Rutger Bregman - On why modern soldiers kill more
Once in combat, we’ve seen that soldiers still find it hard to kill. In Chapter 4 we were in the Pacific with Colonel Marshall, who realised that the majority of soldiers never fired their guns. During the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell noticed the same thing, when one day he found himself overpowered by empathy:
At this moment a man [...] jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half- dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. [...] I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.
Marshall’s and Orwell’s observations illustrate the difficulty we have inflicting harm on people who come too close. There’s something that holds us back, making us incapable of pulling the trigger.
There’s one thing even harder to do than shoot, military historians have discovered: stabbing a fellow human being. Less than 1 per cent of injuries during the battles at Waterloo (1815) and the Somme (1916), for instance, were caused by soldiers wielding bayonets. So all those thousands of bayonets displayed in hundreds of museums? Most were never used. As one historian notes, ‘one side or the other usually recalls an urgent appointment elsewhere before bayonets cross’.
Here, too, we’ve been misled by the television and movie industries. Series like Game of Thrones and movies like Star Wars would have us believe that skewering another person is a piece of cake. But in reality it’s psychologically very hard to run through the body of another person.
So how do we account for the hundreds of millions of war casualties over the past ten thousand years? How did all those people die? Answering this question requires forensic examination of the victims, so let’s take the causes of death of British soldiers in the Second World War as an example:
Other: 1%
Chemical: 2%
Blast, crush: 2%
Landmine, booby trap: 10%
Bullet, anti-tank mine: 10%
Mortar, grenade, aerial bomb, shell: 75%
Notice anything? If there’s one thing that ties these victims together, it’s that most were eliminated remotely. The overwhelming majority of soldiers were killed by someone who pushed a button, dropped a bomb, or planted a mine. By someone who never saw them, certainly not while they were half-naked and trying to hold up their trousers.
Most of the time, wartime killing is something you do from far away. You could even describe the whole evolution of military technology as a process in which enemy lines have grown farther apart. From clubs and daggers to bows and arrows, and from muskets and cannon to bombs and grenades. Over the course of history, weaponry has got ever better at overcoming the central problem of all warfare: our fundamental aversion to violence. It’s practically impossible for us to kill someone while looking them in the eyes. Just as most of us would instantly go vegetarian if forced to butcher a cow, most soldiers become conscientious objectors when the enemy gets too close.
Down the ages, the way to win most wars has been to shoot as many people as possible from a distance. That’s how the English defeated the French at Crécy and Agincourt during the Hundred Years’ War (1337—1453), how the conquistadors conquered the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and what the US military does today, with its legions of armed drones.
Aside from long-range weapons, armies also pursue means to increase psychological distance to the enemy. If you can dehumanise the other — say, by portraying them as vermin — it makes it easier to treat the other as if they are indeed inhuman.
You can also drug your soldiers to dull their natural empathy and antipathy towards violence. From Troy to Waterloo, from Korea to Vietnam, few armies have fought without the aid of intoxicants, and scholars now even think Paris might not have fallen in 1940 had the German army not been stoked on thirty- five million methamphetamine pills (aka crystal meth, a drug that can cause extreme aggression).
Armies can also ‘condition’ their troops. The US Army started doing this after the Second World War on the recommendation of none other than Colonel Marshall. Vietnam recruits were immersed in boot camps that exalted not only a sense of brotherhood, but also the most brutal violence, forcing the men to scream ‘KILL! KILL! KILL!’ until they were hoarse. Second World War veterans (most of whom had never learned to kill) were shocked when shown images of this brand of training.
These days, soldiers no longer practise on ordinary paper bullseyes, but are drilled to fire instinctively at realistic human figures. Shooting a firearm becomes an automated, Pavlovian reaction you can perform without thinking. For snipers, the training’s even more radical. One tried-and-tested method is to present a series of progressively more horrific videos while the trainee sits strapped to a chair and a special device ensures their eyes stay wide open.
And so we ’re finding ways to root out our innate and deep- seated aversion to violence. In modern armies, comradeship has become less important. Instead we have, to quote one American veteran, ‘manufactured contempt’. This conditioning works. Set soldiers trained using these techniques opposite an old-school army and the latter is crushed every time. Take the Falklands War (1982): though bigger in sheer numbers, the Argentine army with its old-fashioned training never had a chance against Britain’s conditioned shooting machines.
The American military also managed to boost its ‘firing ratio’, increasing the number of soldiers who shoot to 5 5 per cent in the Korean War and 95 per cent in Vietnam. But this came at a price. If you brainwash millions of young soldiers in training, it should come as no surprise when they return with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as so many did after Vietnam. Innumerable soldiers had not only killed other people — something inside them had died, too.
At this moment a man [...] jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half- dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. [...] I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.
Marshall’s and Orwell’s observations illustrate the difficulty we have inflicting harm on people who come too close. There’s something that holds us back, making us incapable of pulling the trigger.
There’s one thing even harder to do than shoot, military historians have discovered: stabbing a fellow human being. Less than 1 per cent of injuries during the battles at Waterloo (1815) and the Somme (1916), for instance, were caused by soldiers wielding bayonets. So all those thousands of bayonets displayed in hundreds of museums? Most were never used. As one historian notes, ‘one side or the other usually recalls an urgent appointment elsewhere before bayonets cross’.
Here, too, we’ve been misled by the television and movie industries. Series like Game of Thrones and movies like Star Wars would have us believe that skewering another person is a piece of cake. But in reality it’s psychologically very hard to run through the body of another person.
So how do we account for the hundreds of millions of war casualties over the past ten thousand years? How did all those people die? Answering this question requires forensic examination of the victims, so let’s take the causes of death of British soldiers in the Second World War as an example:
Other: 1%
Chemical: 2%
Blast, crush: 2%
Landmine, booby trap: 10%
Bullet, anti-tank mine: 10%
Mortar, grenade, aerial bomb, shell: 75%
Notice anything? If there’s one thing that ties these victims together, it’s that most were eliminated remotely. The overwhelming majority of soldiers were killed by someone who pushed a button, dropped a bomb, or planted a mine. By someone who never saw them, certainly not while they were half-naked and trying to hold up their trousers.
Most of the time, wartime killing is something you do from far away. You could even describe the whole evolution of military technology as a process in which enemy lines have grown farther apart. From clubs and daggers to bows and arrows, and from muskets and cannon to bombs and grenades. Over the course of history, weaponry has got ever better at overcoming the central problem of all warfare: our fundamental aversion to violence. It’s practically impossible for us to kill someone while looking them in the eyes. Just as most of us would instantly go vegetarian if forced to butcher a cow, most soldiers become conscientious objectors when the enemy gets too close.
Down the ages, the way to win most wars has been to shoot as many people as possible from a distance. That’s how the English defeated the French at Crécy and Agincourt during the Hundred Years’ War (1337—1453), how the conquistadors conquered the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and what the US military does today, with its legions of armed drones.
Aside from long-range weapons, armies also pursue means to increase psychological distance to the enemy. If you can dehumanise the other — say, by portraying them as vermin — it makes it easier to treat the other as if they are indeed inhuman.
You can also drug your soldiers to dull their natural empathy and antipathy towards violence. From Troy to Waterloo, from Korea to Vietnam, few armies have fought without the aid of intoxicants, and scholars now even think Paris might not have fallen in 1940 had the German army not been stoked on thirty- five million methamphetamine pills (aka crystal meth, a drug that can cause extreme aggression).
Armies can also ‘condition’ their troops. The US Army started doing this after the Second World War on the recommendation of none other than Colonel Marshall. Vietnam recruits were immersed in boot camps that exalted not only a sense of brotherhood, but also the most brutal violence, forcing the men to scream ‘KILL! KILL! KILL!’ until they were hoarse. Second World War veterans (most of whom had never learned to kill) were shocked when shown images of this brand of training.
These days, soldiers no longer practise on ordinary paper bullseyes, but are drilled to fire instinctively at realistic human figures. Shooting a firearm becomes an automated, Pavlovian reaction you can perform without thinking. For snipers, the training’s even more radical. One tried-and-tested method is to present a series of progressively more horrific videos while the trainee sits strapped to a chair and a special device ensures their eyes stay wide open.
And so we ’re finding ways to root out our innate and deep- seated aversion to violence. In modern armies, comradeship has become less important. Instead we have, to quote one American veteran, ‘manufactured contempt’. This conditioning works. Set soldiers trained using these techniques opposite an old-school army and the latter is crushed every time. Take the Falklands War (1982): though bigger in sheer numbers, the Argentine army with its old-fashioned training never had a chance against Britain’s conditioned shooting machines.
The American military also managed to boost its ‘firing ratio’, increasing the number of soldiers who shoot to 5 5 per cent in the Korean War and 95 per cent in Vietnam. But this came at a price. If you brainwash millions of young soldiers in training, it should come as no surprise when they return with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as so many did after Vietnam. Innumerable soldiers had not only killed other people — something inside them had died, too.