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gjm comments on Open thread, Sept. 29 - Oct.5, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.