Compare that to conscripts and draftees fighting in the Russia-Ukraine war and you’re a lot more likely to find people uncommitted to killing other human beings. Most human beings have a strong aversion to homicide, even in war.
You are confusing basic aspects of military training with regards to drilling people so that when violence starts happening they can keep functioning, with a desire to kill or a desire for violence.
A desire for violence does not make you a more effective warfighter, it simply doesn’t. There isn’t evidence of it, and the reason is obvious, modern warfare isn’t about getting the highest kill-death ratio or something. What makes you an effective warfighter is if you follow training and you have an unshakable desire to fight… which again has nothing to do with a desire for violence necessarily.
Does this mean that there will be people like your grandfather? Absolutely, if anything it was a good sign your grandfather didn’t want to murder people with a machine gun. If needed training could have helped your grandfather understand what he was doing as a skill not as a celebration of violence, but thankfully it wasn’t needed.
The answer to these questions is not to look for already violent people who have no natural incilination to avoid extreme violence, those people do not make good soldiers, they make good murderers…
Take for example US soldiers, of course with such a large military organization the quality of the troops will vary massively, but in general can you find evidence that during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that US troops were not sufficiently bloodthirsty to effectively fight the enemy? No… there was so many things wrong with those wars, but the capacity for violence among professional US soldiers was not the limting factor…?
In modern warfare most people are killed by crew served weapons like medium machine guns, rpgs, drones, mines/IEDs and most importantly artillery. These are weapons operated by professionals not murderers, in the same way that someone who prides themselves on being a skilled butcher doesn’t revel in the killing of the animal, but rather in the effectiveness of their skill. Unfortunately for Ukraine, a great number of UAV pilots have been given a burdern of having to kill very personally, perhaps even more personally than someone might with a gun and that is a terrible burden to carry. However, make no mistake, these soldiers do not look back and wish they hadn’t fought.
I think to speculate in the way you are is to misunderstood why people, HUMANS, fight at a basic level.
If humans are ever fully replaced on the battlefield, I promise you it won’t be because humans lack a sufficient capacity for explosive violence…
You are confusing basic aspects of military training with regards to drilling people so that when violence starts happening they can keep functioning, with a desire to kill or a desire for violence.
A desire for violence does not make you a more effective warfighter, it simply doesn’t. There isn’t evidence of it, and the reason is obvious, modern warfare isn’t about getting the highest kill-death ratio or something. What makes you an effective warfighter is if you follow training and you have an unshakable desire to fight… which again has nothing to do with a desire for violence necessarily.
Does this mean that there will be people like your grandfather? Absolutely, if anything it was a good sign your grandfather didn’t want to murder people with a machine gun. If needed training could have helped your grandfather understand what he was doing as a skill not as a celebration of violence, but thankfully it wasn’t needed.
The answer to these questions is not to look for already violent people who have no natural incilination to avoid extreme violence, those people do not make good soldiers, they make good murderers…
Take for example US soldiers, of course with such a large military organization the quality of the troops will vary massively, but in general can you find evidence that during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that US troops were not sufficiently bloodthirsty to effectively fight the enemy? No… there was so many things wrong with those wars, but the capacity for violence among professional US soldiers was not the limting factor…?
In modern warfare most people are killed by crew served weapons like medium machine guns, rpgs, drones, mines/IEDs and most importantly artillery. These are weapons operated by professionals not murderers, in the same way that someone who prides themselves on being a skilled butcher doesn’t revel in the killing of the animal, but rather in the effectiveness of their skill. Unfortunately for Ukraine, a great number of UAV pilots have been given a burdern of having to kill very personally, perhaps even more personally than someone might with a gun and that is a terrible burden to carry. However, make no mistake, these soldiers do not look back and wish they hadn’t fought.
I think to speculate in the way you are is to misunderstood why people, HUMANS, fight at a basic level.
If humans are ever fully replaced on the battlefield, I promise you it won’t be because humans lack a sufficient capacity for explosive violence…