...According to Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a former Army Ranger and paratrooper, and author of On Killing,(37) "modern training uses what are essentially B.F. Skinner's operant conditioning techniques to develop a firing behavior in the soldier. This training comes as close to simulating actual combat conditions as possible." Grossman asserts that operant conditioning is "the single most powerful and reliable behavior modification process yet discovered in the field of psychology, and now applied to the field of warfare." Grossman points out that "soldiers who have conducted this kind of simulator training often report, after they have met a real life emergency, that they just carried out the correct drill and completed it before they realized that they were not in the simulator."
Grossman explains that behavioral engineering geared to producing better killers is relatively recent. Citing a veritable "technological revolution on the battlefield," he states that "boot-camp deification of killing was unheard of during World War I, rare in World War II, increasingly present in Korea, and thoroughly institutionalized in Vietnam." According to Grossman, it has been demonstrated that "in World War II, 75 to 80 percent of riflemen did not fire their weapons at an exposed enemy, even to save their lives and the lives of their friends." The problem was evidently addressed before the Vietnam War, where "the non-firing rate was close to 5 percent." This was accomplished through a process of desensitization, denial and conditioning. "The method used to train today's U.S. Army and USMC soldiers is nothing more than an application of conditioning techniques to develop a reflexive quick-shoot ability."...
<http://www.covertaction.org/full_text_67_04.htm> *****
***** "Aggression and Violence" By Dave Grossman
...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.
Marshall's findings were and have remained controversial. Faced with scholarly concern about a researcher's methodology and conclusions, the scientific method involves replicating the research. In Marshall's case, every available parallel, scholarly study validates his basic findings. One of these studies was Ardant du Picq's survey of French officers in the Korean War when the rate of psychiatric casualties was almost seven times higher than the average for World War II. Only after the war settled down, lines stabilized, and the threat of having enemy in rear areas decreased did the average rate go down to that of World War II. Again, just the potential for close-up, inescapable, interpersonal confrontation is more effective and has greater impact on human behavior than the actual presence of inescapable, impersonal death and destruction.
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.
Equally high rates of fire resulting from modern conditioning techniques can be seen in Holmes' observation of British firing rates in the Falklands and FBI data on law enforcement firing rates since the nationwide introduction of modern conditioning techniques in the late 1960s....
* Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, 1963. John Keegan, The Face of Battle, 1976. Jim Goodwin, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders: A Handbook for Clinicians, 1988. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, 1995. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, 8th ed., 1996. Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV Movie, and Video Game Violence, 1999.
<http://www.killology.com/article_agress&viol.htm> ***** -- Yoshie
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