Not for the first time, someone on LW links a West Hunter page that isn't content to make a reasonable point, but has to exaggerate that point and present it with sneering.

Cochran's post is short, but to make it even shorter:

Some people claim that it is really, really difficult for humans to psych themselves up to kill another human. They often cite a claim by S. L. A. Marshall that only a small fraction – less than 25% – of WWII American combat infantrymen fired their weapons in battle.

[...] it’s all bullshit. S.L.A Marshall’s ‘data’ is vapor; there was and is nothing to it. He made shit up, not just on this topic. There’s every to reason to think that the vast majority of infantrymen throughout history did their level best to kill those on the other side [...]

You have to wonder about a universal human instinct that apparently misfired in every battle in recorded history.

It's true that Marshall's claim about WWII soldiers isn't trustworthy. (I haven't spent enough time with the literature to go further and confirm the claim's made-up bullshit vapour. But it wouldn't surprise me.) Unfortunately Cochran has to have his cherry on top; he writes off not only Marshall but the general idea of soldiers, and people in general, finding it hard to kill other people.

Now, I first read about that idea, and about Marshall's dodgy WWII work, in (I'm fairly sure) Randall Collins's Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory, which quotes Marshall at length and cites him for various (alleged) results, among them the WWII statistic. According to Collins, the famous statistic "has been controversial", though he also writes "Marshall is not presenting a statistical argument, but was summarizing his judgment".

That's not really good enough. But Collins doesn't rely exclusively on Marshall — the chapter where Collins goes on & on about Marshall cites many other sources which contradict Cochran's sarcasm & scepticism. They include five citations to affirm that a nontrivial number of soldiers soil themselves in battle, with one of those five mentioning soldiers trying to hide on the ground or under "blankets or sleeping bags"; Marshall's predecessor Colonel Charles Ardant du Picq, who gave "questionnaires to French army officers in the 1860s, who reported a tendency for soldiers to fire wildly in the air"; John Keegan's Face of Battle, which reveals that "eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century massed firing formations" often included NCOs pressing their swords against soldiers' backs "to force them to hold their position"; Paddy Griffith on a "pervasiveness of fear and firing incompetence" in the US Civil War; Richard Holmes and Dave Grossman on the same "pervasiveness" "for twentieth-century wars"; a conclusion "that the level of non-firing was similar [in WWII] in all armies" from Dyer's 1985 edition of War; Ulysses S. Grant's description of newly equipped troops fleeing in panic on the first day of the Battle of Shiloh; and Martin Gilbert's First World War to show that "[m]utinies in World War I occurred among all the armies that had been long in action, or had taken accumulated casualties [on the order of 100%]".

Collins also tabulates observations from a collection of combat photographs and from Russell W. Glenn's Reading Athena's Dance Card, finding that more US infantry in Vietnam reported firing "Rarely" or "Sometimes" (54% in total) than "Virtually always" (46%) in "life-threatening enemy confrontations", and that most of his photos show no troops firing at all.

I could go on. This is just the first half of chapter 2. Some of the evidence is anecdotal and could be cherry-picked, but the broad drift seems really very clear, and the rest of the book compiles further evidence that people tend to experience "confrontational tension and fear" in the face of potential violence, which leads them to back down or fumble — though competent violence can still occur when people overcome that tension & fear.

Cochran is probably right about Marshall, but probably wrong about the ease with which people kill each other. Perhaps Cochran should be less keen to call others idiots in the future.