Grossman is the Anthropogenic Global Warming guy who erases all of recorded history to pick and choose that which supports his thesis, which isn’t even that well thought out. You talk to him in person, and throw out those little questions like “If this is an innate human trait, explain the Mongols at Khwarazim, the French on their little crusade against the Cathars, or any of the many other like events…”? What does he do? He ignores the question, its implications, repeats his thesis, and then circles around to repeat it again from yet another angle. He’s a decent Christian man, for whatever value that makes of things, but he’s really not all that bright. Either that, or he’s so lost in his Noble Savage fantasy that he can’t bear to look at anything that contradicts his ideal of the Rousseauian version of perfect humanity.

There are so many holes in his work that it’s not even funny; he’s done zero original research, and his history is horrible. As scholarship, his work sucks ass–I could probably do better with a high school diploma, to tell the truth. He doesn’t have any sort of formal training in psychology or psychiatry, but he’s been pronouncing on things bearing on both disciplines for years as though he’s some sort of expert about combat trauma.

I’d really love to know what the hell sort of trauma he thought the Mongols developed after Samarkhand, where they basically put the entire population to the sword and then went rooting around in their intestines for any swallowed wealth… Ya, sure, you betcha’… Those Mongol horse troopers spent the subsequent years balled up in their yurts, bawling, over all the “humanity” they’d inflicted.

Or, not.

News flash for ya, buddy: People are assholes, and dangerous predators. We kill for fun, and the only reason that any of us demonstrate any form of restraint at it is because of extensive social conditioning. Remove the conditioning, or give us victims we don’t regard as fellow human beings due the respect that conditioning demands, we’ll kill and rape like stoats on a bender in a henhouse. Grossman has illusions about human nature; ones I don’t share in the least.

I too used to be a true believer in Grossman and Marshall, likewise with Stanley Milgram and also the famous Stanford Prison Experiment. All have been to some extent de-bunked, but I think some of the concepts and ideas are valid, just not to the extent claimed by the authors.

SOME of Grossman on the psychology of killing and the different rates of phsycological injury depending on the type of killing rather than the level of danger are intriguing, but he lost it with the video games bit.

After having laboriously laid out how military training does so conditionally, and the context triggers the behavior, he goes on to say without any statistical evidence, that video games WITHOUT and other situational psychological context triggers the “behavior” in mass killers. Given the ubiquity of video games and FPS (First Person Shooter) games at that, we should be hauling the bodies away from schools by the truckload, and we are not.

Likewise, having both military and martial arts training, I understand the concept of having to train past unconscious inhibitions to action, and I am on board with the concept.

I also get the idea that it is easier to press the button than pull the trigger, and easier to pull the trigger than plunge the knife, but on the other hand, what about all the dead people before firearms and cannon?

If you believe the non-sociologist archeology, stone age tribes lost around 25% of their members to violence, mostly clubbing and stabbing. The Romans managed quite handily to pretty much destroy Carthage with hand weapons. Hutu seem quite capable of murdering Tustsi with machetes and vice-versa, so obviously this intra-species violence inhibitor can be quite easily overcome if it needs to be.

Grossman is more-or-less banned from speaking to any SOCOM audience, due to his bullshit. Marshall is well-documented as having pulled most of his research out of his ass, and the pair of them are self-referential jackasses. Grossman is basically a case of a really poor officer who parlayed his schtick about “video game violence” and “murder simulators” into national notoriety. The vast majority of the claims these two twats have made over the years are entirely unsupported, and mostly created out of whole cloth. I have spoken to actual WWII combat veterans who were at those “after battle sit-downs” with Marshall, and they unanimously agree that precisely none of that bullshit Marshall spouted about combat participation was ever discussed with him or brought up in their presence–And, one of them was at the specific place Marshall mentions in one of his essays, and recalls nothing of that sort being discussed.

If you go back and look at the entirety of Marshall’s work, and try to verify his claims, you wind up losing your way in the night and fog of it all. He claimed to have been key and critical to the development of the Army’s Trainfire system back in the 1950s; there is nothing there to validate that in the literature. Marshall and “combat participation” are not mentioned at all, in anything done by the Army Research Laboratories or the rest of the agencies participating in that program. He glommed onto that issue, and claimed responsibility for it, but there is nothing at all that can be found with his name as a contributor.

If you read David Hackworth’s book, where he describes having been the escort officer for Marshall in Vietnam, you get to see the true Marshall: A hack who wrote and distorted fact to sell books.

I was once a “true believer” in what Marshall had to say, right up until I actually brought up his name with WWII combat veterans. The man was strongly disliked, and talking about his ideas would generally get you laughed at. And, rightly so–The idea that only some 10-15% or less of the force would participate in combat is laughable, because that leaves out the idea that those guys would be perfectly fine with being the only ones risking their lives, and would allow that situation to persist. Not to mention, what the hell were the leaders doing during all of this? If you think you can’t tell, as a fire team leader and squad leader, what the hell your men are doing in combat, you’d be wrong. Ammo expenditure alone would tell you, and result in your bringing the heat down on the “non-participant”, simply out of self-interest. If those guys weren’t firing effectively, then when you did move forward on the enemy, you’d be so much dead meat.

And, Grossman, who is someone who has never seen either enlisted service or combat…? He credulously repeats Marshall as though he were authoritative, and brings in all kinds of crap that isn’t even germane to the discussion. If Grossman and Marshall were correct, then the non-participation rate they preach as gospel truth would have resulted in the utter destruction of the Army elements in the Pacific theater, whenever the Japanese made a Banzai charge.

They’re both crooks and charlatans. I’ve spoken personally with Grossman, back when he was still on active duty and had just published his book. The man isn’t really even that bright–You bring up counter-factuals to the “evidence” he brings up in “On Killing”, and the guy can’t refute shit, only circling around to vaguely repeating the BS he wrote in the book. I’ve been at his “pre-deployment” briefings he was offering the Army twice, and for which the brass was paying him big bucks. The man is a fraud; he has zero qualifications to be speaking on what he blathers on about. No psychology degrees, no real research performed, and just really shitty scholarship that can’t pass the test of even casual examination.

Frankly, if you guys were credulously citing Marshall and Grossman, you were had. They’re both crap researchers, and basically lied out their asses about most of the things they wrote about.

I mean, seriously… Think about it: If only 10-15% of our troops were actually doing anything, under fire, then what the hell were they doing once they were out from under it? Does anyone seriously think that those guys were willing to put up with doing the majority of the work, while their fellow soldiers weren’t doing anything at all to contribute to the fight? Yeah; pull the other one–It’s got bells on it. And, what, precisely, do they think the junior NCOs were doing during all this “non-participatory activity”? Observing it and doing nothing?

Frankly, the whole idea is specious on the face of it, and I’m embarrassed I ever took it seriously. There’s nothing like getting reality-slapped by men who were there.

That’s the one thing I think I’ve learned about WWII combat, especially in Europe. Most of the people who actually were engaged in doing it on our side? I think they essentially vanished from official sight, in that little of what they learned and were actually doing down at the squad and platoon level got captured by the institution. The careerists who didn’t do a lot in that war wound up running the post-WWII Army, and they thought that the stuff in the manuals was gospel truth, which was one reason so much BS was still hanging around during Korea.

It’s all a bunch of crap, coming out of Grossman and Marshall. Both of those clowns are great self-promoters, but entirely frauds about what they say. Grossman isn’t an authority; he’s not a researcher, he knows nothing of statistics or actual historical research, he’s not a qualified psychologist, and he sure as hell isn’t even that good as a scholar.

Y’all have to remember that West Point basically taps just about anyone to instruct there–It’s a routine duty for officers, and isn’t really indicative of any real merit whatsoever. Grossman has been trading on that bullshit since the beginning, and the only reason he was ever up there at West Point in the first place was that the branch manager needed to fill a slot for an instructor’s position. Dude’s a fraud, in plain and simple terms. SOCOM will not allow him to speak to their people, anymore–They finally figured it out, and also realized that a lot of the outright crap he was “teaching” actually helped create more PTSD issues than it helped.

In short–Grossman and Marshall are both abysmal sources for information. Neither ever served in combat, and should not be taken at all seriously. In any way, shape, or form.

I don’t know why they keep doing this, but it’s a madness that the Russians and Soviets agreed with; the individual rifleman who fires his weapon mostly unsupported doesn’t benefit from this crap, at all. The crew-served, however? They most certainly do.

The XM-25 concept would work, were it fired in bursts and supported properly. Some kind of terminal guidance system could also make it work, but so long as you’re firing that itty-bitty warhead off of a human shoulder, you had better plan on recruiting that tiny proportion of the population that has “better than Carlos Hathcock” hand-and-eye coordination. Assuming you can identify them, and persuade them to become your XM-25 gunners.

It’s a non-starter in that format, just like the AN-94 is. AN-94 fired off a tripod…? Kinda makes sense, but the Germans got there first, and back in the 1940s.

Thank you, “Mutual Surveillance”. Yes. du Picq, Grossman and most of all Marshall were lodestone figures for our work back in the 90′s, iirc.

You said a mouthful here. YOU ARE EXACTLY right. 100%. If you look at all these studies they do of firearms they are ALWAYS coming up with ideas to fire off a very quick burst, say three rounds to get a little dispurtion as people tend to run away real fast when fired at. They’ve had all kinds of different ammo to do this, darts, multiple rounds at once. etc. but they won’t change their tactics to conform to these ideas that they know will work so…same old, same old.

That first quote of yours,”…They had figured out the essence of modern war at that level, which is not the maneuver of men against fire, but the maneuver of fire against men…” is worth a Gazillion dollars. It’s very important. They should tattoo it on officers eyelids.

I’d be interested in reading any of what you guys produced. I’m not really impressed that it took so long for people on the Allied side of WWII to figure things out, and grasp what the Germans were up to, but… Hey, better late than never. I don’t think the US Army has figured it out, even yet.

Basic fundamentals of military operations are astonishingly complex things, when you really get down to examining what is going on–And, paradoxically, they’re damned simple. As the shibboleth goes, everything simple is hard, and everything hard is simple… What good that does the young NCO or officer facing their first action under fire, though? None; it’s all going to come hard, that first time.

Totally agreed about crew served weapons and mutually supportive psychology. We found very large group participation and NCO-oversight effects for this; it generated much more lethality than the raw firepower would indicate (Our job was to provide quantitative estimates of this effect size). Yes, we looked at a LOT of WWII data…

Interestingly, we could find similar small-group effects for armoured combat too. The Germans seem to have had the right of it 40 years before us….

One of the really amazing things to my mind, and something I ran into throughout my military career, was the sheer persistence and outright irrefutability of erroneous information in a lot of people’s minds.

I could sit up in front of a classroom, teach the correct information, reinforce it through the practicum, beat it into their heads during daily operations, and yet… Still, the misinformation they’d absorbed from Uncle Mike, the Vietnam Vet would stick around with far more permanence than anything I could do. I swear to God, that myth about the Mattel-made M16…? I could probably do electroshock treatment on the people who believe that, and never do a damn thing to correct that bit of BS hanging around in their heads.

And, what’s worse? Even if Uncle Mike shows up, and agrees with me, telling the myth-taken youth that they had misheard or misunderstood what he was saying…? The myth endures.

This is one reason I’m so damn cynical about anything in the history books, first-hand reports, and eye-witness testimony. People are not only imperfect and unreliable sources, they’re actively distorting the truth in real time as you observe them.

The deal with the M60, though… I think that the gun is remembered by the Vietnam-era guys differently than my generation for two reasons: One, in Vietnam, most of the guns were new (or, new-ish…), and there was lavish support for them. And, I do mean “lavish”–I talked that gun over with an old-school Small Arms Repair warrant officer, once, and his description of what they’d done to keep the M60 fleet functional in Vietnam was epic. The average grunt never saw it, but whenever the guns were turned in, they were supposed to be inspected and gauged, and before they went back out, they’d often get replaced. The Army in Vietnam treated the M60 as an expendable item, and it showed. After the war, and what my generation of soldiers experienced? LOL… Oh. My. Gawd. As an armorer, I had nine M60s in my arms room, and can you guess which weapons took 90% of my maintenance efforts? Yeah; those abortions. And, yet… Not all of it was the fault of the gun; there was the austerity of the maintenance program, which was not up to the Vietnam-era standard, and then the imposition of Break-Free CLP regime for lubrication. During Vietnam, the guns got LSA, or “Light Small Arms” lubricant, which was a viscous thing, about the consistency of hand lotion. That provided a lot more cushioning effect between the slamming parts of the M60 than did the teflon-kerosene based CLP. CLP was a great lubricant for the M16, but for anything else…? Not so much. I’m convinced that the majority of the grief I experienced as an armorer and gunner was due to the fact that they took away our LSA for the machine guns. About the time we got the MK-19 GMG in, LSA made a comeback, and I started experimenting with using it on our M60s. It made a big difference in the amount of work I had to do stoning away all the burrs and other damage, or so I think. We didn’t have the M60 for much past that point, replacing it with the M240, otherwise known as the C6, MAG-58, or L7.

The M60 wasn’t a terrible gun, within its limitations. If you were to fully train the gunners, and kept on top of the maintenance, you could expect good results. Any austerity with that, though? Yeah; forget about it. Overall, I think it was a huge POS, barely acceptable. We should have taken the hint from the M240 coax competition, and gone with the real winner of that test regime, which was a battlefield pickup PKT the Israelis gave us. That thing was apparently unkillable, and even with no factory support and captured crap ammo from (I think…) the Syrians or Egyptians, it walked away with the competition.

That’s what I’d term “a clue”.