On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society

by Dave Grossman

To be truly effective, soldiers must bond to their leader just as they must bond to their group.

military officers (with their trappings of power and the legitimate authority of their nation behind them) have tremendous potential to cause their soldiers to overcome individual resistance and reluctance in combat.

The Roman formation, on the other hand, had a series of mobile, highly trained, and carefully selected leaders whose primary job was not to kill but to stand behind their men and demand that they kill.

The influence of an obedience-demanding leader can also be observed in many of the killing circumstances seen in this book.

And for Alan Stuart-Smyth the screamed order “KILL HIM, GODDAMMIT, KILL HIM, NOW!” was necessary to bring him to kill a man who was in the process of swinging the muzzle of a weapon toward him.

In these and many other killing circumstances we can see that it was the demand for killing actions from a leader that was the decisive factor. Never underestimate the power of the need to obey.

Although intended as sarcasm, there is a profound truth in this statement, for often it is the soldiers’ blood and the leader’s guts that stave off defeat. And when the leader’s guts or will to sacrifice his men gives out, then the force he is leading is defeated.

But I have not yet had any success at getting a leader to confront his emotions revolving around the soldiers who have died in combat as a result of his orders.

Disintegration of a combat unit…usually occurs at the 50% casualty point, and is marked by increasing numbers of individuals refusing to kill in combat…. Motivation and will to kill the enemy has evaporated along with their peers and comrades. —Peter Watson War on the Mind

A tremendous volume of research indicates that the primary factor that motivates a soldier to do the things that no sane man wants to do in combat (that is, killing and dying) is not the force of self-preservation but a powerful sense of accountability to his comrades on the battlefield.

wives.” The defeat of even the most elite group is usually achieved when so many casualties have been inflicted (usually somewhere around the 50 percent point) that the group slips into a form of mass depression and apathy.

Among men who are bonded together so intensely, there is a powerful process of peer pressure in which the individual cares so deeply about his comrades and what they think about him that he would rather die than let them down.

Ardant du Picq referred to it as “mutual surveillance” and considered it to be the predominant psychological factor on the battlefield.

Marshall noted that a single soldier falling back from a broken and retreating unit will be of little value if pressed into service in another unit. But if a pair of soldiers or the remnants of a squad or platoon are put to use, they can generally be counted upon to fight well. The difference in these two situations is the degree to which the soldiers have bonded or developed a sense of accountability to the small number of men they will be fighting with—which is distinctly different from the more generalized cohesion of the army as a whole.

Du Picq sums this matter up when he says, “Four brave men who do not know each other will not dare to attack a lion. Four less brave, but knowing each other well, sure of their reliability and consequently of mutual aid, will attack resolutely. There,” says du Picq, “is the science of the organization of armies in a nutshell.”

In addition to creating a sense of accountability, groups also enable killing through developing in their members a sense of anonymity

atavistic killing hysteria

Konrad Lorenz tells us that “man is not a killer, but the group is.”

All crowding has an intensifying effect.

It has been demonstrated in literally dozens of studies that bystanders will be less likely to interfere in a situation in direct relationship to the numbers who are witnessing the circumstance. Thus, in large crowds, horrendous crimes can occur but the likelihood of a bystander interfering is very low.

Tactically, economically, and mechanically it was not a cost-effective instrument on the battlefield, yet for many centuries it was the king of battle. But if we examine the psychological leverage provided by the chariot to enable killing on the battlefield, we soon realize that the chariot was successful because it was the first crew-served weapon.

Several factors were at play here—the bow as a distance weapon, the social distance created by the archers’ having come from the nobility, and the psychological distance created by using the chariot in pursuit and shooting men in the back—

The chariot was defeated by the phalanx, which succeeded by turning the whole formation into a massive crew-served weapon.

Although he did not have the designated leaders of the later Roman formations, each man in the phalanx was under a powerful mutual surveillance system,

For nearly half a millennium the Romans’ professional military (with, among other things, their superior application of leadership) eclipsed the phalanx in the Western way of war. But the phalanx’s application of group processes was so simple and so effective that during the period of more than a thousand years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the full integration of gunpowder, the phalanx and the pike ruled infantry tactics.

And as you read these case studies note also the presence and influence of groups in most situations in which soldiers do elect to kill. The classic example is Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of World War II. He won the Medal of Honor by single-handedly taking on a German infantry company. He fought alone, but when asked what motivated him to do this, he responded simply, “They were killing my friends.”

Increasing the distance between the [combatants]—whether by emphasizing their differences or by increasing the chain of responsibility between the aggressor and his victim allows for an increase in the degree of aggression. —Ben Shalit The Psychology of Conflict and Combat

There is a constant danger on the battlefield that, in periods of extended close combat, the combatants will get to know and acknowledge one another as individuals and subsequently may refuse to kill each other.

This identification with one’s victim is also reflected in the Stockholm syndrome. Most people know of the Stockholm syndrome as a process in which the victim of a hostage situation comes to identify with the hostage taker, but it is actually more complex than that and occurs in three stages: - First the victim experiences an increase in association with the hostage taker. - Then the victim usually experiences a decrease in identification with the authorities who are dealing with the hostage taker. - Finally the hostage taker experiences an increase in identification and bonding with the victim.

Many times in World War I there were unofficial suspensions of hostilities that came about through the process of coming to know each other too well.

Erich Fromm states that “there is good clinical evidence for the assumption that destructive aggression occurs, at least to a large degree, in conjunction with a momentary or chronic emotional withdrawal.” The situations described above represent a breakdown in the psychological distance that is a key method of removing one’s sense of empathy and achieving this “emotional withdrawal.” Again, some of the mechanisms that facilitate this process include: - Cultural distance, such as racial and ethnic differences, which permit the killer to dehumanize the victim - Moral distance, which takes into consideration the kind of intense belief in moral superiority and vengeful/vigilante actions associated with many civil wars - Social distance, which considers the impact of a lifetime of practice in thinking of a particular class as less than human in a socially stratified environment - Mechanical distance, which includes the sterile Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight, or some other kind of mechanical buffer that permits the killer to deny the humanity of his victim

The Israeli research mentioned earlier indicates that the risk of death for a kidnap victim is much greater if the victim is hooded. Cultural distance is a form of emotional hooding that can work just as effectively.

This process also works the other way around. It is so much easier to kill someone if they look distinctly different from you. If your propaganda machine can convince your soldiers that their opponents are not really human but are “inferior forms of life,” then their natural resistance to killing their own species will be reduced.

The adolescent soldier against whom such propaganda is directed is desperately trying to rationalize what he is being forced to do, and he is therefore predisposed to believe this nonsense.

Once he begins to herd people like cattle and then to slaughter them like cattle, he very quickly begins to think of them as cattle—or, if you will, Untermensch.

According to Trevor Dupuy, the Germans, in all stages of World War II, consistently inflicted 50 percent more casualties on the Americans a...

However, this can be a double-edged sword. Once oppressors begin to think of their victims as not being the same species, then these victims can accept and use that cultural distance to kill and oppress their colonial masters

Thus, according to Stouffer’s research, 44 percent of American soldiers in World War II said they would “really like to kill a Japanese soldier,” but only 6 percent expressed that degree of enthusiasm for killing Germans.

This egalitarian tendency to mingle with and accept, admire, and even love another culture is an American strong-point. Because of it America was able to turn occupied Germany and Japan from defeated enemies to friends and allies.

The truth is that we are still trying to suppress racism more than a century after the end of slavery, and our limited use of cultural distance in World War II and Vietnam still tarnishes our dealings with our opponents in those wars.

Moral distance involves legitimizing oneself and one’s cause. It can generally be divided into two components. The first component usually is the determination and condemnation of the enemy’s guilt, which, of course, must be punished or avenged. The other is an affirmation of the legality and legitimacy of one’s own cause.

wars, not just civil wars. One of the major manifestations of moral distance is what might be called the home-court advantage. The moral advantage associated with defending one’s own den, home, or nation has a long tradition that can be found in the animal kingdom as well,

Winston Churchill said that “it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invader’s hearth.”

American wars have usually been characterized by a tendency toward moral rather than cultural distance. Cultural distance has been a little harder to develop in America’s comparatively egalitarian culture with its ethnically and racially diverse population.

In the Spanish-American War it was the sinking of the Maine that provided the punishment justification for war. In World War I it was the sinking of the Lusitania, in World War II it was Pearl Harbor, in Korea it was an unprovoked attack on American troops, in Vietnam it was the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, and in the Gulf War it was the invasion of Kuwait, and in Afghanistan and Iraq it was 9-11 and the possibility of weapons of mass destruction.[3]

Once the Allies began to liberate concentration camps, General Eisenhower began to view World War II as a Crusade, and the justification for the Cold War and the global war on terror had consistent underpinnings as moral battles against totalitarianism, oppression, and terrorism.

To understand the role of the Swine Log in the military we must understand how hard it is to be the one to give the orders that will send your friends to their deaths, and how easy is the alternative of surrendering honorably and ending the horror.

The paradox of war is that those leaders who are most willing to endanger that which they love can be the ones who are most liable to win, and therefore most likely to protect their men. The social class structure that exists in the military provides a denial mechanism that makes it possible for leaders to order their men to their deaths. But it makes military leadership a very lonely thing.

In nearly all historical battles prior to the age of Napoleon, the serf who looked down his spear or musket at the enemy saw another hapless serf very much like himself, and we can understand that he was not particularly inclined to kill his mirror image. And so it is that the great majority of close-combat killing in ancient history was not done by the mobs of serfs and peasants who formed the great mass of combatants. It was the elite, the nobility, who were the real killers in these battles, usually in the pursuit phase after the battle, on horseback or from chariots, and they were enabled by, among other things, social distance.

The development of new weapon systems enables the soldier, even on the battlefield, to fire more lethal weapons more accurately to longer ranges: his enemy is, increasingly, an anonymous figure encircled by a gunsight, glowing on a thermal imager, or shrouded in armour plate. —Richard Holmes Acts of War