Sam Clark read my paper on game theory and trench warfare, and writes, “I agree that what really has to be explained is why soldiers shoot, not why they do not shoot. In particular, I am interested in how commands use military medals and decorations to get soldiers to risk their lives. Do you know of any work along this line?”
I don’t actually know anthing more about this. Does anyone have anything useful on this (beyond the references in my paper)?
Hi –
The question is wrong: soldiers do not fight in order to get the medals, films like "Cross of Iron" (Peckinpah) to the contrary. Medals and decorations are given to honor what soldiers have done in the line of duty.
And no, there really isn't that much out there in termans of references. Keegan and Marshall you've already got: there are works by professional military officers, but these are not usually refereed nor are they easily available.
What is out there is usually novellized: for one of the best psychological portraits of military life (admittedly fiction, but he really has the feel of it) is W.E.B. Griffin, who has published two multi-volume novels, one dealing with US Army folks and the other with Marines (the first starts with The Leutenants and the other with Semper Fi). Either will give a feel for why it is that soldiers shoot instead of not shooting.
My feeling, though, is that this is so complex a subject that it will not lend itself easily to the kind of simplification that the typical prisoner's dilemma reduces problems to (i.e. a simple 2×2 matrix). Military training is the alpha and omega of the question: I would go so far as to postulate that fraternization of the kind under discussion is the result of not merely faulty training, but ultimately prolongs warfare, since it tends to prevent a resolution of the battlefield, prolonging rather than shortening conflicts.
From what I've seen of military writings, the average soldier goes through an intensive period of training not only to acquire the technical skills, but the most important training is the ability to abstract any given opponent to avoid the judeo-christian prohibition of killing. This is not simple and requires very complex behavioral modifications, yet is absolutely necessary for effective warfighting.
But like I said, references are scarce, since this is professional reading and research for the military, which will not be easily found in the "civilian" world.
John
Actually, soldiers do shoot. If they didn't shoot, their officer would shoot them. The real question is where they aim. In WW1 and WW2 it was customary for soldiers to intentionally miss, making a lot of noise, satisfying their superiors, but sparing lives. At least that's what an old soldier told me.
As for decorations, I don't think that the decorations are given with the intention of feeding more people into the grinder, just with the intention of recognizing the acts that benefitted a group. Wikipedia has a good list.
My understanding is that loyalty to the Corps, one's unit and one's mates has a lot to do with it and the army exploits this in its organisation. Individuals are paired up to act as mutual support, pairs are paired to form 4-man fire teams and so on. I believe there is empirical work that says that teams are more effective than individuals, though I don't have any references for you (sorry). An individual rifleman will blaze away at the enemy rather ineffectively and retreat easily. A four-man team manning a field gun will be more effective, and not just because of the greater power of the weapon, but because no one man can run off without leaving his mates unable to operate the weapon, a deadly situation. Similarly, a 4 man fire team will be equipped to operate effectively as a 4 man team, with 3 men having semi-automatic rifles, 1 of these having in addition a grenade launcher attached to his rifle, and the fourth man having a fully automatic weapon.
It's a popular-ish work, but Fukuyama mentions something about this in The End of History and the Last Man, though there is no entry in the index for "medals" or "decorations," and I can't find the exact passage right now. It's an outcome of the master morality that Hegel talked about in his master-bondsman bit. A truly free man is willing to risk his life for a flag or a medal. It symbolizes that he is above mere animal appetites, like the bourgeois slave morality. My reading of Fukuyama explains to me a lot of the cultural divide between the red and blue states. I wrote a short bit about this in my blog about six months ago: http://www.livejournal.com/users/rakehell.
Blaise: what army carries semi-auto rifles these days?
An afterthought: I think Fukuyama also helps explain the preservation of military culture in the red states. Think of how risking one's life is associated with machismo. Liberal macho-types risk their lives via outdoorsy activities: rock-climbing, alpinism, rafting, etc. There seems to be some sort of "badge of honor" associated with it. So I think Hegel/Fukuyama is onto something.
Oddly, the US has never developed a decoration culture, unlike say in the former Soviet Union, and I believe some parts of Europe. Military tees and caps are common however.
A fascinating book is "On Killing"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316330116/002-5…
It appears that the average person has an aversion to killing and the military works very hard to overcome that aversion.
The actual situation is complex, but not so much so that it doesn't lend itself to analysis. Depending on the context, either you or Axelrod might have been correct on any given day at any given point on the front.
An wholly unsupervised soldier had (and continues to have) large incentives in favor of not exposing himself at all, least of all in order to fire a personal weapon. As noted, it exposes him to fire and may well draw additional unwanted attention. However, a directly supervised soldier has a large incentive to fire, because he may well be (indeed, almost certainly will be) subject to severe sanctions administered by his supervising officer or NCO if he does not, up to and including being shot on the spot. This still allows scope for co-operation with his opposite number, but decreases the likelihood that his opposite number will pick up the correct signal. After all, it's no longer an absence of shooting but rather poorly-aimed shots. The superior has thus complicated the calculation for the opposing soldier a great deal ("Were they trying to hit me?") and upped the cost for him if he's guessed incorrectly, which may well be enough to collapse co-operation.
This was an acceptable solution as long as the density of firepower on the battlefield was such that you could keep troops relatively close together, under direct supervision and subject to a rigid hierarchy. Alas, that paradigm collapsed during WW1 itself, as the sheer weight of metal and the rates at which it could be put into the air made closely packed formations untenable. Since then, the emphasis has shifted to a solution you yourself mention: "Psychologically, people seem to feel more comfortable cooperating with people they know, and this has been studied experimentally by economists and psychologists (see Dawes, Kragt, and Orbell, 1988). In situations where cooperation is important (for example, in a business) or even a matter of life and death (for example, in the military), it is considered crucial to set up a “team spirit.” That is, the soldier is induced, early on in the training process, to reduce the psychological distance between himself and his unit-mates. It works for getting money out of people for charities (which I think I've mentioned here previously), and it works well for getting them to fight for each other. I can attest to the effects personally, having gone through both Basic and Advanced training at Ft.Knox back in 1990 with the same unit. You end up pretty damned close to folks you might otherwise not deal with at all in the normal course of events, to the point of taking on additional risks/costs. In any case, this allows for less direct supervision, less need for clustering and, not coincidentally, better modern battlefield effectiveness. It also complicates the calculation for a would-be "co-operator" massively. He must now take into account short psychological distance (which effectively changes the "me" in game-theoretic terms), the possibility that his close partners may not be willing to co-operate even if he is (in effect making each private a supervisor) and, by breaking up the lines and making it difficult to tell who you are facing or who is shooting at you at any given moment, destroys the iterative part of the problem and makes co-operation even less attractive.
"what army carries semi-auto rifles these days?"
Most of 'em, I think. The selective-fire rifles I'm familiar with usually have a single-shot and burst capability, not least the M16A2.
I wasn't sure if burst is considered automatic, but apparently so. I did a quick and dirty google and found this:
"Features: The M16A2 5.56mm rifle is a lightweight, air-cooled, gas-operated, magazine-fed, shoulder- or hip-fired weapon designed for either automatic fire (3-round bursts) or semiautomatic fire (single shot) through the use of a selector lever."
http://usmilitary.about.com/od/weapons/a/m16rifle…
So perhaps they are used typically in their semi-auto function and supplemented with a non-assault rifle, in this case, a machine gun, and are thus described as semi-auto, but they can indeed function as automatic.