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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sig who wrote (130025)	4/26/2004 4:33:42 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Sig; Re: "Does not mean I agree with all of it, but I think it proves my point to Bilow that US soldiers do not desert. Might freak out or 'lose it', and have to quit, but no cut and run. Its a matter of pride. Leaders quit, when ordered to, or when the mission is impossible." It doesn't prove jack. My point was that soldiers fighting on foreign territory have great difficulty deserting, and their desertion rates are generally lower than soldiers fighting on their own home ground. What do you think happens to soldiers who "freak out or 'lose it'" when home is near by? They f'ing desert, sure as God made all men fear death. The United States is not peopled by supermen that are somehow distinct from the rest of the world in their immunity to the debilitating effects of fear. Your belief in the uniqueness of the United States runs deep. Like I've said before, every ethnic group on this crowded planet believes that it's unique, LOL. And go back and read what cnyndwllr wrote one more time: ... None of you truly understand that little brown men and swarthy Arab men are more like us than not when it comes to protecting their land and their tribe. ... Now cnyndwllr is right when he notes that we had a good kill ratio against the NVA. He attributes that to the toughness of our forces, and a certain amount of that is true, but it has nothing to do with any difference between Vietnamese and American men. The differences are instead due to the simple fact that our soldiers were much better trained. Even 6 weeks basic is better training than what goes on in 3rd world nations. The reason is that the US armed forces understands what stops men from killing men, and adjusts its tactics and training accordingly. For more on this fascinating subject, read here: killology.com And when cnyndwllr calls the NVA "battle hardened", he's using a term rather inappropriately. In any given unit, most of the killing is done by a very small percentage of the people. The rest duck and cover, spray the countryside with ineffective fire, or do very brave things that do not actually hurt anyone on the other side (like tending to the wounded or fetching ammo or any other thing other than actually shooting at the enemy). The people who actually do the killing on one side tend to shoot at the soldiers who "actually do the killing" on the other side. They don't prefer to shoot the ones who "duck and cover" because they're hiding and hard to see. They don't prefer to shoot the ones who are tending the wounded because they're not an immediate threat. The result is that the effective soldiers on each side tend to kill each other faster than they kill the ineffectives. For a unit that has been in combat for very long, the result is that there are no effectives left, only "duck and cover" types. This effect was widely seen in WW1 when the US entered the fighting late, after all the effectives in the German, British and French armies had sniped each other. Showing up late to a war is a good idea. Now let me get back to your chauvinistic and ridiculously incorrect statement "it proves my point to Bilow that US soldiers do not desert." My point was that soldiers in foreign territories generally do not desert because they have no place to go. Let's look at desertion rates for US military forces fighting in their own home. That's right, the Civil war: ... It has been estimated that in a five-month period, eight hundred deserters were arrested in Perry, Saline, Jackson, and Williamson counties and two thousand for Illinois as a whole. ... lib.niu.edu That's right. Two thousand deserters in just 5 months, and that's only the ones they caught. Why did they desert? Because they were in their home territory, and they could. This is universal human behavior and it dates back to the dawn of history. That it occurred massively during the Civil war is a fact of history: Psychological and Psychosocial Consequences of Combat and Deployment Rand Corporation ... MODERN WAR: THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR ... All combat and postcombat behavior took place in an environment of value and expectation about individual performance far closer to that of the Greeks and medieval conceptions than to those of our time. Soldiers were either brave or cowardly.1 Thus men who, for whatever set of reasons, wished to avoid the acute stresses and traumas of combat opted out—obviously in very large numbers. While the reality does not accord with public patriotic visions or with the belief that the maximum penalty was always applied to “deserters,” that there was a high desertion rate is unchallenged. This represents a continuation of the pattern described for medieval and renaissance armies, [Bilow: Note that medieval and renaissance armies generally fought near their homes, and when they fought abroad, such as in the crusades, they did not have high desertion rates.] and it is remarkably different from the normative expectations that characterize “attention to duty” in most Western armies in this century (and in U.S. forces in particular). [Bilow: Note that Western armies now generally fight at least 100s of miles away from home so that desertion is impossible. In places where it is possible, it is the norm to shoot deserters at the front.] There are many reasons for this, but suffice it to say that desertion could well be a selfscreening method for evading or mediating highly stressful situations that is less available to troops serving today. ... rand.org -- Carl