Understanding Society
How Are Most Wars Won?
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Distance makes killing easier — physical distance from long-range weapons, moral distance from dehumanizing propaganda, and chemical distance from stimulants. Through Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, Doug follows those methods from Germany’s wartime distribution of millions of Pervitin tablets to modern conditioning drills. He then turns to the cost: firing rates rose in Korea and Vietnam, but so did the psychological burden carried home.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
“Down the ages, the way to win most wars has been to shoot as many people as possible from a distance. That’s how the English defeated the French at Crecy and Agincourt during the Hundred Years War (1337-1453), how the conquistodors conquered the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries, and what the U.S. military does today, with its legions of armed drones.
Aside from long-range weapons, Armies also increase psychological distance to the enemy. If you can dehumanize the other—say by portraying them as vermin—it makes it easier to treat the other as if they are indeed inhuman.
You can also drug your soldiers to dull their natural empathy and antipathy towards violence. From Troy to Waterloo, from Korea to Vietnam, few armies have fought without the aid of intoxicants, and scholars now even think Paris might not have fallen in 1940 had the German army not been stoked on thirty-five million methamphetamine pills (aka crystal meth, a drug that can cause extreme aggression).
These days, soldiers no longer practice on ordinary paper bulls-eyes, but are drilled to fire instinctively at realistic human figures. Shooting a firearm becomes an automated Pavlovian reaction you can perform without thinking. For snipers, the training’s even more radical. One tried and tested method is to present progressively more horrific videos while the trainee sits strapped to a chair and a special device ensures that the eyes remain open.
In modern armies, comradeship has become less important. Instead, we have, to quote one American veteran, ‘manufactured contempt.’
This conditioning works. Set soldiers trained in these techniques opposite an old-school army and the latter is crushed every time. Take the Falklands War (1982): though bigger in sheer numbers, the Argentine army with its old-fashioned training never had a chance against Britain’s conditioned shooting machines.
The American military had also managed to boost its ‘firing ratio’, increasing the number of soldiers to 55% in the Korean War and 95% in Viet Nam. But this came at a price. If you brainwash millions of young soldiers in training, it should come as no surprise when they return with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as so many did after Viet Nam. Innumerable soldiers had not only killed other people—something inside them had died too.