How one man’s pseudoscience hijacked American police training.
Former West point psychology professor Lt. Col. David Grossman is one of the most influential people in shaping the values of American law enforcement, year-round he travels the country giving seminars to law enforcement and other groups, all for a hefty fee. What he teaches is Killology, which Grossman describes as the study of killing, but is effectively a field of knowledge he invented himself beginning with his bestselling 1995 book On Killing. The problem is the evidence for the thesis of On Killing is almost entirely based on a single highly suspect source which purported to show as low as 15% of soldier’s in combat were willing to fire their weapons at the enemy. This has not slowed down Grossman, who has taken the research described in On Killing — initially intended to improve military training — and expanded it into his now widely promulgated pseudoscience of Killology.
The key source of On Killing is research undertaken by S.L.A Marshal during world war two and published in his influential book Men Against Fire. In Men Against Fire, Marshal makes the claim that during world war two only between 15 and 25 percent of US soldiers fired their weapons during battle. This figure was arrived at by conducting interviews with rifleman after an engagement had taken place. Except that Marshal took no written records of the interviews. He does not even seem to have been consistent with the number of companies he claims to have interviewed, the initial claim of 400 in Men Against Fire latter being inflated to 600. Marshals surviving notebooks don’t contain any statistical calculations arriving at the 25 percent figure. Marshal is known to have misrepresented other aspects of his military career such as claiming to have led soldier’s in combat during World War One when he didn’t (he was likely promoted after the armistice). All of these issues have led some historians to conclude that the ratio of fire figures Marshal cited were simply a fabrication. Ultimately the reason Marshal’s ratio of fire figures can’t be considered as evidence is that although they may be true, we have no good reason to believe he did not simply make them up.
It’s worth noting that regardless of the merits of Men Against Fire the issue of soldier’s willingness or not to fire their weapons in anger is a hotly debated one. The basic concept of soldier’s being unwilling to fire seems to be supported by some combat veterans but not others. All kinds of factors play a role not being limited to, the socialisation of the soldiers, who the enemies are, combat tactics, circumstances of the battle, training etc. Grossman following the tradition of Marshal, has placed a heavy if not exclusive influence on the training of the soldiers. Marshal himself concluded that 55 percent of soldiers in the Korean war fired their weapons. A supposedly dramatic increase compared to his world war two estimates, which he attributed to a change in army training policy (partly giving himself and his work in Men Against Fire credit for a dramatic improvement in the efficiency of the US army). Grossman attempts to support his citing of S.L.A Marshal with supporting claims about soldier’s unwillingness to kill during the black powder musket era, weapons being found loaded many times on civil war battlefields and so on. Being so wedded to the idea of the peaceful soldier, he suggests troops of Muscat man firing harmlessly over each other from a distance of 30 yards for as long as an hour. Without going into detail about the difficulty of reconstructing civil war battles this detour into the black powder era seems a distraction from the fact On Killing is based on a single unreliable source masquerading as scientific evidence.
Having established the counterintuitive notion of the unwilling soldier as a supposed truth, Grossman offers as a simple solution. Human Beings he asserts have an in built powerful psychological aversion to killing our own kind. To this point, during his lectures infused with Christian values, he constantly returns, often applying this insight to contexts that seem more than a little bit of a stretch. How stress effects the brain is clearly complicated and it’s not clear that the psychological default reaction would be to freeze — an officer panicking and shooting wildly could also be possible.
Killology expands well beyond explaining individual behaviour and encompasses a sociological theory of violence in society. The key tenant of this theory is that there are three kinds of people, Wolves who commit violence, sheep who are largely incapable of violence not comprehending we live in a dangerous world and sheep dogs. Sheep dogs are those who through training overcome their peaceful nature to enable themselves to commit legitimate acts of violence to protect sheep from wolves. Everyone with the necessary motivation is encouraged to take on the role of sheepdog, which is convenient as it expands the clientele of what is ultimately a lucrative business. Why humans do bad things has been theorised in many ways, Hannah Arendt’s classic The Banality of Evil standing out as a classic of the genre. In the Banality of Evil Arendt explains the holocaust as a result of ordinary people doing terrible things. Some modern scholars continue to support the idea that we can all be culpable in acts of human cruelty more easily than we might imagine, or perhaps might like to imagine. Perhaps we are all like “sheep” in sense more easily influenced than we or moralists would like to believe.
The debate about human cruelty is a rich one not likely to be resolved soon. There’s questionable scholarship on the other side of the debate as well, as Phillip Zimbardo’s famous Prison experiment continues to come under scrutiny. The prison experiment shares something in common with Men against Fire, in that it captured the public imagination and gained a certain prestige for itself before scrutiny could be applied, leaving critics to play a game of catch up. Zimbardo “Slam” Marshal and Grossman, all possess a certain entrepreneurial streak and a savviness about promoting their ideas.
It’s difficult to know how the gospel of killology really influences police behaviour and therefore what if any harm Grossman might have caused. His role as a police trainer and expert witness is concerning considering the shaky foundations of much of what he teaches, which should bring his credibility as a scholar into question. Undoubtedly, he benefits from a vacuum in which American police training is arguably far from adequate. As of 2013 when the last systemic survey was conducted by the justice department, the average time spent in basic training for American police was 840 hours or 21 weeks (not including field training). Training standards being very diverse across states this indicates some police received significantly less training than even 21 weeks. When one considers that police face a range of complex situations — anything from a live fire situation, to responding to a distressed person with severe mental illness — this low level of training seems absurd. Even in less high stake’s situation police deal with complex interpersonal engagements and must interpret the law correctly in a real-world context. American police training seems to focus particularly on those skills which are necessary in life threatening situations. This is understandable, given policing is more dangerous than in other countries due to the high firearm homicide rate. 38 Officers have been fatally shot so fare in 2019. However low levels of training in other areas is a problem. Debates about how police are trained and how they operate are valid, but at some point, you get what you pay for — although it would be great to have better evidence for or against this point.
Seventy-two years after the publication of Men Against Fire the work continues to have a mystifying level of influence. It has been cited by many succeeding generations of historians and continues to influence military training. Grossmans invented scholarly field of Killology, is just the latest effort to bring this collection of bad zombie ideas back to life. The Killology gospel represents about the most ambitious house of cards which could be constructed on the narrow evidence base of the discredited ratio of fire statistics. In the process of creating this ideological zombie Grossman has accrued money and influence for himself — while ultimately impacting the training of police across the united states, for better or worse.