Only 25% of troops in combat actually fire their wepons

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One point is obvious — I.E.D.’s cause the highest raw numbers of injuries in both wars. From Oct. 7, 2001, through Aug. 1, 2009, explosive devices caused 25,353 casualties in the American ranks. Gunshot injuries caused 4,102 casualties. But as in past wars, the likelihood of an American dying from an I.E.D. once injured — 9.7 percent — remained far behind the dangers of the bullets, which killed 20.3 percent of the soldiers they struck. (This excludes 127 non-hostile deaths caused by gunshot injuries. Gunshot suicides skew bullet lethality data upward.) ....

To digress. Lethality has changed with improvements in trauma medicine. Soldiers are surviving detonation injuries at a higher rate than in past wars. On the down slide the survivors have significant brain trauma & we are having a forced education in TBI & related matters.
 

FBKampfer

Banned
We have records throughout history of standing armies that there has historically been massive discrepancy between hit probability in training (even under fairly realistic conditions) and combat hit probability.

Notable is that gun crews, tank crews, and aircraft pilots, while there is a decrease in accuracy (attributable to stress, hurridness, reduced visibility, fatigue, etc), do not suffer the same degree of drop in hit probability.

It seems reasonable that the difference is there is an easy detachment from what you're doing (aim at a tank, not the tank crew, shoot down a plane, not a pilot, just fire at your assigned target coordinates, not specifically a machine gun nest with real people in it).

Notable is that one must have a certain callousness to perform as a sniper, perhaps the most intimate way to shoot an enemy, where you see and stalk an individual as an individual.


I think the real breakthrough was in training for conditioned response, to a large extent bypassing the individual's tendency to, consciously or subconsciously, miss the mark.
 
I found it a weird stat. I always heard the opposite, and working with lots of x vets it was a more about firing to much.

That was also other people's impression. I once read of a standing joke in the British Army during WW2.


"When the British open fire, the Germans all dive for cover.

When the Germans open fire, the British all dive for cover.

When the Americans open fire, *everybody* dives for cover".
 
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