Stan Goff, "Victories Overruled"

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sat Dec 14 15:23:01 PST 2002


At 5:46 PM -0500 12/14/02, Doug Henwood wrote:
>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>>Rank-and-file soldiers don't own the Fortune 500. Those who
>>command them have to give them a good reason to fight, like
>>fighting against fascism, and then they must embrace it as their
>>own cause.
>
>Didn't you post something a while back - maybe even by Goff - saying
>that modern training techniques have gotten firing rates way up -
>that even in WW2, soldiers were reluctant to fire, but thanks to
>operant conditioning, now they've got itchy fingers.

That's not Stan -- that's Dave Grossman: Cf. <http://squawk.ca/lbo-talk/0211/0742.html>. I think it's revealing that you have to get constant training to learn to fire your weapon as you are expected; in my view, that's an indication of how difficult for humans to kill other humans. You can learn "a reflexive quick-shoot ability" through training, but you can unlearn it, too, as many soldiers did, after or even during their tours of duty.

At 5:46 PM -0500 12/14/02, Doug Henwood wrote:
>The U.S. military is composed of trained professional killers who
>think they're doing god's work. We're not talking an army of
>reluctant conscripts. So if morale etc. counts, then you may be
>underestimating the U.S. military.

The U.S. military depends upon poverty draft to fulfill much of its manpower needs, counting on poor young men and women who don't look to the military as a lifelong career. It's only a minority -- those who go to West Point and the like, and those who are ambitious enough to kill and die for promotion, perhaps -- who may be characterized as "trained professional killers who think they're doing god's work" (even then, not all of the minority are like that -- some will become Scott Ritters). I've met many men and women who are one way or another related to the U.S. military -- combat veterans, veterans, those enrolled in the ROTC programs, reservists, etc. -- in and out of classrooms. The large majority of them are decent folks; a slim majority may be called populists, and a minority of them (mostly those who are already out of the military) are downright left-wing. That's not surprising, because most of them come from very working-class backgrounds, disproportionately people of color. What if such soldiers, who are no killing machines, get sent into a ground war sliding into a quagmire, with no clear goal and no cause they can believe in, fighting against determined guerrillas who do have a clear goal and faith in their cause, rather than a quick war mostly won by air power? -- Yoshie

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