ONLY 15 PERCENT OF AMERICAN SOLDIERS FIRED THEIR WEAPONS DURING THE WW2 BATTLES IN WHICH THEY PARTICIPTED

Training a castrated infantry

 

By Akiva Bigman  

 

Israel Hayom

December 21, 2020 

Footage of an Israeli soldier not shooting a terrorist who set alight and threw a Molotov cocktail at him caused a justifiable uproar. Following the incident, a number of voices blamed in on a number of factors: the effect of the trial of Elor Azaria; the lengthy and complicated open-fire protocol; too cautious a commander, and more. There is truth in these claims, but it's important to note another angle, which in my opinion is deeper and more important than any other, and has to do with the training of infantry soldiers.

Despite prevailing beliefs, soldiers in a democratic army, in which they are citizen-soldiers, are pacifists by nature. This is nothing unique to the Israeli soldier or the result of our long years of dealing with Palestinian terrorism, it is a universal phenomenon. Brig. Gen. Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, who researched the battles of World War II for the US Army, reached the same conclusion after looking at statistics from 20 battles and interviewing hundreds of soldiers. Marshall learned that only about 15% of soldiers fired their weapons during the battles in which they participated, and even when wounded and casualties were factored in, that percentage did not exceed 25%. This was true for all fronts in all conditions, including instances in which at least 80% of the soldiers said they were in a situation to open fire. This statistic is supported by testimony collected in research on other wars of the modern era, and demands an explanation.

According to Marshall, these soldiers come from a cultured environment in which the aggression entailed in taking a human life is forbidden and unacceptable. He concluded that the fear of aggression has been so thoroughly inculcated and absorbed that it comprises the biggest obstacle when civilian soldiers go into battle.

The soldier in the controversial footage is no exception – he is the norm. Evading conflict and fear of killing are natural to every cultured person. However, they are also the main challenge to military training. Taking civilians and turning them into fighters means taking pacifists and instilling in them killer instincts. This is exactly what the training and drills are intended to do.

Infantry training is full of sudden transitions from a calm situation to one of shooting from various points, with the soldiers having to shoot as rapidly as possible toward the target's center mass. Shoot to kill, with the understanding that the moment a threat is identified, this is the immediate response required, without consideration. That is the soldier and that is what he is supposed to do.

In recent years, these basic principles have eroded in operations in Judea and Samaria. Years ago, I wrote an expose about how soldiers were being trained to aim for targets' knees, which was designed to change their mindset from "shoot to kill" to "shoot to disarm."

There are also long hours of lectures about open-fire protocol, which get longer and more complicated all the time. In the field, a soldier has to make an instinctive decision, but according to protocol, he should consider a number of parameters such as whether or not the enemy has "a weapon" with which to attack, "an intent" of doing so, and "the possibility" of carrying out an attack. Aside from the difficulty of identifying the weapon, "intent" and "possibility" are subjective and cannot be measured.

Then we have the rules that prohibit shooting unless there is clear and present danger, in other words – even when someone is preparing a weapon (like lighting Molotov cocktail), they still cannot be shot until he raises his arm to throw it. And we haven't even discussed cases in which a commander must give a soldier permission to fire, which makes what still remained instinctive into a techno-bureaucratic jumble and firing shots into battle into a drawn-out struggle.

Marshall observed that even in his time, training soldiers was hampered by too heavy an emphasis on shooting protocol, to an extent that nearly obscured that the basic problem was to train soldiers to shoot freely – and that was in the face of enemies like the Nazis or the Japanese Imperial Army. The castrated training the IDF offers its infantry soldiers just makes the situation worse, and there will be a heavy price to pay.