Greg Cochran mischaracterizes Grossman’s work (On Killing) by saying that soldiers are loathe to kill in battle and leaving it at that. I reply:
If you read what he writes, he’s describing when and how soldiers will kill, as well as when they won’t. They will kill if they’re on display — firing a crew-served machine-gun, for instance, or when the sergeant’s at their shoulder — and they will kill if the enemy is sufficiently foreign, or running away, etc. Those are examples he explicitly brings up in his own writing.
I think reluctance to kill is only a small part of the phenomena he’s trying to explain — at least compared to reluctance to get killed — but he does bring up the conspicuous bravery of soldiers in nonviolent roles — running into fire to retrieve wounded comrades, etc.
Cochran postures in reply:
He’s full of shit.
Addendum: After I composed this post, he added to his pithy response:
He’s perfectly willing to lean on ‘facts’ like S.L.A. Marshall’s claims of low fire ratio, known to be false by anyone that ever checked it out. Or that nonsense about multiply loaded Civil War muskets being a way of avoiding shooting the enemy.
He also seems to think that things like violent video games contribute to rising rates of murder – except, of course, murder rates are declining. He seems to specialize in explaining stuff that never even happened.
What we need to explain is not low fire ratio, which does not exist, but why so many people swallow such nonsense and reward those who originate it. Grossman was teaching at West Point when he should have been eating out of garbage cans.
Cochran knows more about combat than anyone ever, apparently:
Gen. DePuy might have something to say about that.
Mr. Cochran is a man who knows more about everything than anyone else and is happy to tell you so.
My first encounter with him was on Jerry Pournelle’s site where he announced that Saddam Hussein could not possibly have any weapons of mass destruction because, and this is a word-for-word quote, “I checked”.
Specifically, he described how he looked some things up on the internet, and on the basis of information he found on the internet, he concluded that it was absolutely impossible for Iraq to have imported the necessary components for WMDs, and therefore Iraq did not have them. Presumably he also concluded that it was absolutely impossible for information he found on the internet to deviate in any way from objective reality, or to be in any way incomplete, but he did not actually address this aspect of the issue in any way.
I will note in passing here that large quantities of chemical weapons were indeed found and destroyed by US forces during the occupation, and there is no telling what did or did not get smuggled out after the invasion, considering the complete lack of control the US forces had over Iraqi borders.
I have had occasion to observe Mr. Cochran being a monumental blowhard on multiple occasions since then. He certainly also has interesting and informed comments to make on some topics. The problem is to separate the two and figure out which is which, and neither he nor his contributions are worth the time and effort.
Mr. Cochran is, and has been for a long time, full of shit.
I should add that one of the points Vox Day makes repeatedly — a point on which I happen to agree with him — is that scientists have a nasty habit of venturing out of their area of expertise but continuing to behave as though they still know everything, resulting in their making total fools of themselves. When a scientist is telling you something, be aware of their specialty, and always be asking yourself “just how closely related is this topic to specialty X?” That will let you estimate how seriously you should take their opinion.
Cochran is a physicist.
I don’t know if anyone has mentioned this, but there is a British documentary on this topic called ‘The Truth about Killing’. A quick check shows that it can be found broken-up and scattered across Youtube.
Do you have cite for that exchange Rollory? I’m curious if he was careless and didn’t specify nuclear. Because they clearly had chemical weapons in late 1980s, making the argument that he “checked” and therefore they couldn’t have them in 2002/2003 laughable.
Because I remember Cochran very forcibly making the point that Iraq didn’t have nuclear weapons in 2002, but, see, he was clearly right about that and I never had any trouble believing the argument. And, as a physicist, that’s clearly within his realm of expertise.
The problem is where he at least implicitly conflated “nuclear” into “WMD” and explicitly denigrated administration as being “full of shit.”
Because the Bush Administration never really emphasized the nuclear angle with regards to Iraq, at least not in it’s most public pronouncements. In the 2003 SoTU Bush mentions the chemical and biological stuff first, and they are the only categories he claims were actually weaponized.
When it came to nuclear, Bush mentions a bunch of minor nuclear activity, none of which ran contrary to the low level to which Cochran said Iraq’s development would be constrained.
The message of the speech wasn’t that Iraq was even close to have a nuclear weapon, Bush explicitly makes that point that these various efforts demonstrated that Iraq was indifferent to the international’s community’s demand that he stop.
Cochran also couldn’t understand why Bush wanted to invade Iraq, when that particular aspect of our foreign policy had literally been codified into US law (The Iraqi Liberation Act) under Clinton, who in 1998 stated virtually the exact same case that Bush did in 2003. It wasn’t like “Regime Change” was Bush buzzword.
It’s amazing how people treat the utterly blatant continuation of explicitly stated US policy as the inexplicable personal impulse of whatever president they dislike at the moment. Even for things that were headline news only 4-5 years previous (Clinton bombed Iraq in late 1998).
Thanks for the pointer to the documentary, but I feel that I should forewarn people it starts from the idea of an incontrovertible dataset behind Marshall’s observations (now known to be non-existent) and Grossman is the main technical adviser.
I don’t have the exact URL. It’s probably findable if someone wants to bother. I find it perfectly believable that he was talking specifically about nuclear and I don’t remember it clearly. It remains ludicrous that anybody could make such statements with absolute assurance about precisely the sorts of things a nation would want to conceal, based on things written on the internet. As Pournelle himself has said often enough: the map is not the territory.
The question of the sanity of the Iraq invasion is a different one.
I was going to make the same points about The Truth about Killing, now that I’ve watched the first episode, but I should also say that I liked the skeptical approach and the demonstrations of how chaos, fatigue, etc. enter into the process.
Cochran has the manners of a donkey*, as learned by personal experience, but he isn’t wrong about S.L.A. Marshall’s data and Grossman’s conclusions derived therefrom. Thoroughly discredited.
*apply synonym
If people are by nature ‘reluctant’ to kill someone, especially up close, how does Grossman explain the increasing prevalence of murder the further one goes back in history?
And that in certain primitive tribes, homicide is the biggest cause of death?
Grossman claims that a reluctance to kill other humans is natural, but he doesn’t claim that it’s immutable — quite the opposite, really. Civilization relies on constant reinforcement to treat strangers like friends and family. With emotional or psychological distance, Grossman says, men are quite willing to kill.
I know, but what kind of evolutionary mechanism would produce that kind of adaptation?
Furthermore, all the war memoirs I’ve read fail to mention anything like that. The authors often express sadness at having to kill conscripted kids and so on but nowhere one can find a mention of someone ‘not firing’.
How does that make sense in the case of intra-tribal violence? In such cases the killer and victim were probably family, and fairly close family too.
I’d say that the ‘distance’ exists by default, and one might expect reluctance to kill only to occur in cases where the enemies have spent a lot of time in close proximity, as was the case sometimes in WWI trenches.
When two animals of the same species fight, they rarely fight to the death, Grossman notes, and humans are no different, he suggests. Like other animals, they choose between four options: posture, submit, flight, or fight.
Animals don’t have axes and slingshots to kill others without risking themselves in sneaky attacks.
If they had daggers they’d backstab each other alright.
Isegoria:
So the sky high homicide rate in pre-civilized societies, the persistent murder fantasies most people have people, that means nothing?
Humans have the capacity to plan ahead and execute rather complex behavior, something found in only very few animals.
Here’s a Canadian take on the firing ratios. The author, a Ph.D. student in military history, claims that (a) S.L.A. Marshall’s firing ratios were probably made up, because no one ever found any data, no one with Marshall back in WWII remembered Marshall asking about firing ratios, and (b) Canadian textual sources indicate that rather officers and NCOs complained more about lack of fire discipline than non-firing.
I’m not sure why you would think that Grossman (or I) would dismiss the high homicide rate in pre-civilized societies, R. Grossman’s point about our reluctance to kill is not that no one wants to hurt anyone else ever. He’s quite explicit about when men are willing to kill.
We now know — or strongly suspect — that S.L.A. Marshall made up his data. When Grossman was forming his ideas, S.L.A. Marshall’s work was held in high regard. That said, Grossman doesn’t simply cite Marshall; he also cites earlier examples, where musket fire doesn’t yield anywhere near the casualties one would naively assume.
We may or may not swallow his explanation, but it is consistent with a body of evidence beyond Marshall’s discredited pseudo-study.
(Also, Grossman explicitly mentions a need to fire and contrasts it with an explicit attempt to kill a particular enemy soldier.)
Yeah, if there is ‘distance’. Which is by default. If, in a war, you meet an enemy who is pointing a gun at you, the instinctual reaction is to shoot him. 99% cases he speaks a different language, looks different, etc.
Grossman’s ‘point’ has so many caveats that one should rather make an entirely new one – that everyone is reluctant to kill someone who seems just like them?
It’s a nice story (people are basically decent) and he says the things older generations wants to hear ‘videogames bad – cause murder’, even though present-day youth are less violent than their videogame-free antecendents..
That, could just as easily be caused by inaccurate aiming. In some armies the penultimate command in the firing drill was not even aim ‘just level’.
What body?
There’s one set of data from Gettysburg, which can just as well be explained by stressed or shellshocked soldiers messing up and loading the gun multiple times without firing it.
Grossman is out of his dept. He has a degree in education! And this ‘reluctance’ to kill shtick of his is just the tip of the bullshit heap.
He is also in favor of gun control, which is an intellectually untenable and morally repugnant position.
( I really wish aiming skill in online shooters translated to the real world, but it doesn’t. It’s a thing which could be easily validated by a simple experiment. Grossman has never conducted any)
He doesn’t say what distance the shots were taken at. It’s all quite disingenuous.
And ‘will to kill’. Is Grossman some kind of emotional cripple who has never been really angry?
Maybe he’s just a really nice guy. This commenter Kirk who met him personally in the US Army thinks so:
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, there are parts of Grossman’s theory that are trite, and parts that are true, but the parts that are true are trite, and the parts that are not trite are not true.
Grossman’s distance isn’t binary. He would predict fewer accurate shots in wars between similar populations, at least until they properly demonized one another, than in wars between different races, religions, etc. Propaganda is a powerful tool, he would argue; it’s not superfluous.
Cochran only discussed the unlikelihood that Iraq had nukes, both on Pournelle’s blog and in an article in The American Conservative during the run-up to our ill-fated invasion of that miserable shithole. He never talked about other potential Iraqi WMDs.