Hi, Tim!
I think we will just have to agree to disagree on this one. <img src="/forum/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />
"Right, SLA Marshall did not use an approved scientific method for his questions..."
AKA... he just made it up.
The article, "S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire," appeared in the British journal, The Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies. The author was professor Roger J. Spiller, and his task was an unpleasant one because he believed that Marshall was basically right about the primacy of ground combat. Nonetheless, Spiller pulled no punches. He writes:
Marshall had no use for the polite equivocations of scholarly discourse. His way of proving doubtful propositions was to state them more forcefully. Righteousness was always more important for Marshall than evidence....
The foundation of his conviction was not scholarship but his own military experience, experience that he inflated or revised as the situation warranted. Marshall often hinted broadly that he had commanded infantry in combat, but his service dossier shows no such service. He frequently held that he had been the youngest officer in the American Expeditionary Forces during the Great War, but this plays with the truth as well. Marshall enlisted in 1917 and served with the 315th Engineer Regiment—then part of the 90th Infantry Division—and won a commission after the Armistice, when rapid demobilization required very junior officers to command "casual" and depot companies as the veteran officers went home. Marshall rarely drew such distinctions, however, leaving his audiences to infer that he had commanded in the trenches. Later in life, he remarked that he had seen five wars as a soldier and 18 as a correspondent, but his definitions of war and soldiering were rather elastic. That he had seen a great deal of soldiers going about their deadly work was no empty boast, however. This mantle of experience, acquired in several guises, protected him throughout his long and prolific career as a military writer, and his aggressive style intimidated those who would doubt his arguments. Perhaps inevitably, his readers would mistake his certitude for authority.
What of Marshall's claims for his research in the field during World War II? Spiller writes:
In Men Against Fire Marshall claims to have interviewed "approximately" 400 infantry rifle companies in the Pacific and in Europe, but that number tended to change over the years. In 1952, the number had somehow grown to 603 companies; five years later his sample had declined to "something over 500" companies. Those infantry companies—whatever their actual number—were his laboratories, the infantrymen his test subjects, and at the focal point of his research was the ratio of fire. "Why the subject of fire ratios under combat conditions has not been long and searchingly explored, I don't know," Marshall wrote. "I suspect that it is because in earlier wars there had never existed the opportunity for systematic collection of data." [Emphasis added.]
Opportunity aplenty existed in Europe: more than 1200 rifle companies did their work between June 1944 and V-E day, 10 months later. But Marshall required by his own standard two and sometimes three days with a company to examine one day's combat. By the most generous calculation, Marshall would have finished "approximately" 400 interviews sometime in October or November 1946, or at about the time he was writing Men Against Fire.
This calculation assumes, however, that of all the questions Marshall might ask the soldiers of a rifle company during his interviews, he would unfailingly want to know who had fired his weapon and who had not. Such a question, posed interview after interview, would have signalled that Marshall was on a particular line of inquiry, and that regardless of the other information Marshall might discover, he was devoted to investigating this facet of combat performance. John Westover, usually in attendance during Marshall's sessions with the troops, does not recall Marshall's ever asking this question. Nor does Westover recall Marshall ever talking about ratios of weapons usage in their many private conversations. Marshall's own personal correspondence leaves no hint that he was ever collecting statistics. His surviving field notebooks show no signs of statistical compilations that would have been necessary to deduce a ratio as precise as Marshall reported later in Men Against Fire. The "systematic collection of data" that made Marshall's ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have been an invention.
Puncturing the Marshall legend was Dr. Spiller's duty rather than his pleasure. He ended his piece this way:
History has a savage way about it. A reputation may be made or unmade when history seizes upon part of a life and reduces it to caricature. S.L.A. Marshall was one of the most important commentators on the soldier's world in this century. The axiom upon which so much of his reputation has been built overshadows his real contribution. Marshall's insistence that modern warfare is best understood through the medium of those who actually do the fighting stands as a challenge to the disembodied, mechanistic approaches that all too often are the mainstay of military theorists and historians alike.
"...but for SOME REASON training changed and so did the lethality of U.S. units."
Really? Most casualties are from improvements on artillery and air power. As far as lethality of ground units, if Marshall's numbers were right, the argument is against it:
lethality index of small arms development:
WWI, bolt action rifles: 500 rounds needed to kill one man (trench warfare and over the top charges--most killed by machine guns and artillery)
WWII somewhere around 5000 rounds per man: M-1 Garands, M-1 carbines, smg's, first assault rifles.
Korea, the desensitation program starts and the rounds shoot up to 25K per man casualty.
By Vietnam, M-16's and AK's---in excess of 50K. More firepower, less effectiveness than when we were "
more sensitized" in the two world wars of the 20th c.
"I NEVER recall hearing anti-gun talk in his books."
The world is just now recovering from the most violent and bloody century in human history, and the streets of the western, industrialized nations are the scenes of a level of violence that is unprecedented in human history. Each individual who is injured or killed by violence provides a point of departure for further violence on the part of their friends and family. Every destructive act gnaws away at the restraint of human beings. Each act of violence eats away at the fabric of our society like a cancer, spreading and reproducing itself in ever-expanding cycles of horror and destruction. The genie of violence cannot really ever be stuffed back into the bottle. It can only be cut off here and now, and then the slow process of healing and re-sensitization can begin.
It can be done. It has been done in the past. As Richard Heckler has observed, there is a precedent for limiting violence-enabling technology. It started with the classical Greeks, who for 4 centuries refused to implement the bow and arrow even after being introduced to it in a most unpleasant way by Persian archers.
In Giving Up The Gun, Noel Perrin tells how the Japanese banned firearms after their introduction by the Portuguese in the 1500s. The Japanese quickly recognized that the military use of gunpowder threatened the very fabric of their society and culture, and they moved aggressively to defend their way of life. The feuding Japanese warlords destroyed all existing weapons and made the production or import of any new guns punishable by death. Three centuries later, when Commodore Perry forced the Japanese to open their ports, they did not even have the technology to make firearms. Similarly, the Chinese invented gunpowder but elected not to use it in warfare.
Firearms probably will not go away any time soon, but their abuse will almost definitely be strongly influenced by technology that will make guns "keyed" so that they can only be fired by a designated individual and will thereby be useless to all others. Similarly, violence in the media will not go away as long as there is a market for it, but there will probably be movement away from indiscriminate violence-enabling of children through violent video games and violence in the media and toward protecting children from these things while still permitting their availability to adults, in much the same manner as alcohol, tobacco, prescription drugs, pornography, and guns.
This virus of violence is occurring worldwide. The explanation for it has to be some new factor that is occurring in all of these countries. There are many factors involved, and none should be discounted: for example, the prevalence of guns in our society.
Americans spend over $100 million on toy guns every year (What Counts: The Complete Harper's Index © 1991).
Another route to reduced violence is gun control. I don't want to downplay that option, but America is trapped in a vicious cycle when we talk about gun control. Americans don't trust the government; they believe that each of us should be responsible for taking care of ourselves and our families. That's one of our great strengths--but it is also a great weakness. When the media foster fear and perpetuate a milieu of violence, Americans arm themselves in order to deal with that violence. And the more guns there are out there, the more violence there is. And the more violence there is, the greater the desire for guns.
We are trapped in this spiral of self-dependence and lack of trust. Real progress will never be made until we reduce this level of fear. As a historian, I tell you it will take decades--maybe even a century--before we wean Americans off their guns. And until we reduce the level of fear and of violent crime, Americans would sooner die than give up their guns.
Sorry. I realize this is wildly off topic, but I don't want to see Grossman indiscriminately used as a source for WMA studies without an open understanding that he has an agenda and his work is terribly flawed.
"A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer's hand." Lucius Annaeus Seneca 4BC-65AD.
