On Killing

I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse…. At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: “Oh God, let’s stop it.” And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter and obeyed to the end.

If this kind of obedience could be obtained with a lab coat and a clipboard by an authority figure who has been known for only a few minutes, how much more would the trappings of military authority and months of bonding accomplish?

The Demands of Authority

The mass needs, and we give it, leaders who have the firmness and decision of command proceeding from habit and an entire faith in their unquestionable right to command as established by tradition, law and society.

— Ardant du Picq

Battle Studies

Someone who has not studied the matter would underestimate the influence of leadership in enabling killing on the battlefield, but those who have been there know better. A 1973 study by Kranss, Kaplan, and Kranss investigated the factors that make a soldier fire. They found that the individuals who had no combat experience assumed that “being fired upon” would be the critical factor in making them fire. However, veterans listed “being told to fire” as the most critical factor.

More than a century ago, Ardant du Picq found the same thing in his study based on a survey of military officers. He noted one incident during the Crimean War in which, during heavy fighting, two detachments of soldiers suddenly met unexpectedly face-to-face, at “ten paces.” They “stopped thunderstruck. Then, forgetting their rifles, threw stones and withdrew.” The reason for this behavior, according to du Picq, was that “neither of the two groups had a decided leader.”

Authority Factors

But it is more complex than the simple influence of orders by a leader. There are many factors in the relationship between the potential killer and the authority that influence the decision to kill.

In Milgram’s experiments the demands of authority were represented by an individual with a clipboard and a white lab coat. This authority figure stood immediately behind the individual who was inflicting shocks and directed that he increase the voltage each time the victim answered a question incorrectly. When the authority figure was not personally present but called over a phone, the number of subjects who were willing to inflict the maximum shock dropped sharply. This process can be generalized to combat circumstances and “operationalized” into a number of subfactors: proximity of the authority figure, respect for the authority figure, intensity of the authority figure’s demands, and the authority figure’s legitimacy.

• Proximity of the authority figure to the subject. Marshall noted many specific World War II incidents in which almost all soldiers would fire their weapons while their leaders observed and encouraged them in a combat situation, but when the leaders left, the firing rate immediately dropped to 15 to 20 percent.

• Killer’s subjective respect for the authority figure. To be truly effective, soldiers must bond to their leader just as they must bond to their group. Shalit notes a 1973 Israeli study that shows that the primary factor in ensuring the will to fight is identification with the direct commanding officer. Compared with an established and respected leader, an unknown or discredited leader has much less chance of gaining compliance from soldiers in combat.

• Intensity of the authority figure’s demands for killing behavior. The leader’s mere presence is not always sufficient to ensure killing activity. The leader must also communicate a clear expectancy of killing behavior. When he does, the influence can be enormous. When Lieutenant Calley first ordered his men to kill a group of women and children in the village of My Lai, he said, “You know what to do with them,” and left. When he came back he asked, “Why haven’t you killed them?” The soldier he confronted said, “I didn’t think you wanted us to kill them.” “No,” Calley responded, “I want them dead,” and proceeded to fire at them himself. Only then was he able to get his soldiers to start shooting in this extraordinary circumstance in which the soldiers’ resistance to killing was, understandably, very high.

• Legitimacy of the authority figure’s authority and demands. Leaders with legitimate, societally sanctioned authority have greater influence on their soldiers; and legitimate, lawful demands are more likely to be obeyed than illegal or unanticipated demands. Gang leaders and mercenary commanders have to carefully work around their shortcomings in this area, but military officers (with their trappings of power and the legitimate authority of their nation behind them) have tremendous potential to cause their soldiers to overcome individual resistance and reluctance in combat.

The Centurion Factor: The Role of Obedience in Military History

Many factors are at play on the battlefield, but one of the most powerful is the influence of leaders. This influence can be seen throughout history. In particular, the success of the Roman military machine can be seen in light of its mastery of leadership processes.

The Romans pioneered the concepts of leadership development and the NCO corps as we know it, and when the professional Roman army went up against the Greek citizen-soldiers, leadership can be seen as a key factor in the Romans’ success.

Both sides had the political legitimacy of their nations and city-states behind them, but there was a real difference in the military legitimacy that these leaders probably had in the eyes of their soldiers. The Roman centurion was a professional leader who had the respect of his soldiers because he had come up through the ranks and had previously demonstrated his ability in combat. This kind of legitimacy is completely different from that associated with leadership in civilian life, and the Greek leader was primarily a civilian whose peacetime legitimacy was not easily transferred to the battlefield and was often tainted by the spoils system and the petty politics associated with the local village he had come from.

In the Greek phalanx the leader at squad and platoon level was a spear-carrying member of the masses. The primary function of these leaders (as defined by their equipment and lack of mobility within the formation) was to participate in the killing. The Roman formation, on the other hand, had a series of mobile, highly trained, and carefully selected leaders whose primary job was not to kill but to stand behind their men and demand that they kill.

Many factors led to the military supremacy that permitted the Romans to conquer the world. For example, their volleys of cleverly designed javelins provided physical distance in the killing process, and their training enabled the individual to use the point and overcame the natural resistance to thrusting. But most authorities agree that a key factor was the degree of professionalism in their small-unit leaders, combined with a formation that facilitated the influence of these leaders.

The influence of an obedience-demanding leader can also be observed in many of the killing circumstances seen in this book. It was the command “That’s gotta be Charlie, you asshole…. Blow their ass up and run” that spurred Steve Banko into killing a Vietcong soldier. For John Barry Freeman it was a pointed machine gun and the order “Shoot the man” that caused him to shoot one of his fellow mercenaries who had been condemned to death.