Something that we get told reasonably often is
that a lot of troops almost never fire their weapons. Only a small proportion will even fire them in the general
direction of the enemy. And sometimes people ask me, "Is this true? Is there any basis to this?"
Well, yes, actually there is a basis for this. In 1947, just after World War Two, there was
quite a large study carried out in the United States. A General interviewed very, very large numbers
of troops who had been involved in the war. And from what he discovered, he
concluded that fewer than a quarter of troops ever fired their weapons in the general direction
of the enemy - when they were in a position to do so. So it's not that they ... couldn't see the
enemy, that they weren't in a position, that they were support troops miles behind
the line and that's why they didn't fight. ... No, the troops at the front, in a position to
shoot at the enemy didn't, most of the time. And another figure that was discovered was that 1%
of fighter pilots accounted for 50% of fighter pilot kills in the American Army Air Force. And the other
99% of pilots downed the other 50% of enemy kills. So it seems that modern armies were very
reliant on a very, very small number of people who were doing almost all the
actual killing of the enemy bit. And how many people actually shot to kill? Well, it seems that about 2% actually shot to kill,
not just in the general direction of the enemy, but deliberately and knowingly put their sights right
on that guy and shot with the intention of killing him. Now there are many other instances of this that have
been recorded. So for instance in the American Civil War, there are incidents of people reporting paralysis of the trigger
hand. They just couldn't bring themselves to fire their weapon. In World War One German troops referred to "trigger finger
frostbite", which is, I imagine, the same sort of phenomenon. And there have been a number of tests done in the
musketry period to see just how effective muskets are. And the battlefield and test
results were rather different. There been many of these, I've read of several. There
was one that was carried out in the 1700s in Prussia, and what they did is they got
(I think it was a battalion) a battalion of troops, and they marched this battalion of troops up to the
sort of range you would normally engage an enemy. And they had a sheet of cloth, a white sheet of cloth,
that was the height of a man and the width of a battalion pegged out vertically in a field. And they said,
"Right, everyone fire one round at that." "So, first row, kneel and fire", bang, first lot
volley, "and second row", bang, "kneel, third row" ... and so forth until everyone had fired
one shot. And then they counted the holes. And from this they calculated how many hits
they would expect to get on a target that size. And the answer was about 500. About 500 hits
from one round from all the men in the battalion. So, how did this compare with what they were
actually getting under battlefield conditions? Well under battlefield conditions
they were scoring ... three. Three hits, not 500. Really a huge difference. Now, how do
you explain this enormous difference? Well, one is of course smoke, for instance. So when the
enemy fires, when you fire, there's a lot of smoke around, the target is more obscured.
That would make a difference. Sometimes, but not a huge difference necessarily. All right, well clearly it's more difficult to aim your weapon
calmly and accurately if there's stuff coming at you the other way. I mean, the sheet wasn't firing at these guys, but you
know the guys in the battle, they're much more scared, and they're being put off by what the enemy is doing.
Yup, yup, that would explain it, too. But maybe a greater explanation is that
those men didn't want to kill anyone. Those men were like the majority in World War
Two, who didn't really want to harm the enemy. Now muskets are extremely
loud and they shout. So if you've got this big shouty stick in your [hand] and
you could just say to those people, "Go away", boom. And you don't even want to look, and you perhaps
subconsciously aim high (or low). You aim to miss. And it seems that's what was happening.
Nobody wanted to kill anyone, it was all too horrible. "Could those people over there just please go away.
Look, look, look, you're in a huge amount of danger. Look at all these guns going off at you.
Why don't you just run away?" Not many men make good snipers. Now, obviously one of the reasons is that not everyone can shoot
as well as you need to be able to shoot to be a good sniper. But in fact, I'm told that about half of recruits,
with a decent amount of training, can be trained to be a good enough shot to be a sniper. So the
marksmanship limitation is not the main explanation. Well, another explanation is that you
need to have a lot of personal initiative, because you can't have officers telling you
exactly what targets to shoot all the time, and telling you where to hide,
and when to relocate and so forth. You've got to look after yourself,
pick your own targets, and your own locations and move
under your own initiative a lot. So yes, that's another reason that
many men don't make good snipers. But perhaps the greatest reason that
most men do not make good snipers is that most men find it near impossible to
kill someone who is not threatening them. So there you are, you're a sniper, look through the scope, "Oh, I've got someone, ... yeah ... yeah ... yeah, he's having a shave. Oh, he's talking ... oh yeah, there's the other guy. Yeah, they're
laughing, they're having a joke about something." [Shoots.] "Whoa, headshot."
Very, very, very few men can do that. "The guy wasn't threatening me,
why should I ... shoot him?" And this would occur again,
again and again in actual war. So for instance, in World War One
there are a number of incidents where a small group of soldiers would come across
a small group of the enemy unexpectedly. So they're walking along
(they've all got their rifles) and then suddenly, "Whoa, a load of Krauts. Oi, Krauty." And they
start yelling insults at each other and so forth and, "Oh, they're giving some back. Oh, right." And they'll put down
their rifles to find something to throw, "Yeah, there's a stone." They start throwing stones and clods of earth at each other,
and "Haha, we saw them off. Eh? Yeah, that's shown them." "Yeah. Where's my rifle? Oh there is."
And they walked off. It didn't occur to them to shoot each other,
because that's not a normal man's first instinct. "Oh, a person, I'll shoot him dead." Really? Oh, a rival
group of people, I'll posture and show that, you know, that we're not afraid of them and perhaps we'll
escalate it a little bit throwing a few stones, just to make sure that, you know, they're
not to try anything seriously dangerous. And then we both go on
our way and nobody gets hurt. That's actually how humans behave most of the time.
And that's actually how animals behave almost all of the time too. Animals posture, they make a show,
a display of bravado, they try to intimidate. They try to shout down the opposition,
without actually fighting to the death. When two deer are competing for ... access
to the does to father the next generation, they will bellow at each other, sometimes for hours. And if
that doesn't work, they might sometimes come to blows. But even then it's a ritual fight. They lock antlers,
antlers have evolved to minimise deer casualties. And they just sort of have a ritualised
pushing match. And then the one who loses backs off and the other one lets him go.
There's no point in trying to escalate things further. A while ago I was in Reading and
I videoed these two pigeons fighting. And I marvelled. They fought,
and fought, and fought, and fought. (I won't show you the whole video
because it goes on for absolutely ages.) And they never do any harm. And you think, "What, come
on, you're in a position there, just peck him in the eye, peck him in the eye. You got this sharp beak
right next to his eye, peck him in the eye. Boom. You could, it would be a matter of half
a second, boom, you could do it." But you can see that ... they're not really trying to
peck each other in the eye, they're just sort of saying, "I'll peck you in the eye. I'll peck you in the eye, I'm
threatening to, I'll peck you in the eye, watch it mate." After a while one flew away, but then he
gathered his bravery (I say he, I think they're males), and flew back and had another go. And then
eventually they parted company and neither was hurt. That's how normal animals compete with others of their own
species. And humans are animals and that's how we do it too. Now you've probably heard of Himmler, you know, World War Two, black uniform.
Yeah, I don't want to make a video about Himmler. So in summary, not a nice chap. And probably indirectly
responsible for a very, very large number of deaths. He found that he just couldn't bear to
watch executions. Just couldn't bear it. Just like some people today can't even watch
someone having an injection on television. Well, he couldn't bear to watch
executions. Himmler, he couldn't. Now there are of course really nasty,
brutal, ruthless people in the world who ... like Che Guevara for instance, Che Guevara had
a particular liking for executing prisoners himself. He liked to shoot them in the head with his pistol. Well, even those really brutal, nasty people they
shoot in the back of the head. Why do they do that? Well because to shoot someone in the front
of the head ... you have to see their face. And you can see the fear on that face,
and a normal man cannot then pull the trigger. A normal man will get trigger
finger frostbite. You can't do it. And why? Well, we have a very
powerful instinct that tells us not to do it. An instinct that evolved
before the design of the pistol. Think back to the Stone Age. There you are, your
defeated enemy is in front of you and you've got a club. And you could just try to beat
him to death with your club. But you can see his face and you can see that you've
won. He's terrified, he's wetting himself, he's crying, he's snivelling. There's no way that's acting, he's
absolutely terrified. You know you have won at this point. You don't have anything more
to prove, you are the winner. If you back away now, you will have won, terrific.
If you start beating him to death with your club, what options have you given him? He can either be
beaten to death or he can put every ounce of effort he's got left into lashing out
in the hope of defeating you. Why take that risk? You've won, back away.
That's what your instinct is telling you. Now admittedly with a pistol, of course, the risk is far lower.
You are pretty likely to win the fight if you pull the trigger. But your instincts haven't evolved for
pistols. There you are, you can't do it. You're fighting against this very strong instinct to not do it.
Assuming you're not a psychopath, which most people are not. So, what percentage of people are psychopaths
and do actually shoot to kill deliberately? Well, it seems naturally about 2%
of people actually shoot to kill. And these actually divide
quite neatly into ... two categories. There's the psychopath, who does it because
psychopaths are wired differently upstairs. And one of the things, one of the many things, that makes
them different is that they don't recognise fear in others. When they see a terrified person,
they don't read it as fear. They read it as maybe weakness or whatever.
"Well, he just doesn't seem to be doing much." And they don't see shooting someone
who's terrified as doing anything wrong, "Well, he should have told me he was terrified.
Well, he should have tried to run away then." But why didn't he run away?
Because he was too terrified to run away. Once someone is utterly terrified you can not
reason with him, the forebrain shuts down. The amygdala kicks in, it only takes about
12 milliseconds if the threat is great enough, the amygdala detects the threat and shuts the
forebrain down, and reason's gone out the window. You cannot reason with someone who's
terrified. But psychopaths don't see that and, "Well, it's just, I don't know, I told him, I told him to
get up and go over there and he didn't, so I shot him. Oh, I had to, he wasn't, he wasn't obeying me."
"Couldn't you see the guy was terrified?"
"Oh was he? I dunno." Didn't feel they've done anything
wrong because they're psychos. So that's one half of the 2% that actually
shoot to kill. What about the other half? The other half is quite different. The other half are the sort of people who win the VC.
The other half shoot not out of psychopathy, but out of love. Yes, love, and here's a strange thing.
You see the VC, the Victoria Cross, is the highest award for valour, for gallantry,
that you can win if you're in the British Army. And you have to do something pretty
spectacular, particularly now, to win one. And ... that makes this group of people a worthwhile group
to study, and people have. They've looked at them and think, "Right, is there anything which connects VC winners. What
subgroup of humanity is the sort of subgroup that will win the VC?" And the answer seems to be that most of them (the substantial
majority, I think it's three-quarters of them, maybe more than that), share one quite rare characteristic and that is:
they were, when younger, responsible older siblings. So think of it, father's gone to war
and has been killed. Or just is away. Mother's become an alcoholic, and
you are the eldest of seven and you think, "Right, OK, I'm now effectively the head of this household.
I'm now going to have to look after my younger siblings." And you do this for some years. And this instils in you a
great sense of responsibility for the people in your care, and the people in your family.
And you also develop (perhaps, I'm theorising here,
I don't know this, but I am suggesting) that you develop a parent-like
love for your siblings that goes beyond what most people
feel in regard to their own siblings. Because you become like a parent to them,
they become like your children. Now if a father sees a man attacking his children,
he will do whatever is necessary to see off that threat. He will take risks. Parents will
do stuff to protect their kids. Elder siblings then get recruited to the
army, and are given now a new family. Their platoon, their section, these men that
they fight with are like their new family. And perhaps some of those parental feelings of
responsibility and love carry over to their new family. And when the bullets are flying
and everyone has hit the dirt and ... the attack's ground to a halt and everyone's ... and you see some of your family, some of your men,
being shot by those enemy in that machine gun nest. Right, you are going to take action because out
of love, ... the desire to protect the people you love, you will then rush over there, rush round there,
... chuck grenades in and defeat the nest. And you win the VC for saving the
day and saving the rest of your platoon. And it's noticeable that when you do see citations
for bravery and medals and so forth, and look at the sort of people who win medals and the
reasons for why they are given these medals, it's generally to do with saving your own side
rather than just killing an awful lot of the enemy. It's not: "Oh well, in order to win the VC you've
got to kill 50 Germans in a day", or something. And "Oh, 49. Bad luck, Tompkins, you didn't quite do it.
Still, try again tomorrow, eh?" No, it's not for killing sprees. It's not chalked up with how many of the enemy you destroy.
It's almost always saving the day for your comrades, doing the thing which saved the
rest of your new army surrogate family. So it's out of love that the other 1% shoots to kill. So, how can you, if you're in the army and you
want your troops to do more ... shooting to kill? How do you get the number of
men to shoot to kill to be greater? Because fewer than a quarter was quite
shocking to the American Army in 1947. "Really? Fewer than a quarter of our guys were actually
shooting at the enemy and only 2% were shooting to kill? How can we improve on that?" Well, a chap called B.F. Skinner
wrote a book called "The Behavior of Organisms". You may have heard of him: Skinnerian psychology. He is the man who, perhaps more than anyone else,
familiarised us all with the term "conditioned reflex". They thought, "Ah, maybe this guy Skinner's
ideas will work". And it seems that they do. So maybe we can condition our troops to have reflexes which
are to shoot at the enemy and that will change their behaviour. And it seems to work. So before World War Two,
if you were training troops to shoot straight, you'd get them to shoot at a range
at a series of concentric circles. This was a target which just in an abstract way measured
accurately the deviation from a central desired point. But when they started introducing Skinnerian techniques,
they started introducing targets that were man shaped. Get people used to shooting at men. It's not how straight
you shoot, it's how willing you are to shoot a man. That's what we got to train these guys to do. And they improved the willingness of
troops to shoot at the enemy by quite a bit. Even by the Korean War, which
wasn't that much later [1950-1953], they got it up to perhaps 50% of their
troops were then shooting at the enemy. By the Falklands Conflict, which was 1982, the British Army had
95% of their men shooting in the general direction of the enemy. In the Gulf War, the Americans managed to get
their figure up to 95% shooting to kill, it seems. That's what I gleaned from a documentary I watched
on television about the modern American Army. That's the figure they were
claiming they got it up to. So how do they do that then? Well, I want
you to imagine that it's World War Two, and you're some ordinary Atkins and you're in a slit
trench. You've been told to hold the line at the front, and nothing happened yesterday, or the
day before, and oh, you see some guys. Now you've never actually seen any real-life
Germans, you've only just been shipped across. You've done basic training in England, you've come
across, you've never actually seen any Germans. You saw a few dead Germans, well, at least their
boots poking out from under some tarpaulins. But these are real live, actual, in the field Germans.
And you say, "Brian, Brian, look, look. Can you see that? Look, can you see the two guys? I can't
see what they're doing. Can you see them? Yeah, they're definitely Germans, they've definitely got
German helmets on, what are they up to? I don't know. Look, there's a third one. There's a ..." and you
watch them for hours and you talk about this. And then later it comes up in a conversation,
and your officer overhears and he says, - "What's that? ... But did you shoot them?"
- "Oh, no, I didn't shoot them."
- "Why didn't you shoot them?" - "It never occurred to me, sir, sorry, my orders were
to hold the line and nobody told me to shoot them. They weren't threatening me, they weren't doing anything."
That's the normal way to behave. So what you got to do is: see-a-target-bang-shoot-it.
So how do you do that? Skinnerian psychology. So you get a guy and you train him, you give him a gun,
you put him into a target thing where a target flips up here, it's man-shaped and bang. If he doesn't shoot it
within one second or whatever, then he loses a point. There's a carrot-and-stick here, you
reward success and you punish failure. And another one pops up, bang, and another one, bang.
And then you perhaps take this a little bit further. So for instance, in the same documentary, they were
showing Americans who were training with paintballing. But these were paintballs being fired by actual
guns using actual gunpowder [or cordite]. So there was the full bang noise of a gun,
and if you got hit by one of these it seriously hurt. And in fact there was even
a potential for being killed. If you were hit in a vital spot from close enough range,
you could be killed with one of these paintballs they were that powerful.
So it was hurt the other guy, or be hurt. And the first time guys went out, their
hearts would be going like a steam train. "Okay, this is gonna really hurt, there's a"
bang-bang-bang, "... ah, take cover. And ..." They were so stressed by this. And then you do it again,
and the next day you do it again. And after a while, oh, ... their heart rate was still elevated, but they
were not panicking like they were the first time. And so then you put them on a range and
a target-pops-up-bang, target-pops-up-bang. They shoot before making the
decision of whether or not to shoot. And that's the important thing, that's
what makes it a conditioned reflex. Do you remember the first time you ever drove a car? Remember how tightly you held the steering wheel.
At the end when you got home, your hands were tired, physically tired, from gripping the steering wheel
so much. After you've been driving for a bit, just two fingers, "Ah, I wonder what's on the radio?" You know,
and your heart rate was quite normal, you got used to it. And every time you pull up to a junction do you think, "Ah, now
then, shall I press the accelerator and change into fourth gear?" No, if you've got a manual (what the Americans call a
stick shift), you just press the clutch, into first. You just do it. You've done it so many times, you don't actually make
the decision to do it. It becomes a conditioned reflex. So we all have these and it's possible to train a soldier
the conditioned reflex, to just shoot-bang-to-kill straightaway. And it seems that the American Army, and others I'm
sure, have succeeded in this. But there are problems. Actually, before I get onto the problems, you
may be familiar with the film "Black Hawk Down", which is about a historical engagement
between Americans and Somalis. And that's a rare instance of an army with this
modern Skinnerian shoot-to-kill-first mentality, going up against an army that doesn't have that.
And when you watch the film it seems almost comical in places that the Somalis don't seem to be able to
hit anything and yet every time an American soldier shoots, another Somalian falls dead. Well, perhaps
that difference can be explained partly by this: that those Somalis were actually just
thinking, "Go away, Americans, go away. Just be afraid of me and just go away, I don't want to
be here." Bup-bup-bup-bup, and they didn't hit a thing. Whereas the Americans were just,
"Oh, I'm in danger." Bang. The immediate response to danger is "I shoot to kill." If someone comes at you with a bayonet and they're screaming,
they've got the war face, and they're rushing at you, you can either not shoot them and be
bayonetted to death, or bang-bang-bang-bang. You just shoot them, and
an ordinary man can do that. But remember the fear and the shooting
and the face I was talking about earlier. An ordinary man cannot,
when not threatened, do that. But with enough training, a modern soldier can be
made to shoot-to-kill-first before you've even thought. Now the downside. The ... upside is that you'll get
an army that's perhaps a great deal more effective. The downside is that it seems that
we haven't worked out what to do next. So, you've got a man who's been brought
up to believe that killing is absolutely wrong. He has now got several memories of having killed someone.
Perhaps at quite close range and he saw their face. He's got these terrible memories and he
has now got to live with those memories. Now, maybe because of the training, you've got a guy who was
never going to fire his weapon in the direction of the enemy, maybe he was one of that majority that
normally won't actually fire at the enemy. And he certainly wasn't one of the 2%,
he wasn't one of the shoot-to-kill guys, but you've turned him into a shoot-to-kill guy. And
that made him an effective soldier on the front line, but ... now he's come home. Have we
got the technology to sort that out? We can turn them into these killers, but can we then deal with
the mental consequences of what we've turned them into? It seems that we're not quite there yet. [ Perhaps new technology will come to help us.
"Set phasers to persuade." ] Lindybeige! [ Perhaps new technology will come to help us.
"Set phasers to persuade." ]
