Comment by rdtsc
12 hours ago
> the most damaging part of direct combat is watching people that you consider to be family die or be maimed.
I've heard from various places over the years (documentaries, friends) that soldiers really fight for their comrades at the end of the day. As in when asked "why are you here fighting" if they are in front of a news crews or something where they have to say "we're bringing democracy to ..." they'll just say something like "those fuckers blew my buddy up and I am here to pay them back".
That's a well studied topic in military history/science called unit cohesion. The saying goes that morale gets the soldiers to the battlefield, cohesion is what keeps them there. In order to withstand the psychological horrors of combat, soldiers need that comradery otherwise they'll run off at the first chance they get. There needs to be some anchor keeping the soldier in the way of danger, whether that's social pressure or years of intense training together.
Brett Devereaux has talked about it multiple times on his blog in various different contexts (most recently two weeks ago)[1][2][3]:
[1] https://acoup.blog/2026/07/24/collections-pre-modern-armies-...
[2] https://acoup.blog/2022/07/01/collections-total-generalship-...
[3] https://acoup.blog/tag/cohesion/
I was in the military and in my experience people that chose to go into war zones, it's optional, are fucked in the head and literally enjoy killing people, I've seen it a dozen times. They want to kill.
Id recommend anyone to give "Generation Kill" series a watch.
You are absolutely fucking full of shit.
I chose to "go into war zones" many times and none of it was to "enjoy killing people".
Not sure what military is being discussed. In the US military, you do not choose to go into combat zones. You receive orders to deploy you to a combat zone.
Then you aren't one of the dozens he has seen?
You ought to be able to back this up with sources other than trust me bro
No one runs into machine gun fire to bring democracy to someone else I can assure you of that.
That's probably false as you can see historically that ideological armies have far better morale and better effectiveness
"Bringing democracy" is a very weak ideological motivation. I would rather call it plausible deniability. As in "we're doing this to bring democracy" and people might be left with the doubt that it's true.
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