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jaime2000 comments on Open thread, Sept. 29 - Oct.5, 2014 - Less Wrong
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An interesting natural experiment happened on the Pacific Theater of WWII. American and Canadian forces attacked an island which had been secretly abandoned by the Japanese weeks prior. Their unopposed landing resulted in dozens of casualties from friendly fire and dozens of men lost in the jungle. Presumably, a similar rate of attrition occurred in every other landing, on top of casualties inflicted by the deliberate efforts of enemy troops.
We can know that other amphibious assaults probably had lower or neglible friendly fire rates, because some other landings (some opposed) had absolutely lower rates of casulaties- e.g here, here, and here.
Things look a bit more complex than the parent and OP make it. The first one on Kiska island resulted from Canadian and American detachment taking each other for the enemy. Agreed this is friendly fire - but among sub-optimally coordinated detachment - not within on single force.
The second one on Woodlark and Kiriwina which had less casualties was not only unopposed, it was known to be unopposed, so expectations were differnt.
The other opposed landings are more difficult to read.
If the landing had been peaceful & uneventful, perhaps we wouldn't have heard about it. So there might be a selection effect.
It seems like the rate of friendly-fire casualties might be less when fighting a real enemy. (Super-crude toy model: soldier fire randomly at whoever they see. If no one is on the island apart from the attackers, then those are all going to turn into friendly fire cases. If most of the people on the island are the ones you're trying to attack, then they're going to sustain most of those casualties.)
Wouldn't there be proportionately more shots fired if there's more people they see? You'd get the same number of friendly fire casualties either way.
That would be a slightly less crude toy model, I guess. I would expect the truth to be somewhere in between -- e.g., soldiers have limited ammunition and limited ability to attend to everyone around them in a conflict situation, so the number of shots fired probably increases sublinearly with number of potential targets.
In case anyone was in any doubt: I have no knowledge of any of this stuff, have never served in any military force, etc.
Just because you think of a new factor driving it down and then a new factor driving it up doesn't mean you end up in the same place.
The model I was using is that every time you see a soldier, you randomly decide whether or not to fire. Under this model, adding enemy soldiers makes no change in friendly fire.
Whoops, looks like I missed the word "proportionally" up there. Sorry for assuming that you were being silly.