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"Psychological
Effects of Combat"
Overcoming
the Resistance to Killing
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 that eventually
replaced firing at bull's-eye targets with deeply ingrained
"conditioning" using realistic, man-shaped, pop-up targets
that fall when hit. Psychologists know that this kind of
powerful operant conditioning is the only technique that
will reliably influence the primitive, midbrain processing
of a frightened human being, just as fire drills condition
terrified school children to respond properly during a fire,
and repetitious, "stimulus-response" conditioning in
flight simulators enables frightened pilots to respond reflexively
to emergency situations.
Throughout
history the ingredients of groups, leadership, and distance
have been manipulated to enable and force combatants to
kill, but the introduction of conditioning in modern training
was a true revolution. The application and perfection of
these basic conditioning techniques increased the rate of
fire from near 20% in World War II to approximately 55%
in Korea and around 95% in Vietnam. Similar high rates of
fire resulting from modern conditioning techniques can be
seen in FBI data on law enforcement firing rates since the
nationwide introduction of modern conditioning techniques
in the late 1960s. Figure 3 (below) presents a schematic
representation of the interaction between the killing enabling
factors that have been manipulated throughout history, including
the key, modern ingredient of conditioning.
One
of the most dramatic examples of the value and power of
this modern, psychological revolution in training can be
seen in Richard Holmes' observations of the 1982 Falklands
War. The superbly trained (i.e. conditioned) British forces
were without air or artillery superiority and consistently
outnumbered three-to-one while attacking the poorly trained
but well-equipped and carefully dug-in Argentine defenders.
Superior British firing rates (which Holmes estimates to
be well over 90%), resulting from modern training techniques,
has been credited as a key factor in the series of British
victories in that brief but bloody war. Any future army
that attempts to go into battle without similar psychological
preparation is likely to meet a fate similar to that of
the Argentines.
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Read
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Encyclopedia
of Violence, Peace, and Conflict, Volume 3, p.159
©
1999 by Academic Press. All rights of reproduction in any
form reserved.
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