.com
Western children commit horrible mass murders with stunning frequency nowadays. As 3rd world children are exposed to the same violent video games, they too will act out the same way. But in our society, children are simultaneously conditioned to expect to be punished, to tolerate others, and to not go down in a blaze of glory. But compare that with the situation in Palestine. The children there are undoubtedly now exposed to almost as much video game violence as our own children, but unlike our own kids, they have a readily available enemy that they can obtain societal support for shooting at. The Moslem tradition and financial support of martyrdom only makes it more likely that an Arab youth would do this.
So there are two effects at work here. The first is that exposure to video game violence makes backward nation youth more likely to commit violence. But more importantly, it makes them more likely to be effective at shooting. This means that some of the less effective military training prevalent in the 3rd World is partially compensated for by the spread of violent video games.
The overall effect of improving the effectiveness of infantry is that the advanced nations will lose more soldiers when we go against these armies. The improvement in effectiveness due to full military training, according to the results of studies by the US military, are around 10x. That is, a unit of fully trained riflemen will produce up to as much as 10 times as many casualties in the enemy as a unit trained in the old fashion.
This increase in small unit effectiveness will likewise increase casualties in 1st world nations when we go up against 3rd world nations. But the factor is partly compensated by improvements in other technology. For example, US troops wear body armor and have night vision equipment.
There are three areas that are militarily of interest to the US right now. I thought I'd look at them from the point of view of the above analysis:
The Afghans were not exposed to video game combat, so their troops were rather poor at combat.
The Iraqis are now big on video games, particularly among their civilians, but there are also hints of military uses. The Iraqi military apparently bought 4000 PS/2s last year. The speculation was that these were taken apart so that the Iraqis could use the 32-bit processors, but I think that that is ridiculous. Instead, I think they were bought for use as game stations:
Iraq Scores Hordes of PS2s at US Gamers' Expense
ps2.ign.com
Washington Post, September 16, 2002
BAGHDAD The newest craze among well-to-do teenage boys here is to stalk the streets at night, finishing off the enemy with the rat-a-tat-tat of an M-1 carbine.
At a few dozen computer centers that have recently sprouted up around the sprawling Iraqi capital, patrons sit at small consoles adorned with posters from the latest Hollywood movies and play the latest shoot'em-up video games on the latest Pentium-powered computers. For Zaid Abdul Amir, 34, a computer engineer fiddling with his keyboard and surrounded by boys half his age, playing war on the computer is "something fun to do." But, like many people here, he has little desire for the real thing.
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"Life is good," said Jaleel Jabbar, 34, who opened a computer center two months ago with $8,000 he had saved.
If the United States invades, Jabbar said, he plans to be ready. He said he has been "training" on his computer, playing a game called Medal of Honor, where his character is a World War II-era U.S. soldier assigned to hunt down Nazi forces in North Africa.
"We will fight on the street if we have to," he said. "But I would rather just do it on the computer."
216.239.53.100.
I would guess that the Palestinians are also well exposed to violent video games. The Syrians, for example, have even published the first Arab computer video game, based on the Intifada:
Syria launches Arabs' first video game, on Intifada
AWSE News, February 22, 2002
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Nada, a women buying Underash, said "I was shocked when my son told me the game he was playing was to kill Saddam Hussein," the Iraqi president.
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news.awse.com
BBC, May 31, 2002
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The game is surprisingly real. If Ahmad gets shot, he dies. There is no miracle cure. If he shoots civilians, the game is also over. A lot of young players have complained that the game is too difficult. There is also no ultimate victory against the Israelis. ...
news.bbc.co.uk
Also:
gamegirladvance.com
I have no doubt that Palestinian children are exposed to violent first person shooter video games, but I can't find any links to prove this. My guess is that the slowly improving effectiveness of the Palestinian guerillas is at least partly due to exposure to desensitizing video games.
In any case, there is no doubt that further spread of these games makes it even more difficult for the US (and Israel) to control enemy civilian populations.
Also see the training program for suicide bombers:
foxnews.com |
