September 6, 2024
The Associated
Pressreports that many of the recruits drafted under Ukraine’s new conscription
law lack the motivation and military indoctrination required to actually aim
their weapons and fire at Russian soldiers.
A Ukrainian recruiting poster reads, “It’s brave to admit your fears.” (Photo: Ministry of Defense, Ukraine)
“Some people
don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but
don’t open fire... That is why our men are dying,” said a frustrated battalion
commander in Ukraine’s 47th Brigade. “When they don’t use the weapon, they are
ineffective.”
This is familiar
territory to anyone who has studied the work of U.S. Brigadier General Samuel
“Slam” Marshall, a First World War veteran and the chief combat historian of
the U.S. Army in the Second World War. Marshall conducted hundreds of
post-combat small group sessions with U.S. troops in the Pacific and Europe,
and documented his findings in his book, Men Against Fire: the Problem of
Battle Command.
One of Slam
Marshall’s most startling and controversial findings was that only about 15% of
U.S. troops in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. In no case did
that ever rise above 25%, even when failing to fire placed the soldiers’ own
lives in greater danger.
Marshall
concluded that most human beings have a natural aversion to killing other human
beings, often reinforced by our upbringing and religious beliefs, and that
turning civilians into effective combat soldiers therefore requires training
and indoctrination expressly designed to override our natural respect for
fellow human life. This dichotomy between human nature and killing in war is
now understood to lie at the root of much of the PTSD suffered by combat
veterans.
Marshall’s
conclusions were incorporated into U.S. military training, with the
introduction of firing range targets that looked like enemy soldiers and
deliberate indoctrination to dehumanize the enemy in soldiers’ minds. When he
conducted similar research in the Korean War, Marshall found that changes in
infantry training based on his work in World War II had already led to higher
firing ratios.
That trend
continued in Vietnam and more recent U.S. wars. Part of the shocking brutality
of the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq stemmed directly from the
dehumanizing indoctrination of the U.S. occupation forces, which included
falsely linking Iraq to the September 11th terrorist crimes in the U.S. and
labeling Iraqis who resisted the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country
as “terrorists.”
A Zogby poll of
U.S. forces in Iraq in February 2006 found that 85% of U.S. troops believed
their mission was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks,” and 77%
believed that the primary reason for the war was to “stop Saddam from
protecting Al Qaeda in Iraq.” This was all pure fiction, cut from whole cloth
by propagandists in Washington, and yet, three years into the U.S. occupation,
the Pentagon was still misleading U.S. troops to falsely link Iraq with 9/11.
The impact of
this dehumanization was also borne out by court martial testimony in the rare
cases when U.S. troops were prosecuted for killing Iraqi civilians. In a court
martial at Camp Pendleton in California in July 2007, a corporal testifying for
the defense told the court he did not see the cold-blooded killing of an
innocent civilian as a summary execution. “I see it as killing the enemy,” he
told the court, adding, “Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the
insurgency.”
U.S. combat
deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan (5,429 killed) were only a fraction of the U.S.
combat death toll in Vietnam (47,434) or Korea (33,739), and an even smaller
fraction of the nearly 300,000 Americans killed in the Second World War. In
every case, other countries suffered much heavier death tolls.
And yet, U.S.
casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan provoked waves of political blowback in the
U.S., leading to military recruitment problems that persist today. The U.S.
government responded by shifting away from wars involving large deployments of
U.S. ground troops to a greater reliance on proxy wars and aerial bombardment.
After the end of
the Cold War, the U.S. military-industrial complex and political class thought
they had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome,” and that, freed from the danger of
provoking World War III with the Soviet Union, they could now use military
force without restraint to consolidate and expand U.S. global power. These
ambitions crossed party lines, from Republican “neoconservatives” to Democratic
hawks like Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.
In a speech at
the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in October 2000, a month before winning
a seat in the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton echoed her mentor Albright’s
infamous rejection of the “Powell Doctrine” of limited war.
“There is a
refrain…,” Clinton declared, “that we should intervene with force only when we
face splendid little wars that we surely can win, preferably by overwhelming
force in a relatively short period of time. To those who believe we should
become involved only if it is easy to do, I think we have to say that America
has never and should not ever shy away from the hard task if it is the right
one.”
During the
question-and-answer session, a banking executive in the audience challenged
Clinton on that statement. “I wonder if you think that every foreign
country—the majority of countries—would actually welcome this new
assertiveness, including the 1 billion Muslims that are out there,” he asked,
“and whether or not there isn’t some grave risk to the United States in
this—what I would say, not new internationalism, but new imperialism?”
When the
aggressive war policy promoted by the neocons and Democratic hawks crashed and
burned in Iraq and Afghanistan, this should have prompted a serious rethink of
their wrongheaded assumptions about the impact of aggressive and illegal uses
of U.S. military force.
Instead, the
response of the U.S. political class to the blowback from its catastrophic wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan was simply to avoid large deployments of U.S. ground
forces or “boots on the ground.” They instead embraced the use of devastating
bombing and artillery campaigns in Afghanistan, Mosul in Iraq, and Raqqa in
Syria, and wars fought by proxies, with full, “ironclad” U.S. support, in
Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and now Ukraine and Palestine.
The absence of
large numbers of U.S. casualties in these wars kept them off the front pages
back home and avoided the kind of political blowback generated by the wars in
Vietnam and Iraq. The lack of media coverage and public debate meant that most
Americans knew very little about these more recent wars, until the shocking
atrocity of the genocide in Gaza finally started to crack the wall of silence
and indifference.
The results of
these U.S. proxy wars are, predictably, no less catastrophic than the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. domestic political impacts have been mitigated,
but the real-world impacts in the countries and regions involved are as deadly,
destructive, and destabilizing as ever, undermining U.S. “soft power” and
pretensions to global leadership in the eyes of much of the world.
In fact, these
policies have widened the yawning gulf between the worldview of ill-informed
Americans who cling to the view of their country as a country at peace and a
force for good in the world, and people in other countries, especially in the
Global South, who are ever more outraged by the violence, chaos, and poverty
caused by the aggressive projection of U.S. military and economic power,
whether by U.S. wars, proxy wars, bombing campaigns, coups, or economic
sanctions.
Now the
U.S.-backed wars in Palestine and Ukraine are provoking growing public dissent
among America’s partners in these wars. Israel’s recovery of six more dead
hostages in Rafah led Israeli labor unions to call widespread strikes,
insisting that the Netanyahu government must prioritize the lives of the
Israeli hostages over its desire to keep killing Palestinians and destroying
Gaza.
In Ukraine, an
expanded military draft has failed to overcome the reality that most young
Ukrainians do not want to kill and die in an endless, unwinnable war. Hardened
veterans see new recruits much as Siegfried Sassoon described the British
conscripts he was training in November 1916 in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer:
“The raw material to be trained was growing steadily worse. Most of those who
came in now had joined the Army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they
should find military service tolerable.”
Several months
later, with the help of Bertrand Russell, Sassoon wrote Finished With War: a
Soldier’s Declaration, an open letter accusing the political leaders who had
the power to end the war of deliberately prolonging it, which was published in
newspapers and read aloud in Parliament. The letter ended:
As Israeli and
Ukrainian leaders see their political support crumbling, Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are taking
increasingly desperate risks, all the while insisting that the U.S. must come
to their rescue. By “leading from behind,” our leaders have surrendered the
initiative to these foreign leaders, who will keep pushing the United States to
make good on its promises of unconditional support, which will sooner or later
include sending young American troops to kill and die alongside their own.
Proxy war has
failed to resolve the problem it was intended to solve. Instead of acting as an
alternative to ground wars involving U.S. forces, U.S. proxy wars have spawned
ever-escalating crises that are now making U.S. wars with Iran and Russia
increasingly likely.
Neither the
changes to U.S. military training since the Second World War nor the current
U.S. strategy of proxy war have resolved the age-old contradiction that Slam
Marshall described in Men Against Fire, between killing in war and our natural
respect for human life. We have come full circle, back to this same historic
crossroads, where we must once again make the fateful, unambiguous choice
between the path of war and the path of peace.
If we choose
war, or allow our leaders and their foreign friends to choose it for us, we
must be ready, as military experts tell us, to once more send tens of thousands
of young Americans to their deaths, while also risking escalation to a nuclear
war that would kill us all.
If we truly
choose peace, we must actively resist our political leaders’ schemes to
repeatedly manipulate us into war. We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and
those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them
to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends, and “allies” in other
countries.
We must insist
that our mis-leaders instead recommit to diplomacy, negotiation, and other
peaceful means of resolving disputes with other countries, as the United
Nations Charter, the real “rules-based order,” in fact requires.
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