"On Killing" by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

• Despite an unbroken tradition of violence and war, man is not by nature a killer.
• When people become angry, or frightened, they stop thinking with their fore-brain (the mind of a human) and start thinking with their mid-brain (which is indistinguishable from the mind of an animal). They are literally “scared out of their wits.” The only thing that has any hope of influencing the mid-brain is also the only thing that influences a dog: classical and operant conditioning.
• After nuclear holocaust, the next major threat to our existence is the violent decay of our civilization due to violence-enabling in the electronic media.
• Killing is a private, intimate occurrence of tremendous intensity, in which the destructive act becomes psychologically very much like the procreative act.
• There is within most men an intense resistance to killing their fellow man.
• With the proper conditioning and the proper circumstances, it appears that almost anyone can and will kill.
• The fight-or-flight dichotomy is the appropriate set of choices for any creature faced with danger other than that which comes from its own species. When we examine the responses of creatures confronted with aggression from their own species, the set of options expands to include posturing and submission.
• The first decision point in an intraspecies conflict usually involves deciding between fleeing or posturing.
• These actions are designed to convince an opponent, through both sight and sound, that the posturer is a dangerous and frightening adversary.
• When the posturer has failed to dissuade an intraspecies opponent, the options then become fight, flight, or submission. When the fight option is utilized, it is almost never to the death.
• The soldiers options: fight, flight, posture, submit
• Today we understand the enormous power of drill to condition and program a soldier.
• A lack of enthusiasm for killing the enemy causes many soldiers to posture, submit, or flee, rather than fight; it represents a powerful psychological force on the battlefield; and it is a force that is discernible throughout the history of man.
• Looking another human being in the eye, making an independent decision to kill him, and watching as he dies due to your action combine to form the single most basic, important, primal, and potentially traumatic occurrence of war.
• After sixty days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties of one kind or another.
• There is a common trait among the 2 percent who are able to endure sustained combat: a predisposition toward “aggressive psychopathic personalities.”
• Within a few months of sustained combat some symptoms of stress will develop in almost all participating soldiers.
• Treatment for these many manifestation of combat stress involves simply removing the soldier from the combat environment.
• War is an environment that will psychologically debilitate 98 percent of all who participate in it for any length of time. And the 2 percent who are not driven insane by war appear to have already been insane -- aggressive psychopaths -- before coming to the battlefield.
• Resistance to overt aggressive confrontation, in addition to the fear of death and injury, is responsible for much of the trauma and stress on the battlefield.
• The extremely rare “natural soldiers” who are most capable of killing can be found “mostly congregating in the commando-type special forces [units].”
• Officers direct the killing but very seldom participate in it. They are buffered from the guilt of killing by the simple fact that they order it, and others carry it out.
• Limits are mostly in the mind and can be overcome.
• With very few exceptions, everyone associated with killing in combat reaps a bitter harvest of guilt.
• The responsibilities of a combat leader represent a remarkable paradox. To be truly good at what he does, he must love his men and be bonded to them with powerful links of mutual responsibility and affection. And then he must ultimately be willing to give the orders that may kill them.
• Killing is what war is all about, and killing in combat, by its very nature, causes deep wounds of pain and guilt. The language of war helps us to deny what war is really about, and in doing so it makes war more palatable.
• It has long been understood that there is a direct relationship between the empathetic and physical proximity of the victim, and the resultant difficulty and trauma of the kill.
• Precisely rehearsing and mimicking a killing action is an excellent way of ensuring that the individual is capable of performing the act in combat.
• Man has a tremendous resistance to killing effectively with his bare hands.
• Killing enabling factors:
• demands of authority
• proximity of authority
• respect for authority
• group absolution
• intensity of support for kill
• number in immediate group
• legitimacy of group
• predisposition of killer
• training and conditioning
• recent experiences
• temperament
• total distance from victim
• physical distance
• emotional distance
• cultural
• moral
• social
• mechanical
• target attractiveness of victim
• relevance of available strategies
• relevance of victim
• payoff
• killer’s gain
• enemy’s loss
• In addition to creating a sense of accountability, groups also enable killing through developing in their members a sense of anonymity that contributes further to violence.
• It is so much easier to kill someone if they look distinctly different from you.
• Moral distance involves legitimizing oneself and one’s cause.
• Being able to identify your victim as a combatant is important to the rationalization that occurs after the kill. If a soldier kills a child, a woman, or anyone who does not represent a potential threat, then he has entered the realm of murder (as opposed to a legitimate, sanctioned combat kill), and the rationalization process becomes quite difficult.
• There is 2 percent of the male population that, if pushed or given a legitimate reason, will kill without regret or remorse.
• Those who command atrocities are powerfully bonded by guilt to those who commit atrocities, and to their cause, since only the success of their cause can ensure that they will not have to answer for their actions.
• By ensuring that their men participate in atrocities, totalitarian leaders can also ensure that for these minions there is no possibility of reconciliation with the enemy. They are inextricably linked to the fate of their leader.
• The basic response stages to killing in combat are concern about killing, the actual kill, exhilaration, remorse, and rationalization and acceptance.
• PTSD results when the rationalization process fails.
• Usually killing in combat is completed in the heat of the moment, and for the modern, properly conditioned soldier, killing in such a circumstance is most often completed reflexively, without conscious thought.
• One of the things that appears to occur among men in combat is that they fell the high of the exhilaration stage, and then when the remorse stage sets in they believe that there must be something “wrong” or “sick” about them to have enjoyed it so intensely.
• The triad of methods used to achieve this remarkable increase in killing [between WWII and Vietnam] are desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms.
• Most modern infantry leaders understand that realistic training with immediate feedback to the soldier works, and they know that it is essential for success and survival on the modern battlefield.
• Denial and defense mechanisms are unconscious methods for dealing with traumatic experiences.
• Manifestation of PTSD include recurrent and intrusive dreams and recollections of the experience, emotional blunting, social withdrawal, exceptional difficulty or reluctance in initiating or maintaining intimate relationships, and sleep disturbances.
• The degree of trauma times the [inverse] amount of social support received equals the magnitude of the post-traumatic response.
• The Weinberger doctrine:
• The US should not commit forces to combat unless our vital interest are at stake.
• We must commit them in sufficient numbers and with sufficient support to win.
• We must have clearly defined political and military objectives.
• We must never again commit forces to a war we do not intend to win.
• Before the US commits forces abroad, the US government should have some reasonable assurance of the support of the American people and their elected representative in the Congress...US troops cannot be asked to fight a battle with the Congress at home while attempting to win a war overseas. Nor will the American people sit by and watch US troops committed as expendable pawns on some grand diplomatic chessboard.
• Finally, the commitment of US troops should be as a last resort.
• The kind of games that are very definitely enabling violence are the ones in which you actually hold a weapon n your hand and fire it at human-shaped targets on the screen.
• There is a direct relationship between realism and degree of violence enabling.