I'm not sure he's right about man's natural proclivity to violence. Nor does the U.S. military seem certain that human beings have the instincts for war exhibited by ants. Through many decades and many wars, the U.S. military has been honing its training skills, learning to take a civilized human being and turn him into a killing machine.
A traditional way of doing this was to motivate the soldier to hate the enemy and want to kill him. But after World War II, this approach was shaken by the Army's official World War II historian, Samuel Marshall, who in 1947 upset the entire military establishment with a slim book called "Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War." In this book, he claimed that in World War II, at best one in four combat soldiers ever fired their weapon at the enemy, and in most combat units only about 15% of the available firepower was ever used.
Recently, I was discussing the Marshall book with two World War II veteran friends. The one who had not been in combat found the report hard to believe, but the other, who had served in the infantry in Europe, said, "I had a machine gun. I never fired the thing."
"Why not?" the other asked.
"If you fired it, they'd shoot back at you."
Many in the military challenged Marshall's findings. But military training became focused on how to improve what Marshall had called the "ratio of fire." Starting with the Vietnam War, the ratio of fire has greatly increased through training techniques that involve simulated combat -- so that the soldier acts without thinking. Soldiers today often will commit acts that they regret and will be uncertain about why they did them. In a documentary I saw recently, a confused American soldier in Iraq said he was not sure why he had intentionally run over a woman and killed her; his only explanation was that he had been taught in training to respond that way to that situation.
This, not surprisingly, creates psychological problems. Jonathan Shay, a Boston psychiatrist specializing in the trauma of Vietnam veterans, is not at all convinced of the naturalness of war. He believes that what is wrong with the combat veterans he sees is their sense that they have gone against their nature. Shay says he finds "violent rage and social withdrawal when deep assumptions of 'what's right' are violated."
