A Willingness to Kill
How deep-seated moral convictions can be trained out of an individual.
2 min read · from UNINTENDED by Mayank Mehta
During World War II, military researchers discovered something that should have been reassuring but instead was deeply puzzling. The majority of soldiers, even in combat, weren't shooting to kill. Studies conducted after the war found that as few as fifteen to twenty-five percent of riflemen may have actually fired their weapons at the enemy. The exact figures, first proposed by historian S.L.A. Marshall, have been challenged by researchers who dug into his methodology. But the broader finding, that a significant proportion of soldiers resisted firing even in combat, has been supported by independent studies from other armies and eras. The rest froze, fired high, or simply didn't pull the trigger. The finding suggested an instinctive human resistance to killing another person, a moral brake built so deeply into most people that even in a firefight, it held.
The military looked at this data and saw a problem to be solved.
Over the following decades, training was redesigned. Pop-up silhouettes replaced stationary bullseye targets. Drills were structured to make firing automatic, a reflex rather than a decision. Soldiers were conditioned through repetition, desensitization, and reward. Authority was reinforced at every level. The goal wasn't to teach soldiers to kill. It was to make killing a trained response, something that happened before the conscious mind had time to object.
It worked. By Vietnam, the firing rate had risen to over ninety percent.
This goes well beyond the battlefield. What the military discovered, and what Milgram's experiments had demonstrated in a different context, was that moral behavior is far more dependent on structure and authority than most people want to believe. The same person who would recoil from violence in ordinary life can be trained, incentivized, or ordered into committing it, not because their values have changed, but because the environment around them has.
The East German border guards who shot fleeing citizens were products of the same dynamic. Research into firing squads shows the same pattern. Most people, when placed in a structure that commands them to kill, will comply. Not happily. Not without hesitation. But they will comply.
The most unsettling implication isn't that people can be made to do terrible things. It's that the values we consider fundamental, the convictions we believe are inalienable, turn out to be more dependent on context than we are willing to admit. The scientist in the lab coat, the judge in his wig, the officer with his stars: all have the power to make people do things they would otherwise find unthinkable.
We like to believe we are the authors of our own moral choices. The evidence suggests that, for most of us, the author is whoever is standing in the room wearing the uniform.