You do not rise to the occasion in combat, you sink to the level of your training. Do not expect the combat fairy to come bonk you with the combat wand and suddenly make you capable of doing things that you never rehearsed before. It will not happen.
Seen here.
For all the "guns turn people into killers" drones out there, how do you explain this?
You may think that it is easy to kill, that a person only has to walk onto the battlefield and he will become a killer simply because he has been ordered to. The truth is that it is hard to get people to kill. Consider the murder rate, which is only six per 100,000 per year. Millions of people bump against each other every day, many of them depressed, angry, hostile and full of hate, but only six out of 100,000 will kill. Only four per thousand even attempt to inflict serious bodily harm and suffering (aggravated assault) in the average year. How is that?
We learned in World War II that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen fired their weapons at an exposed enemy soldier. If there was a leader present ordering soldiers to fire, then almost everyone would do so. Likewise, a crew-served weapon, with a gunner and assistant gunner fighting together, almost always fired. But when soldiers were left to their own devices, the vast majority them, on all sides, could not kill.
I've got a few things to mull over for later if I have time, but this is definitely an interesting read.
rolled out on
Wednesday, August 29, 2007 4:01 PM