reality check: army training with acceptable casualties

[H.Flashman(VC)]

I was watching a documentary about dutch veterans of the colonial war in Indonesia just after World War II. One of the Dutch veterans, who had volunteered for service in the war said that before he was send, he had followed a special military training in the United States. He claimed that this training tried to emulate as best it could the real deal. He said that they used live ammo and that a casualty rate of 5 % was acceptable. (He said that this indeed prepare him better than others for the ordeals)
This must have been in the first two years after WW II. Can this story be true or partly true?

 

[La Rouge Beret]

Conducting live fire drills are an integral part of military training, i.e. your section / platoon / company / battalion all utilise live ammunition and potentially other supporting arms during an exercise.

The other option that you are referring to would be a battle inoculation range, where you might fight through an obstacle course with live rounds being fired overhead & explosives detonating near you (obviously safety ranges are carefully observed).

In the past they might have been more accepting of casualties, but you can conduct the training above with no casualties.

 

[Riain]

During the Vietnam war the Australian Army had more deaths in training at home than in combat in Vietnam. Of course the death rate was higher in Vietnam, but it illustrates that when the alternative is death in combat dangerous training at home is the lesser of two evils.

 

[Sam R.]

Large institutions kill people.

In the past [being a determinate Marxist on the expansion of the general volume of commodities bought by value] human life was worth fewer years of university or number of refrigerators. Now a life by either expected lifetime earning / quality life years / insurance cost is “worth” more in terms of televisions than in 1947. In 1947 televisions were more expensive and human life was cheaper.

When large institutions have a cheap input, frictional losses are generally ignored. Life was cheap. Friction was ignored.

Better administrators (back when such a job was a senior position, not merely executive but policy level) did the sums on how many dead 17 year olds it’s worth for an A or B line light infantry division. They still do, though now I expect it is outsourced to insurance firms that cost more per year than retained division 1 or 2 public servants.

Additionally the concept of duty of care has changed. Under early master and servant law only a disobedient or incompetent servant could get their arm ripped off by an unguarded machine, or stand up during a live fire simulation. Now days masters have an expanded duty of care. The determinist in me would argue that’s because our lives are worth more refrigerators and the cost of producing one 17 year old is more play stations and years of schooling and more calories.

(Organised European militaries before the generalisation of capitalist social relations had similar conceptions, see also loss rates due to illness. Though in the case of the military revolution from pre-renaissance Italy it is arguable that band leaders did evaluate input costs in producing mercenary companies).

Yours,
Sam R.

 

[Mike D]

I've read that the huge (Corps+ size) BAOR/NATO exercises back in the 70s and 80s had an acceptable casualty rate of something like 5 or 10% before they were cancelled.

Unfortunately people are hurt or killed during military training all the time - even without live ammunition you've got hazards like crossing rivers (day or night), the weather, unknown health defects (strenuous training and a heart defect you don't know you have don't mix), large numbers of vehicles and other heavy equipment like bridges etc (often with poor driver visability, driving without lights at night and sometimes hampered even more by NBC equipment) and generally high risk activities such as parachuting (a number of TA Paras died during an exercise back in the 70s when they drifted into the Kiel canal on a night jump).

 

[Michele]

I was watching a documentary about dutch veterans of the colonial war in Indonesia just after World War II. One of the Dutch veterans, who had volunteered for service in the war said that before he was send, he had followed a special military training in the United States. He claimed that this training tried to emulate as best it could the real deal. He said that they used live ammo and that a casualty rate of 5 % was acceptable. (He said that this indeed prepare him better than others for the ordeals)
This must have been in the first two years after WW II. Can this story be true or partly true?

You won't see that number as too shocking when you consider that "casualty" means "dead and wounded". Back in WWII, you could expect, in the case of the best equipped armies (which therefore also had the best first-aid, evacuation, field hospital etc. services), 8 WIA per 1 KIA. In training (with medical facilities more readily available and action stopping when you want it to), that's probably 9:1. So a heavy training course including 200 soldiers firing live ammo (and note that that does not imply that they were also shot at with live ammo) would mean 9 wounded and 1 dead, amounting to 5% casualties. When you consider that most of the wounded probably are victims of injuries and accidents rather than of shooting, that's relatively reasonable for the 1940s-1950s.

 

[riggerrob]

Michele pointed to our perception of casualties.

For example, a few years back the a few American paratroopers died when they jumped during a huge exercise. While casualties were in the 1 percent range, journalists and the American public got terribly upset.
Bottom line, during large exercises, you are going to break a few legs, wreck a few trucks and crash a helicopter or two.

Public perception varies widely from one country to the next. Consider how desperately a small nation like Israel does everything possible to reduce casualties, while their Muslim fanatic opponents cheerfully sacrifice dozens or hundreds of young people in hopes of killing one or two Israeli civilians.

 

[CalBear]

Back in the late 70s a couple Marine recruits were killed during a live firing drill (it was the classic "crawl under strung barbed wire with a machine gun firing above the height of the wire" that seems to be part of every recruit training syllabus on Earth) idea is to get personnel used to noise confusion stress while still not being really dangerous. IIRC, the wire is strung two feet high (67 centimeters), the gun is set up with a barrier that will not allow it to fire lower than three feet (1 meter) and you have to go under it both on your belly and on your back, with your rifle and web gear. No way you should be able to get more than a couple dings from the wire, if that. One two separate occasions, within a couple months, two separate recruits managed to have full blown panic attacks and somehow managed to STAND UP, having pushed through the wire (which had to be tough as hell, not to mention a world class owie) in the middle of the obstacle and caught a bullet. People freaked out, one of the recruits was from the Bay Area up on the Peninsula, and the local media was howling for changes. Local LIBERAL DEMOCRAT House member, who had been an active member of Uncle Sam's Misguided Children in his youth, just slammed the Media.

Used the "more you bleed in training, the less you bleed in combat" defense and pointed out how many ten of thousands of recruits go through the same training with no issues. Finished with something along the lines of "the military is not a danger free world, deal with it". Some locals had a conniption fit. He carried his district by 30 point next election.

 

[Riain]

The real problem is when safety precautions are not taken or ignored deliberately or by pigheaded negligence. There's a world of difference with a drunk instructor with an attitude problem killing recruits by going outside the bounds of safety and a person having a panic attack in an tightly controlled and properly risk mitigated but otherwise dangerous training environment.

 

[Sam R.]

While you can get bad safety cultures in high labour cost industries (universities, hospitals), generally as the price of labour increases in absolute “units of televisions” terms safety culture in general improves. Not just because higher ups demand smaller loss rates to make return on investment, but as there are fewer incompetent mate of a mate drunken inspectors tolerated.