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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jd Smith1" data-source="post: 9705152" data-attributes="member: 6998052">Grossman never served in combat. DoD studies put the increase down to the end of the draft, and combat optics; even as far back as the Marshal study, a big issue for infantry was an inability to see what they were shooting at. One motivation for the adoption of the M-16 was that the Marshal study found that BAR gunners fired far more than riflemen, because even if the target was obscured, the act of full-auto fire gave them confidence. The selective-fire M-14 was not a great success.With modern optics and better-motivated troops, the willingness to engage has risen. Being regulars intensively trained as a unit before deployment has raised the understanding of suppressive and covering fire as well.But it still fails. I saw a Staff Sergeant crack up and have to be hospitalized after he killed a guy. He had been in the Infantry with its 'Kill, Kill' mantra for six years, extensive pre-deployment training, and he utterly flaked out. At the core of it, was somehow he never believed that he was going to kill anyone. They ended up having to boot him out.Optics, IMO, depersonalize the target. While you can see what you are shooting at, the optics make it much more sterile. Oddly, I saw guys struggling with the fact that killing someone didn't bother them. They had been hyped up by Hollywood that it was a big emotional event, only to discover that in a firefight, things happen so fast that often you don't realize what you had done until after its over and you have time to detox. The other thing that bothered guys was that unlike Hollywood, people don't usually just drop and go limp; there's often a lot of screaming and thrashing involved, which can get on your nerves.</blockquote>

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