Originally Posted by law dawg
Read On Killing by Col. Dave Grossman. It will enlighten you. It follows warfare and personal and impersonal killing from early musket days to today. In WWII only 15-20% of soldiers actually fired their weapons at the enemy. After the war the military looked at these stats and revised their training. Rate was up to 55-60% in Korea. Further revisions were made. That figure was raised to 95% in Vietnam.
The stats don't lie - even trained soldiers in WWII had only, at best, a 20% engagement rate. At that was TRAINED. Want to bet what percentage will "fight back" on a plane? And how long will it take them to do so.
No thanks, I'll stick to the trained (with all the new methodologies) FAMs, FFDOs and LEOs.
I HAVE read it and I wasn't terribly impressed on this particular issue. It would take too long to explain why I believe (and why many of my colleagues in my Air War College seminar believe) his numbers were taken out of context and didn't adequately address such key aspects as demographics, tactics & doctrine, force structure, etc, changes that make it virtually impossible, or irrelevant, to normalize the statistics for comparative purposes. I know you base most of your argument on 4 flights and a couple of hundred people in total. But, that's hardly enough data points to draw any sort of quantitative and defendable comparison.