Murray Brains & Bullets

How psychology wins wars
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-84954-565-5
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

This book is the story of how Western armies forgot how to fight real people. It is not about generals and strategies; it is focused on small groups of men in desperate situations and how they use their brains and their bullets to make the enemy surrender.' The closer people get to war the less they like it. The human brain is hard-wired with a primal, almost imperceptible aversion to killing and an intense aversion to being killed. In order to win wars, vast effort and uncountable sums have been expended to try and quash these reactions in our soldiers. For years, this research focused on two questions: 'Who fights?' and 'How can we make more people fight?' In Brains & Bullets, military psychologist Leo Murray argues that, given the right conditions, everybody fights. Change those conditions, however, and almost everybody will stop fighting. If we really want to win wars, the question we ought to be asking is: 'How do we make the enemy stop fighting?' Interweaving intense first-hand accounts of combat with the hard science of tactical psychology, this extensively researched study offers a fascinating insight into what war does to the human mind. Most crucially, it also suggests a new way to approach military conflict - one which comes too late to change the outcome of the war in Afghanistan, but which may well have a profound effect on the future of modern warfare.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Murray, Leo

Leseproben

TWO

WHO FIGHTS?

BRIGADIER MARSHALL, MAKIN ISLAND, 1943

This account from Brigadier S. L. A. Marshall’s is one of the few in this book that is not based on direct combat experience. Rather than learning through fighting himself, Marshall came to understand the psychology of war by interviewing hundreds of soldiers soon after they returned from battle.

Soldier, journalist, analyst and historian, Marshall was a complex and colourful character. He did a lot of good for Western armies and over the years he provided profound insights into training, tactics, weapons and the weight that soldiers carry into battle. He developed a new way of thinking about combat and he was able to make others think this way too. His journalistic side generated some -style war porn, but this only served to make his message more forceful.

When was published in 1947, it came as a revelation to people who had not been in combat. Despite the initial fuss caused by his book, very few people questioned Marshall’s methods and most armies soon came to accept the fire ratios as gospel. That 15 to 25 per cent still overshadows the art and science of tactical psychology.

The central message was a variation on an old chestnut: ‘There are two kinds of people in this world: those who fight and those who don’t.’ Marshall’s fire ratios seemed to provide fairly solid evidence that something like four out of five people are not natural fighters. The trick for military analysts was to spot the difference.

I had been told about Marshall’s fire ratios long before I got the battle morale job but it was a month into the project before I saw a copy of the book. I was interviewing a colonel from the Royal Armoured Corps about the design of a new light tank when I happened to mention the battle morale project. The conversation immediately switched to one of those rambling chats about fighting spirit, gore and bayonets. It turned out that the colonel was obsessed with the genetics of fighting. What he really wanted was not some new armoured vehicle but a way to find and recruit men who were naturally good at fighting. He wanted nothing to do with the ‘wishy-washy pinko nonsense about culture and society’ which many professional analysts were keen on. He wanted to find a gene that made super-soldiers.

The Tank Colonel pressed a copy of into my hands and said: ‘Read this. This man’s a genius. If you can work out what makes the difference between the men that fight and the men that don’t, you’ll get two ticks and a gold star.’

We spent the rest of the morning swapping ideas and drawing on scraps of paper. The light tank was forgotten as we generated elaborate plans for working out ‘what makes men tick’ and how to turn Marshall’s work into something useful for a modern army. When we parted, we were almost of one mind regarding fire ratios. I had reservations about the simplicity of the genetic answer but we both agreed that it needed to be understood. Over the years the Tank Colonel, now retired, has given me regular updates on the genetics of fighting.

Sadly, the light tank turned out to be a white elephant; too heavy, too complicated and too full of clever ideas, it is still on the drawing board after twenty years of development. The genetics of fighting, and the ‘pinko’ version with society and training included, have also proved to be a bit trickier than expected. At the heart of the problem was Marshall’s fire ratio theory.

Over the years it has become apparent that Marshall’s scientific-sounding fire ratios were not the result of laborious study. In fact, they turned out to be a bit of a guess. He had the best of intentions: in many battles there really were too few soldiers firing at the enemy, but the fire ratio problem was far from being universal. Other pressures were at work, and these made it very difficult to spot any stable characteristics that could be separating soldiers who fight from soldiers who run or hide. To understand this, we need to trace the origin of Marshall’s figures.

Marshall was not the first to propose a limit on the number of men doing all the fighting. The idea had been bubbling along for millennia, but Marshall was inspired by a report written by Lionel Wigram. Wigram was a British army officer who started as a theorist and instructor before developing his understanding through direct experience of combat.

Wigram was instrumental in the development of Second World War battle drills. The standard battle drill was similar to the fire-and-movement example we looked at in the last chapter, with half a unit giving suppressive fire while the other half move to assault the enemy. The drills were based on storm tactics used by both sides at the end of the First World War but, because so much had been forgotten between the wars, many of the details came from a purely theoretical understanding of combat.

Wigram was not entirely happy with the theory, so he left his classroom and went to the war in Sicily, to see whether the drills he taught were being used in action. When he got there, he took part in dozens of small battles, from section to battalion level, and this experience made him realise that the battle drills were not working. Rather than using fire-and-movement, Wigram found that battles were won by what he called ‘guts and movement’. He described the typical platoon attack like this:

Enemy machine guns open fire, the whole platoon lie down except the platoon commander and three or four gutful men. Five or six men start making tracks for home, meanwhile the gutful men under the platoon commander dash straight in to the enemy position without any covering fire and always succeed in taking the position. In some instances some positions are taken by as few as two men, and every battalion...