Navy SEALs Were Warned Against Reporting Their Chief for War Crimes

[JohnnyRingo]

22. I've been a history buff of WWII all my life

Because it was an amazing era of mechanized warfare. Indeed, technology took incredible advances during those long 5 or 6 years from biplanes and horse drawn cannon to nuclear ordinance. Necessity is not the mother of invention, war is.

The fact that during that conflict 10% of the soldiers on both sides did 90% of the killing has been well documented. I've since done research into the Gulf Wars and how recruitment changed to make for a leaner more effective fighting force. The Pentagon relies more now on psychologists than Sgt Carter to craft soldiers into machines that kill without hesitation. While the goal is 100% kill force, that isn't possible, but it's much higher now.


Studies of combat activity during the Napoleonic and Civil Wars revealed striking statistics. Given the ability of the men, their proximity to the enemy, and the capacity of their weapons, the number of enemy soldiers hit should have been well over 50 percent, resulting in a killing rate of hundreds per minute. Instead, however, the hit rate was only one or two per minute. And a similar phenomenon occurred during World War I: according to British Lieutenant George Roupell, the only way he could get his men to stop firing into the air was by drawing his sword, walking down the trench, "beating [them] on the backside and ... telling them to fire low". World War II fire rates were also remarkably low: historian and US Army Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall reported that, during battle, the firing rate was a mere 15 to 20 percent; in other words, out of every hundred men engaged in a firefight, only fifteen to twenty actually used their weapons. And in Vietnam, for every enemy soldier killed, more than fifty thousand bullets were fired.

What these studies have taught the military is that in order to get soldiers to shoot to kill, to actively participate in violence, the soldiers must be sufficiently desensitized to the act of killing. In other words, they have to learn not to feel -- and not to feel responsible -- for their actions. They must be taught to override their own conscience. yet these studies also demonstrate that even in the face of immediate danger, in situations of extreme violence, most people are averse to killing. In other words, as Marshall concludes, "the vast majority of combatants throughout history, at the moment of truth when they could and should kill the enemy, have found themselves to be 'conscientious objectors'".
https://www.historynet.com/men-against-fire-how-many-soldiers-actually-fired-their-weapons-at-the-enemy-during-the-vietnam-war.htm

S.L.A. Marshall did a study on the firing rates of soldiers in World War II. He found that the ratio of rounds fired vs. hits was low; he also noted that the majority of soldiers were not aiming to hit their targets.[6] This was a problem for the US military and its allies during World War II. New training implements were developed and hit rates improved. The changes were small, but effective. First, instead of shooting at bull's-eye type targets, the United States Army switched to silhouette targets that mimic an average human. Training also switched from 300 yard slow fire testing to rapid fire testing with different time and distance intervals from 20 to 300 yards. With these two changes, hitting targets became a reaction that was almost automatic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology