‘Black Mirror’ Fact Check: Do Most Soldiers Really Not Shoot?
The fifth episode of the Netflix series’ third season joins “Full Metal Jacket” and “All Quiet on the Western Front” as one of the most powerful visual accounts of how war actually works.
In “Men Against Fire” the enemies are called “Roaches,” and soldiers are given implants that make these enemies — who are actually scared, fragile humans — appear to be vampiric monsters.
Late in the episode, a military psychologist played by Michael Kelly explains to a soldier nicknamed Stripe, played by Malachi Kirby, that one of the biggest problem in war is that so many combatants see their enemies’ humanity.
Which is a good thing.
[...] your future depends on wiping out the enemy …
The Problem of Battle Command, is an influential book by Samuel Lyman Marshall, nicknamed “Slam,” a World War I veteran, newspaper reporter and military historian who said that in combat, no more than one in four men will generally fire their weapons.
Marshall proposed changes to increase the amount of shooting and killing, and according to a summary of his book, the ratio of fire more than doubled from World War II to the Korean War, just a few years later.
[...] it just may be that Samuel Lyman Marshall made the whole thing up.
Smoler also cites an argument that in a by-the-book divisional assault — he offers a very in-the-weeds account of how such assaults are carried out — it might be entirely possible that the vast majority of soldiers might have no orders or reason to fire.
Whatever the facts, what makes “Men Against Fire” — the book and the episode — so frightening is the idea that someone would make a cold calculation that war would be better if it were more ruthless, not less.
There’s a utilitarian argument — you may have heard it in a philosophy class — that it was more ethical for President Truman to order the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II than it would have been to invade Japan.
(The number of people who died by bomb and atomic fallout has been conservatively estimated at 225,000, but could be far higher.) We’re supposed to solve a hellish crisis with a math problem:
Part of what feels so sickening about the utilitarian framing is that the by-the-numbers approach ignores almost everything but numbers, and fails to assign a numerical value to the concept of humanity.
The technology serves as a symbol for almost any kind of weapon, from guns to atomic bombs to missiles to drones, that allow us to kill from greater physical and emotional distance.
The soldiers we meet on “Black Mirror” have slipped far, far down the slippery slope, and now they’re killing people they shouldn’t, enemies they don’t see as human, and becoming less human themselves.
The episode makes a powerful case that soldiers should be able to see the real faces of their supposed enemies, and make their own decisions about who deserves to die.