Qualifier: Former US special operations operator that served in multiple wars.
My anecdotal take is there are many ways that shock and trauma can accumulate through training and war that are far beyond the minimal effects of an M4.
Firearms: While the primary weapons systems are the M4 and side arm (pistol), there are many weapons systems utilized by special operations such as sniper rifles, crew serve weapons, and niche small arms.
The M82 sniper rifle shoots a 50 BMG round. In either the bolt action or semi-auto versions they feel like you are getting punched in the face when you shoot them.
Crew serve weapons like the MK19 and M2 do pack a punch. The MK19 is a machine gun that shoots 40mm grenades. The M2 is a .50 cal machine gun. These weapons systems are mounted, but the percussion of them is still far greater than an M4.
More niche arms like the M249 SAW, M16 HBAR, full-auto AKs, M240 Golf, MP9, etc are not as mild as the standard M4/M16.
Blasts: There are many types of blasts encountered such as Mortars (inbound and outbound), Flash Bangs, Entry charges, IEDs, Landmines, etc. These do make your head ring if you are close enough to them.
In my own personal experience there are many other daily jarring events that aren't nearly as sexy to talk about. Riding in the back of a 5 ton will almost shake your brain out of your head. Riding in an LCAC (hovercraft) is like riding in a 5 ton. Doing boat work in Zodiacs will bounce you all over the place, especially when doing surf passages. Doing hydrographic surveys right where the surf breaks will pound you for hours and make you a little sick afterwards. When your chute opens on a jump, if jumping round chutes, will make you see stars...the landing is not a soft pretty one like rectangle chutes...you hit the ground hard.
There are many more ways your body gets pounded on a daily basis far in excess of the weapons you use.
The article links to a USSOCOM-funded study. In your opinion, are they (as a whole) seriously concerned with mitigating this issue or is it just checking the box? The worry is this can be similar to the buried diesel tank issue contaminating water, which was known for decades but seemed to be ignored (possibly out of liability concerns).
I'm not sure how much of it you can minimize. You can only control what you can control...and war/combat is chaos. Honestly it seems most things in relation to this over the years has been on treatment, not so much prevention.
Thank you for sharing. It's a tragedy that this does not have enough mitigation and follow-up treatment. Armed forces are a necessity, and should not damage a generation beyond repair, and especially not in relative peace.
The tools used, as you’re undoubtedly aware, go far beyond small arms. Family members in the Army have talked about training to clear houses where they want to avoid going through a heavily defended doorway so they put an explosive against a wall, duck around the corner, light it off, pick themselves up, and run through the newly created entryway.
Round chutes (cupolas) are designed to get soldiers from the plane to the ground quickly.
Quickly enough to remain the least possible amount of time in the air where they are an easy target for any ground troop. (This is why soldiers are dropped from very low altitudes; 400m is usual, but some combat drops occurred at even lower altitudes)
But not too quickly that too many of the dropped soldiers end up unable to fight from the hardness of the landing. Please note that it is assumed that some will get hurt on the landing, and the calculus is designed to balance the risk in the air with the risk of the landing.
In contrast, rectangular chutes (wings) are designed to be dropped from higher than 900m, steered in the air, and to provide a very comfortable landing (as long as the surface of the wing is adequate for the suspended weight). They were also introduced for skydiving as a sport, and only later found some military use.
Why is the danger sickening? Of course the equipment is dangerous -- it all exists so you can kill people and not die well beyond any natural level, and there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Sickening like working a construction job. When you're killing yourself in slow motion (the impact, the noise, the chemicals!), and there's no way out.
Most injuries involve an element of luck or skill, and the ego serves as a natural buffer.
Consistent, unavoidable, permanent, self-inflicted damage is different. It hurts in its own (sickening) way.
This is discussed in the article, the mechanism is thought to be different:
>It was not chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., which is found in football players and other athletes who have been repeatedly hit in the head. It was something new.
Depression is a lot like being drunk. There’s a point where you wish you could puke and get it over with but it’s just not happening. As I understand it there’s a lot of ex football players in this state. Just hopelessly miserable but not on suicide watch. Or on their way to Parkinson’s.
They need to implement weight limits in football just like are in use in most other contact sports. You don't force boxers to go up against guys 50+ lbs heavier than they are, over and over, daily in practice and weekly in games.
the article also mentions that they'd all trained extensively in diving deep underwater, which is also known to cause brain damage, but the 'interface astroglial scarring' pathology lab results sound pretty specific to big shock waves
i'm skeptical that firing a rifle produces shock waves that induce cavitation in brain tissue, though
> .50 cal sniper rifles and shoulder launched weapons like Carl Gustaf, the M72 LAW or the AT4 can [produce shock waves that induce cavitation in brain tissue]
The US military, and militaries in general, do not use weapons like the M82/M107 as sniper rifles very often. The M82/M107 in particular has a recoiling barrel (the entire 2.5' barrel slides back when shooting) and isn't a very precise weapon.
They're used for blowing up ordinance or disabling light vehicles. They are sometimes used for hostage situations because they're more likely to immediately disable someone.
The US military has pretty rarely used shoulder fired weapons, since they very rarely have to worry about tanks or aircraft. SEALs in particular wouldn't be doing that.
> The US military has pretty rarely used shoulder fired weapons, since they very rarely have to worry about tanks or aircraft. SEALs in particular wouldn't be doing that.
Do you know that, or are you thinking "these are AT weapons so they wouldn't be used"?
I haven't worked with US forces on a tactical level, but I have served in Afghanistan with my own country's SOFs. We used M72s extensively, even though we never engaged any armor.
I wasn't around for this picture, but it illustrates the point:
Generally, you're limited to firing 6 rounds or less per day during training due to blast & shockwave effects. The guys we trained with didn't have that much ammo on hand, anyway, but interesting to know.
It's loud when you are the loader/spotter or are standing close by. It's not loud at all if you are the one firing it (with your head practically on the tube). That is my experience anyway.
Not loud at all but it gives you a distinctive feeling like you've been slapped in the base of the skull by God. The Carl G was the first thing that came to my mind when I read the article.
Having fired a .50 cal sniper rifle just a couple of times, I was all set. The shock wave from each trigger pull made my nasopharynx hurt. That couldn't have been good.
How much do special forces use weapons significantly more specialized than the standard issue M4? CoD suggests that every operator is slinging a sniper rifle and some highly customized exotic small batch assault rifle; however, I'm guessing that's likely just to make the games more exciting.
HS friend of mine was SF so this info is OEF/OIF-era information and could very likely be different today. You are not going to be able to just pick whatever weapon you want, but you are going to have a wide array of training and be able to pick something more specialized to the mission, whereas for the most part if you're some random infantry grunt you just use your rifle for everything. But if you're a random infantry grunt your M4 is going to be a good rifle for all your missions - you're not going to need a silenced SMG/PCC or something that can reach out 800 yards. Sidearms are similar, it's not carte blanche but among what is available you can carry whatever you are comfortable with within the scope of the mission.
You're much more likely to see SF guys with short-barreled rifles, pistol-caliber carbines, suppressors on everything, etc. For all the (justified) complaints about military overspending, there just aren't the resources or training available to give every rifleman a suppressor.
plenty of troops shooting a lot outdoors. enlisted grunts shooting a machine guns, etc. lots of civilian shooters as well.
lead is also easy to detect in blood, or via things like hair samples. no doubt SF types are getting more residue than most, but again fairly easy to notice
Not really a concern outdoors. Ben Stoeger, world shooting champion and firearms trainer who shoots a lot, said his blood lead levels are normal and attributes it to shooting outdoors.
One counterexample may be sufficient to disprove a hypothesis. If you claim a certain quadratic equation has no roots and I give you one root, you can’t say “n=1”.
Claims about populations in medicine are not very much like math theorems. There are too many exceptions for a single case study to settle the question.
What I've heard is they do/did a lot of explosive breaching. Then things like recoilless rifles, heavy machine guns or if you use a .50 caliber sniper rifle might further contribute to the situation.
I'm not sure if these types of units usually dive that deep that you would be worried about brain damage, but I'm less familiar with that side of things. Diving probably hasn't been that much of a focus during the recent years in the middle east either.
FWIW The standard rifles used by the US Military (M16 and it's variants/decedents) are fairly low power, low recoil, and quiet as rifles go. Of course I'm not doctor so maybe they are still enough to cause damage and like another poster pointed out, there are other weapons that soldiers use which are much more powerful.
Mostly agree - I'd like to add that 5.56 seems like a toy until you bring it inside to play, where it's an entirely different story... The first shot feels like someone slamming the switch off on your ears. I wouldn't think this is the cause of brain damage though. IMO the overexposure SEALs have to the modern warfare breach charge is a huge red flag.
The M16 platform has small projectiles, but there’s a lot of powder behind them.
They are pretty loud, more so if you’re to the left or, especially, right where the ejection port sits.
My guess for SEALs is the breaching charges play a big role. Carl Gustafs are notorious as well, but I don't know whether SEALs use them. US Army Special Forces do.
Edit: Yeah, I should clarify to say the M16 is more likely to cause hearing damage, but not brain damage. The concussive force isn't that bad.
As far as rifles go 5.56 is about as anemic of a round as you can get and have it still be fit for purpose in a military or defense context. You can't even hunt most things with it because it's not powerful enough. They only way these rifles are causing brain damage is if you're on the wrong end of one.
They are however incredibly loud. Being close to someone shooting 556 with a brake is a really annoying experience and I would not be shocked if there were follow on effects.
If I understood it right, its firing artillery, not rifles. Even then I doubt cavitation, but not shock echos at density borders tearing he tissues at the border.
You state a lot of random things as a fact, while none of them are, not sure why the upvotes.
Other react mostly to guns, but as a diver I can assure you that there is no automatic brain damage from 'diving deep underwater', whatever that layman term means. There are many folks in diving community with 10s of thousand of dives working cognitively as well as their peers. If you mean Nitrox for bigger depths, again that ain't true, Nitrox is actually better than regular compressed air re effects like nitrogen bubbles in your bloodstream.
If you screw up or your equipment fails and end up with decompression sickness thats another story, but its like saying paragliding breaks your legs.
that was my inference, but i don't have much information about seal training, so i could be wrong. it's a little irrelevant though because, as i said originally, the description of the type of brain damage should rule out diving as a cause
I don't really have a source, but anecdotal evidence... Some of my commercial diver friends got really fucked up after a while of doing it.
One of my friends in particular had a saturation dive go really bad and he came back a completely different person. Like going from someone living the life to a complete wreck in one month.
Famously the Navy SEALs' entry exam-slash-basic training is named "Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL" as a carry-over from its WWII Underwater Demolition Team legacy, maybe GP is referring to that?
technically they didn't die _from_ doing underwater breath holding training _directly_. they fainted (the question at hand is - does the training up to this point cause brain damage) and then drowned.
"Collectively, these observations suggest that increased cerebral oxidative stress following prolonged apnea in trained divers may reflect a functional physiologic response, rather than a purely maladaptive phenomenon."
so, this paper neither is relevant for seal training nor does it claim any harm caused by breath holding, based on the Abstract section.
yeah, maybe this paper isn't the most relevant source. hopefully you can find a better one if learning about this is important to you, i suggest reading the papers it references, or related papers in google scholar. i'm super not motivated to help you right now because you're acting like if you're wrong about something it's my responsibility to convince you
this kind of bullshit is really frustrating. my comment already explained that the kind of brain damage caused by apnea isn't the kind the pathology reports found, so it absolutely doesn't matter whether seal training involves apnea or not, or exactly what conditions are needed for apnea-induced brain damage, unless you have some strong reason for believing that the news article's reporting of the pathology is wrong
so actually it's fine with me for you to continue being wrong if you want. i don't have anything to sell you
well, i read plenty about breathing techniques and training from various angles and also practice breath exercises where hyperventilation and breath holding play key roles. i never came across anybody claiming that holding your breath especially pre-fainting (which is essential when practicing apnoe diving - and btw you seem to confuse apnoe with sleep apnea?).
to add something of substance - here is a study that does not even find any "Link between Repeated Transient Chokes and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Related Effects" and that kind of asphyxiation is obviously much more extreme than holding your breath.
There was a rather scathing study on it here. [1] In short the government's own internal investigations realized the obvious answer, a mass hysteria event, was the most likely culprit. But politics got involved and so then they classified reports mentioning this, and released reports suggestive of foreign adversaries attacking people with some mystery weapon, even though their own internal reports put the chances of that at basically zero. So they then set out so study and solve the issue, unsurprisingly finding nothing. The paper's concluding paraph is brutal:
---
Over the course of their 6-year investigation into “Havana Syndrome” U.S. officials expended considerable human capital and financial resources going down a rabbit hole searching for exotic explanations. Instead of finding secret weapons and foreign conspiracies—they found only rabbits. For in the end, prosaic explanations were determined to be the cause of the events in Cuba and its subsequent global spread. That is the lesson of “Havana Syndrome”—follow the science.
The pentagon is funding $750k in testing to re-create the effects of Havana Syndrome on ferrets and more studies without the details.
“It is necessary to use an animal like a ferret that has brain structures resembling the “gyrencephalic nature” of the human brain; mice and rats do not fulfill this criteria, according to the summary. The brain tissue of gyrencephalic animals, like humans, ferrets, pigs and primates, resembles ridges and valleys, compared to smooth surfaces of the brains of lissencephalic animals, such as mice and rats.”
“You don’t get approval for animal testing unless the science is there. … You’ve already proven out that the science is correct and exists, and now you are looking at the biological impacts that can’t be modeled and you need a specimen to determine what it does biologically,” the former official said.
Past tense - that study was supposed to run from September 30 2022 to September 29 2023. [1] It ended up being cancelled with most of the DoD's money being returned by March 20th. [2]
Usually when I read or watch something news related, I try to revert it back into the author's outline. What I mean is that when somebody's writes an article, they start with a few facts, and then add a bunch of words and, in modern times, spin on top. But I'm mostly only interested in those few facts. They can be compared against other sources, challenged (or verified), and so on. So for instance in the article for this topic it'd look something like:
- a very small minority of navy seals have committed suicide after exhibiting signs of psychological disorders
- post-mortem analysis showed damage that could be related to exposure to blasts
- blasts causing brain damage? perhaps in training?
Everything else that's written is (to me) pretty much irrelevant. Because in science, a good scientist engaging in good science would now setout to reject their own hypothesis. And only after trying to refute it in every way imaginable might they begin to accept it as even possible, and then set out to test it, again with the goal of rejecting it, so much as possible. But media goes the other way and now runs around collecting statements, data, and evidence in favor of their hypothesis, but you can collect practically endless evidence in support of ideas that are false (which is why science focuses on rejecting your own ideas instead), so it's quite a pointless endeavor.
I tried to do the same with the 60 minutes article (going by the transcript), but failed. The reason is that what they presented sounds pretty silly if you remove it from the "flow." A Russian working in America as a chef, who previously worked as a military comms guy, is arrested for speeding/evading arrest and has a device to allegedly wipe his car's comp? That doesn't even really qualify as circumstantial evidence, because it's just not at all logically connected unless you're playing a game of "connect the dots." And one can do that, but in the end you mostly just end up drawing a Jackson Pollock.
That doesn't read like science, it reads like an ideological statement. The current punishment for scientific fraud is non-existent and academia is full of it and ideologically driven pseudoscientific research.
Subsequent evidence debunked that "post-mortem", as another user posted.
We've seen, with evidence, China pressure research groups and Nature into calling the lab leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory. Like "fake news", "conspiracy theory" is now actively used by China as a way to shut down evidence.
From subpoenaed communications we even know that certain figures who publicly denounced the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy, privately believed the theory was likely.
Government covert operations are not the kind of phenomenon science can properly study because it's not reproducible and data is not open. It's the realm of investigative journalism and intelligence.
I would quite strongly disagree with you here. When researchers engage in academic dishonesty, it not only tends to have extremely negative consequences for themselves in terms of ability to publish, acquire grants, etc but it also directly and significantly affects the journals they published in. And in the case of the COVID stuff, public health officials who officially mislead people may also face criminal consequences, with ongoing investigations pursuing that exact outcome this very moment. [1]
But when journalists or intelligence agencies lie, exactly nothing happens. Intelligence agencies clearly see lying as just part of their retinue of weapons. And the media in general has mostly become a mixture of entertainment and bias confirmation. The internet seems to have largely killed the traditional role of the media as the bearer of information and knowledge on the happenings of the day.
While public health officials may face criminal charges, Nature magazine editors and the team of researchers that were contacted by the Chinese government and lied walked away with nothing close to extremely negative consequences. I didn't claim public health officials can fraud without consequence, I said researchers can. I can't find one instance of misleading science for political purposes lead to academic consequences for fraudulent researchers. There were researchers arrested for connections with Chinese Military by the US government but if it were up to Harvard I speculate nothing would be done, because it never has been done, as far as I know and looked at.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/harvard-university-professor-...
I also didn't claim Journalists and Intelligence Agencies are bearers of truth but it stands that to study something like Lab Leak or Havana Syndrome is a question in the realm of investigation, not science. No?
Peter is risking criminal consequences based on evidence gathered by investigation, not the scientific process. Also not because of purposefully misleading research but dangerous research and lies while testifying, which isn't fraudulent science.
I feel like you're getting close to pulling a no true Scotsman here with claiming that Peter Daszak isn't being "really" punished (even though he's now lost all funding, will likely be debarred preventing him from securing future Federal funding, and his career is basically dead) because of the "medium" through which he was/is being punished.
But if you want a more general case, just check out Retraction Watch. You'll find that consequences are very real, they're just not the sort that typically make the news. For instance looking up cases at Harvard, I randomly picked Sam W Lee. [1] The final charge against him was in 2019. Since then he has not only been terminated at Harvard, but has not had a single publication - meaning he likely has been unable to find a position at another university, nor has he been able to independently publish. [2]
Then there was this: "Unraveling Havana Syndrome: New evidence links the GRU's assassination Unit 29155 to mysterious attacks on U.S. officials and their families"
Do you not realize when you're reading literal propaganda? This quote is but one section from there, which I clicked to because it had a silly heading - and it delivered.
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A consensus has formed among the growing community of AHI sufferers that the U.S. government — and the CIA in particular — is hiding the full extent of what it knows about the source of Havana Syndrome. The victims offer two general hypotheses as to why. The first is that releasing the full intelligence around Russian involvement might be so shocking as to convince the American people and their representatives that Moscow has committed an act of war against the United States, thereby raising thorny questions as to how a nuclear power fond of showing off its hypersonic missiles ought to be made to pay.
---
Okay, so Russia is running around randomly attacking low level embassy workers, and the US knows this and is playing PR for Russia, because they're worried about US citizens viewing Russia negatively. I'm sure there's far more absurd mental gymnastics in there as well, as that was literally from the first section I clicked to. When we get out of this clown world era and back to something vaguely resembling normalcy, there's about a 100% chance that these "citizen investigative journalists" are mostly all going to end up having been little more than Operation Mockingbird 2.0. [1]
Russia isn't "running around randomly". Their (alleged) actions are very targeted and deliberate.
"attacking low level embassy workers"
Do you think really they'd pick the US president as their first target on an experimental (or even proven) weapon? And I wouldn't call embassy employees "random" in any context.
>US knows this and is playing PR for Russia, because they're worried about US citizens viewing Russia negatively
As a student of history, there are hundreds of reasons and prior examples of governments hiding the true capabilities of nations they consider enemies or adversaries. This allows them time to investigate and create a defense, it also appease the public becuase telling everyone "hey everyone watch out our advisory has this super top secret weapon to which we have no defense!" is not a great idea.
The idea that the US would "play PR for Russia" is absurd.
I'd recommend reading the study. You're making some false claims. In particular quoting the study:
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While the U.S. Government allowed the release of the [politicized findings which suggested weapons as a possible cause], they withheld the results of other investigations that were skeptical of the condition. In 2018, the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded that mass psychogenic illness was most likely responsible for the outbreak. While the report remains classified, its conclusions were leaked to the media. The contents of a second classified report were only released in September 2021 after a Freedom of Information Act filing. It found the role of microwave radiation “highly unlikely,” and that psychogenic illness appeared to play a role
---
The political establishment was actively trying to suggest it was caused by secret weapons from "foreign adversaries", and classifying the opinions which contradicted that. They were undermined by a mixture of leaks and Freedom of Information Act requests. People claiming to suffer from the syndrome numbered in the hundreds in 70 countries around the world [1], including many Western nations where "foreign adversaries" would stand minimal chance of deploying any sort of a weapon, even more so after the initial incidents. Notably, from the same article, workers who reported suffering from 'Havana Syndrome' were able to receive compensation of up to $200,000.
> Notably, from the same article, workers who reported suffering from 'Havana Syndrome' were able to receive compensation of up to $200,000.
Are you suggesting these people reported symptoms in order to be eligible for potential future government compensation? Compensation I remind you, that didn't even exist until very recently.
Oh and I couldn't resist:
"Specific amounts will be determined to by the extent and severity of the victims’ injuries, which have included brain damage not limited to vertigo, cognitive damage, eyesight and hearing problems, according to the officials and aides."
That's some "psychogenic illness"! And why would they compensate at all if this is just made up?
The study got into the "injuries" in detail. Quoting it, once again:
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One found that patients “appeared to have sustained injury to widespread brain networks without an associated history of head trauma” (Swanson et al., 2018, p. 1125). But standard MRI scans of the brain were normal and based on the criteria for abnormal neuropsychological tests, just about anybody would be diagnosed with brain injury as the threshold for impairment was excessively high (Della Sala & Cubelli, 2018). Another study using functional MRI found “brain anomalies” in a small cohort of patients (Ragini et al., 2019). But such anomalies are common with this imagining technique, often representing normal individual variation.
--
And I'm stopping the quote there for brevity. It goes on with further elaboration.
Well... I would agree with your final sentence were it not for the fact that we strongly adhered to Russia's numerous red lines as far as weapon systems delivery to Ukraine.
I get you, but I wouldn't classify that as "running PR for Russia" more like "there are multiple factors involved". Was/is it to keep oil prices down? Was/is it to slow escalation? Or was/is it practical reasons related to strategy? I )(personally) don't think any of one of those is the sole reason, but I'm certain it wasn't because the current US administration wants to appease Russia. Now the potential next administration? That's a different story.
I'll grant that my example is a slight stretch, but only because I don't know definitively for what reasons all the delays took place. Somewhere in the calculus UA lives and hundreds of billions in infrastructure were deemed expendable in order to do what exactly? Sure, the U.S. has publically been frosty with Russia, but what dirt is there on certain U.S. politicians that was leveraged?
Rifles would never do this. They probably usually/always wore ear protection during training. Even if not it wouldn't do it. Many civilians fire guns throughout their lives, often without ear protection.
If you have been firing a whole day, you definitely fell funny in the head.
Ear protecting does not protect brain much. It protects hearing. Brain heals from very mild damage when there is time to rest, but when you shoot all day, day after day, the damage can accumulate. One already recognized problem area is the show wave getting between helmet and skull. It can amplify the impact.
Nobody knows what the impact from very frequent rifle training is. Very people few do that. Once a month in the range is probably not enough.
the kind of shock that padding absorbs is not the kind of shock we're talking about here; we're talking about supersonically propagating pressure waves which create discontinuities in the pressure field, as well as the temperature field and the velocity field. to my surprise modern combat helmets are designed to protect against those to some extent, but padding is irrelevant to that; to shock waves, it's effectively a gap. the padding protects you from things that could displace the helmet until it hits your head, such as bullet impacts
People that hunt and shoot guns their whole lives do not commit suicide at high levels. This is what I am basing my statements on. Basically half the people I know in the US fall in to this category.
I know the US can be gun obsessed at times but I struggle to believe that even a professional hunter who frequents the range in his spare time fires as many rounds in a given day as a Navy SEAL who's entire job description revolves around being trained to deliver rapid and precise attacks under extreme pressure, which is only possible with incessant drills and practice.
People that hunt and shoot guns their whole lives don't shoot guns their whole lives. They shoot guns a few times when hunting and then a lot of times at the range but at a leisurely pace. This is like comparing a package delivery guy who likes jogging to an Olympic athlete.
> Navy SEAL who's entire job description revolves around being trained to deliver rapid and precise attacks under extreme pressure
You'd be surprised how much time SOFs im general spend lying in a bush, peeing on bottles and radioing in updates. Although US SOFs may have been doing it less than others during GWOT. Not everything is DA.
(That doesn't change your general point though, and SOF training is extremely rigorous and demanding and does include a lot of shooting. But not all day every day.)
Men in the special forces shoot firearms much, much more than even enthusiastic hunters. Thousands of rifle rounds in a day. All day long.
A hunter (I am one) might shoot a dozen rounds to zero in a rifle, or a hundred shells at a clay range. Actually hunting is never more than a handful of rifle rounds or a few dozen shells.
Have you shot anything you mentioned? .30-06 and .308 are both quite powerful, and you can feel them in your chest when fired.
An M4 (the only carbine I can think of in use by the military) is already a step down in boom as a 5.56mm; adding a suppressor makes that even less so. It’s like shooting a .22 at that point. As to SMGs, they’re all small caliber – 9mm, .45, 5.7mm…
I'm saying that a SEAL shooting a suppressed SMG feels nothing after dumping magazine after magazine downrange. There's no way this is causing concussions.
Grandpa's 30-06 will rattle your fillings a little bit after one round - still probably doesn't result in TBI.
Sure, but we should be able to see if 0331 guys and the like have a higher incidence rate of suicide overall. Presumably they are spending far more time on these platforms than SOF.
The amount of shooting 0311 Rifleman does is fraction of what SOF does. The problem is accumulation of damage and no healing periods.
As I said, we don't if calibers below .50 cause significant damage when shooting in excessive amounts. Trying to figure it as a layman is useless. It's better to show epistemic humility than try to assert one way or another.
This was a really well-written article. I think for years I had naturally thought that traumatic brain injury as a result of explosives basically caused the brain to rattle so hard that it smashed against the skull causing contusions, but apparently this is something different.
The way it's explained in the article is that this is actually a result of the blast energy wave bouncing off of differently dense brain tissue sections and causing cavitation.
I'm glad that these issues are finally being brought to light, It's truly unfortunate that no matter how highly trained and skilled some of these soldiers are, that blast waves from IEDs or in this case from their own munitions can result in such insidious physiological changes.
This would also explain why accounts of "shell shock" and PTSD rose so dramatically during WWI but were less common in prior wars where explosions were less common.
That's interesting that at the time, in WW1, it was assumed to be a physical injury to the brain caused by the shockwave of exploding artillery shells (hence the name). A few years later a consensus evolved that it's a psychological problem caused by the stress of combat, which was the prevailing opinion for about 100 years. And now it's looking like it might actually be a physical injury caused by shockwave damage to the brain.
Well the good thing they went forward back then and invented the modern helmet to protect people in trenches from overhead explosions.
And incredibly it seems that the Adrian helmet still outperforms modern helmet designs in the blast protection quality. [1] It can't stop a bullet sure, but I suspect that chances of being hit by an overhead blast are higher than that a of a headshot in a typical warfare scenario.
FYI, also modern helmets are not designed to stop bullets but rather to protect from shrapnel and hand grenades. Stopping a bullet would mean breaking the wearers neck. (The kinetic energy needs to go somewhere after all.)
The bullet's kinetic energy is absorbed by the deformation and fragmentation of the projectile, the deformation of the helmet shell, the deformation/compression of rigid helmet pads, and conversion to heat.
If your helmet stops a bullet, there's some risk of head injury if the helmet shell, upon deformation, comes into contact with your skull. Otherwise you'll be okay. There's some historical information on this at: https://www.ade.pt/bulletproof-helmets
Also, the kinetic energy of a fragment near the site of an explosion can be higher than the kinetic energy load of a 9mm handgun bullet, which is generally the only small-arms threat that combat helmets are rated to stop.
Older steel helmets don't but modern IIIA-class helmets (e.g. ECH) do.
Kinetic energy is not an unsolvable problem, energy can be dissipated. The momentum is in fact the problem that can't be really worked-around (except spreading it over longer period of time) but the momentum of a bullet is low.
UPD replaced "impulse" with "momentum", lost in translation
Level IIIA resists penetration from .357 SIG, 9 mm, and .44 magnum. Those are handgun rounds. It may stop some intermediate rounds if you’re lucky, but certainly not full power rifle rounds.
Helmets cannot deform as much as vests before seriously injuring the wearer, limiting their capacity to dissipate kinetic energy. And if you make them too rigid, concussion becomes a problem.
Yes, but dissipating kinetic energy is a solvable problem unlike dissipating momentum.
The initial statement that's being refuted here is that a bulletproof helmet would break your neck and thus cannot work.
This statement is false because (besides such helmets existing on practice) your skull can absorb the momentum without too much damage and helmet can absorb the kinetic energy.
In the movies, the good guy casually fires a shot - one handed. He experiences almost no kickback.
But then the bullet hits the villain’s 300lb henchman, who is lifted off his feet and goes flying.
This is why people think bullets are magical momentum machines when in reality, due to air resistance, the momentum transfered to the target is even lower than at the moment of firing.
It's more the area of the bullet that matters. A small bullet or a thin needle require much less momentum/energy to penetrate a body than a big object.
If you place a bullet between rifle stock and the shoulder, then fire the rifle, it’s going to be mildly unpleasant, but the bullet won’t penetrate the skin, let alone kill the shooter.
It indeed can't be too big because the shooter takes the same or greater momentum in the form of recoil. Conservation of momentum applies to the process of accelerating the bullet.
Shell shock was considered related to neurasthenia (weak nerves) which is the 18th century name for ME/CFS. TBI, ME/CFS and PTSD are highly correlated for what I believe are the same genetic predisposition plus an environmental trigger.
And the huge population movements, cramming exhausted people together in dense and often unsanitary conditions, characteristic of 20th century warfare are ideal conditions for.. guess what?
A lot of the medication for psychological issues is aimed at altering the bio chemistry in the brain to mitigate physical problems. The reason that stuff works is because the issues are physical and not imagined. It's also true that certain disorders (e.g. psychosis) actually cause brain damage when left unchecked. This technically is not a single thing but more like a group of disorders with widely varying symptoms. My understanding is that a lot of PTSD complaints overlap in terms of symptoms and are probably related. Or that some PTSD patients actually become psychotic.
So not surprising to see some brain damage in navy seals. Of course the question is what comes first, the brain damage or the ptsd. And whether something can be done before brain damage happens in terms of medication or therapy.
>The reason that stuff works is because the issues are physical and not imagined
Psychological doesn't mean "imagined", just means "in the realm of thought". Your thinking is not "imagined", nor is the impact of decisions, ruminating, etc to you.
Physical damage to the brain can easily cause phycological problem. It wouldn't make psychological problems any less real, merely help to prevent them better.
>It’s not either/or. The psychological shit is real
Depends, because we had millenia of wars, even much more gruesome (but without explosions), and much fewer accounts of psychological shit. It was just a fact of life, and most people carried on.
Throughout history most wars were fought primarily via pitched battles, a very different type of war than the continues trench warfare of the first world war.
Also throughout history there just wasn't much attention for regular people, and they're seriously under-represented in the historical record in pretty much
every way. Do you think some Roman general is going to write about his soldiers crying about how horrible war is? Of course not; that would make him and his army look bad. He was much more likely to under-represent his numbers to make his army look good ("we defeated the Barbarian horde of 50,000 with just 5,000 soldiers!" sounds a lot better than "our armies were of equal numbers but we won"). And the soldiers themselves typically didn't leave any records.
And throughout much of history there just wasn't all that much attention for these types of problems in the first place. Patton famously slapped some soldiers dealing with shell shock because he thought it was just fake and they needed to "man up". That was probably more or less the typical response for much of history.
Fewer accounts maybe but life used to be a lot shorter and more violent back then, more like in poor and unstable countries today. For long periods of history many children wouldn't grow to become adults and adult men would frequently get conscripted. Those who saw extensive combat experience would often succumb to injuries. Not to mention that most of them wouldn't know how to write and wouldn't be of interest to anyone who knew how to write.
The aristocracy generally fared relatively well in medieval battles as it was more profitable to capture a noble unharmed for ransom than to risk severely injuring or killing them, not to mention the class taboo and difference in training and equipment between a noble and a commoner.
But warfare was also extremely different. The use of crossbows against Christians was banned by the Catholic church because it was considered too horrifying because of its speed. Battles would often be won by forcing the other side to surrender or morale breaking down and being routed. Because the violence was also much more direct than the pull of a trigger or press of a button, humans were also much more hesitant to actually try and kill their opponent. The crusades are infamous because they actually involved a more modern level of dehumanization but throughout most of history wars would be fought against people who looked like you, spoke a similar language and shared a similar culture. The exceptions are so well-known because they were rare.
"It was just a fact of life" is something we say about all kinds of horrors of the past. You say "most people carried on" but this is literally survivor bias: most people who served in past wars don't go on to kill themselves even without treatment even when they suffer from PTSD or shell shock or whatever. That doesn't mean recognizing and treating their condition wouldn't drastically increase their quality of life. It also ignores that "most" is not all. People would simply starve themselves to death or go into the woods and never come back or get "battle frenzy" and throw themselves at the enemy with no regard for their safety and that too was "just a fact of life" but today we would call that suicide.
History is full of "psychological shit". We just lacked the understanding of psychology to properly classify and recognize it in ways that would allow us to address any of it.
I think cultural context can make the difference between a psychological traumatic event and another day at the office. Somebody who grew up on a farm might snap a chicken's neck without a thought, while a vegan city slicker being made to do the same might plausibly suffer severe psychological trauma.
It may be the case that being from a society in which violence is glorified and made into a virtue makes people less susceptible to war-induced PTSD. Or the circumstances of the war could make the difference; if you are fighting a just war you earnestly believe to be in the direct defense of your family and community, or whether you were drafted into a war that has nothing to do with you and society tells you is cynically or foolishly motivated.
Based on psychological research we know that early childhood trauma can help develop sociopathy. It's easy to see the effect of perpetual violence in terrorist hotspots like Palestine where children grow up to become terrorists because of the violence they experience in "counter-terrorism", which their existence as terrorists of course feeds into, repeating the cycle. As the saying goes "hurt people hurt people".
I think it's a mistake to look at a civilisation past or present that is defined by widespread violence and death and think of it as anything other than dysfunctional. It's just that the baseline of suffering is so high it drowns out all the easily identifiable forms of suffering we're accustomed to.
You often hear people talk about the cultural trauma of Japan, Russia, or Germany. As an outsider there's also a clear circle of violence in American society which pervades and informs cultural attitudes, social policy and conflict resolution. This shouldn't be surprising given the US's history of widespread suffering throughout its history: indentured servitude, religious prosecution, chattel slavery, genocide, disease, civil war. American hyperindividualism as well as both the Cold War and War on Terror "world police" eras of foreign policy and the more recent popularity of isolationism have all the trappings of a trauma response.
Meat is violence. This is why slaughter is often highly ritualized in "primitive" societies, often thanking the animal for its part and being deeply aware of the interplay of life and death that meat eating requires but also the importance of the slaughter for the survival of that society. Both the meat-eating urbanite having an existential crisis over having to kill an animal for sustenance as well as the farm hand thoughtlessly killing an animal are in unhealthy positions - one from the detachment of mass production, the other from the desensitization of their involvement in it. The vegan might be in a healthier space but given modern industrial production is likely as detached from the food they consume and the suffering and death that enables it (be it the field hands working in bad conditions for low pay, the animals dying in the process of industrial farming or the ecological damage caused by shipping exotic or out-of-season produce around the globe).
I say that as a city dwelling meat eater living in Germany, which is a deeply unwell country scared of understanding its own history beyond easy platitudes and simple stories of good and evil people. Humans are not a virus but humanity is very sick and it will take a long time and a lot of effort for it to get any better - if ever.
More to the point: as someone who has had a justified need for therapy before, I think it's important to recognize that of course you can often simply "push through it" because if you can't, you simply break. But importantly you won't get any better, you will just appear more functional for as long as you can keep it up. Therapy was a taboo in my lifetime and I'm not even 40. Suicide is still often a taboo but only started being acknowledged a few short decades ago because a number of celebrity deaths became widely publicized (in Germany it was a soccer player, the stoic masculinity equivalent of an American quarterback). That didn't mean these things didn't happen before. It just meant we didn't acknowledge they did and we didn't know how to get help.
You're talking in some absolutes here, but I don't think any of it is so set in stone. If a city vegan doesn't think about where his food comes from and isn't mentally bothered by this, then he's healthy. If a farm boy slaughters livestock casually isn't bothered by it, he too is healthy. Each are well adapted to their circumstance and is healthy so long as they remain in that condition. What other people think about either of them is the problem of those other people.
That pattern of reasoning is also used by people who defend hitting their children because "my parents hit me as a child and I turned out fine" when arguably the fact they think it's okay to hit their child demonstrates they're not fine.
Yes, there are people who aren't "bothered" by killing animals. There are also people who aren't "bothered" by killing people. I'm saying that's a bad thing. I live near an industrial slaughter house, in fact one of the biggest "meat factories" in Europe. The people who work there are not okay.
I'm not saying "don't eat meat". I'm saying if eating meat literally doesn't bother you, you should consider that a warning sign.
You spelled "occupation" and "resistance to occupation" in ways that make them hard to recognise. Might want to not do that next time you bring up the subject.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. If you're talking about Palestine, you should try to judge an argument by its content rather than by whether it uses words that offend you. Your time is better spent addressing other people than me, trust me.
You were using the wrong words, that's it. I think it would be good for you to use the right ones instead, for several reasons, one being that you might not get mistaken for a Ruggiu kind of person.
See the first commentator’s George Carlin video on Euphemisms. None of his commentators mention it (yet) but it’s the best part of his comment IMO.
I’ll summarize the video’s transcripts here partially.
In WW1, it was called Shell Shock. That was 70 years ago.
In WW2, a generation later, it was called Battle Fatigue.
In the War in Korea in 1950, it was called Operational Exhaustion.
In the War in Vietnam and because of that war, it has been called Post-Tramatic Stress Disorder.
The NYT Article basically concludes that PTSD has been Shell Shock all along. Progress has been hampered by Euphamisms. If the combat veterans were diagnosed with Shell Shock, we might have a solution or remedy for it 70 years later.
This problem is pretty bad. U.S. soldiers are almost 9x more likely to die by suicide than by combat, according to a Pentagon internal study ending in 2019.
According to data published by the CDC, if you’re a white male (civilian/military/all) the main thing you have to do to live to see your 44th birthday is not die by suicide. The data says that’s a lot harder than it sounds as it’s the second leading cause of death in all age brackets up to age 44. A staggering 70% of all suicides are by white males. What societal factors are disproportionately affecting them?
Maybe put out an ad campaign that says “Suicide is selfish, misandrist, and racist.” Although that doesn’t treat the underlying issue(s) and causational factors. It’s similar to when Foxconn added nets to the upper floors of their iPhone factory.
However also confounded with the rise very different forms of warfare.
Prior to ww1 there were limited periods where you would live on edge - if you have to march armies into position and have pitched battles (e.g. Waterloo) the soldiers have some warning and mental preparation time.
WW1 saw the start of widespread normality of living in trenches and never knowing when the artillery shell might kill you.
I had a friend who had tinnitus from repeated exposure to explosions in the army. To combat his tinnitus he developed the habit of talking incessantly and at home would always have music playing. Sounds kinda funny but I could tell that it was having a significantly negative impact on his life.
I think it's probably both. I think the negative consequences of being in a war increased significantly after the invention of artillery, but also psychological stuff was under-reported the farther you go back in time.
From what I’ve heard from people in artillery is that the brass hardly cares about occupational safety. If they need to get rounds down field they get rounds down field first and make sure you have proper ppe for that second. And what ppe they do have is seen as improper. Not much you can even do when the issue is local blast damage and the gun design demands you to be so close to it.
These days we have a senate committee approving a bill that would register women for the draught… it’s getting closer. Men aren’t enough, for this machine, apparently.
Eh. Historically, the rationale for excluding women from the draft was that they weren't eligible to serve in combat roles, voluntarily or otherwise. (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rostker_v._Goldberg)
That policy changed by 2016, so the rationale no longer holds.
With that said, we also haven't had mandatory conscription since the Vietnam War, and I think it's unlikely that we would any time in the near future, short of WW3 landing on our front doorstep (either directly or as a result of NATO's collective defense clause) -- recall that we didn't formally enter WW2 until after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
I recall that the only reason I signed up for selective service was because it was a requirement to receive federal financial aid for college, although it seems that requirement was removed in 2023.
>Historically, the rationale for excluding women from the draft was that they weren't eligible to serve in combat roles, voluntarily or otherwise
Historically countries didn't let women fight in wars because they didn't want their civilisation to die out. If a country loses a double-digit percent of its men it can still repopulate just as quickly, because one man can make multiple women pregnant, while if it loses its women then it takes significantly longer to repopulate, because one woman can't have multiple babies at the same time so the birthrate will necessarily be reduced.
> Historically countries didn't let women fight in wars because they didn't want their civilisation to die out. If a country loses a double-digit percent of its men it can still repopulate just as quickly, because one man can make multiple women pregnant, while if it loses its women then it takes significantly longer to repopulate, because one woman can't have multiple babies at the same time so the birthrate will necessarily be reduced.
People keep repeating this, but nobody has so far answered my follow-up question: do you have any example where that actually happened? Even in heavily impacted countries (like Serbia in WWI, which lost around 50% of its prewar male population), there were no laws or campaigns to allow harems or one man - multiple women combinations.
And the research seems to disprove the core premise of the person I responded to ("only men are drafted because women are kept to be bred to repopulate the country, because 1 men can get multiple women pregnant"). From the abstract:
> Using unique archival data, the results indicate that male scarcity led to lower rates of marriage and fertility
You probably should look at single mothers' statistics.
Edit: To provide more context: It was not exactly "official policy", but single mothers became much more common in Britain after WWI due to the fathers either dying in the war or, well, being already in another marriage. To the point the women started organizing and campaigning for their rights https://www.gingerbread.org.uk/about-us/gingerbread-history/
Naively, it seems like there'd be a lot more of the "dead fathers" case than the "out of wedlock because women want to have kids but there aren't enough husbands to go around" case.
Because in practically every country there are laws on marriage, and it's usually (Muslim world being the exception) 1:1 in partners. It adds legal and financial protections for both parts of the couple. Unless there's a law change, how do you see this working? A married man going around spreading seed and women getting pregnant and going at it alone?
> It adds legal and financial protections for both parts of the couple. Unless there's a law change, how do you see this working?
I see it working without the luxury of extra legal and financial protection.
> A married man going around spreading seed and women getting pregnant and going at it alone?
Well that and more. It's a combination of all available options:
* Men having kids outside of marriage
* Men having kids from 2-3 marriages
* Women marrying older men who normally are out of the reproduction race
None of that is unheard of even in peace times, and just becomes more frequent.
> women getting pregnant and going at it alone
Women going at it alone is a very modern phenomenon. It takes a village to raise a child, not just your partner. And conversely if you do have a village to support you then you don't need your partner that much.
So all of it certainly can work and did work in the past. How it will pan out in the 21st century no one knows yet. I hope we'll never have to learn.
Infidelity exists. Serial monogamy exists. No-strings liaisons exist. Polyamory exists. Etc. Single mothers exist even with an equal number of men and women. The exact legal nature of marriage is not going to stop any of these. Enormous numbers of people have lived and reproduced without any legal or financial protections at all, including the majority of your ancestors.
And the core premise I'm disagreeing is that countries on purpose draft only men, because women are kept to be bred to repopulate the country in case of military disaster.
IF that were the case, governments would do something, anything, to encourage such behaviour (one man getting multiple women pregnant) after the war is over. Nobody is able to come up with any examples of anything like that happening, which again leads me to believe that the premise is bullshit and the real reasons why only men are drafted are somewhere between biology and misogyny.
> and the real reasons why only men are drafted are somewhere between biology and misogyny.
Sounds about right. Historically, the military culture is obviously deeply rooted in patriarchy. Men are to defend their countries, in the same way that 'women and children' have been supposed to go first into lifeboats.
There are some arguments to be found in the above mentioned Rostker v. Goldberg, and in the legal debate that followed:
Once the combat issue is put in proper perspective and the evidence of women's recognized ability to perform military functions is assessed, it becomes apparent that an exclusion of women from a draft registration requirement would be the product of the archaic notion that women must remain 'as the center of home and family.'
and
Congress followed the teachings of history that if a nation is to survive, men must provide the first line of defense while women keep the home fires burning.
>And the core premise I'm disagreeing is that countries on purpose draft only men, because women are kept to be bred to repopulate the country in case of military disaster.
It's one of the concerns, not necessarily the primary. Somebody had to keep the household going, raise and feed the existing children, and so on (which, at the day, and even today in most parts, was the role of women).
>IF that were the case, governments would do something, anything, to encourage such behaviour (one man getting multiple women pregnant) after the war is over.
That doesn't follow. Governments would only need to "do something, anything" if the thing didn't just happen by itself - which generally, it did.
And of course the morals of the day wouldn't have them explicitly promote anything of the sort.
I am not even in Russia, but that war pulled so much out of every region, including mine (which did not see fighting directly, but provided many conscripts and resources), that after the war there simply wasn't much to eat or too many people to work the fields. My grandparents first ate caramel candy in 1952, IIRC. Good luck increasing your fertility rates in these conditions.
Back in the day we're talking about (up to WWI, WII) there was not much in "legal and financial protections" for either part, and the little that were were not really enforced that widely. Men having and abandoning children with multiple women was common, especially in lower and working classes.
Yeah, in fact such laws would make it less tempting (they'd mean those men would have to take financial responsibility and cater to the kids they spread, etc.). Whereas the sheer choice and ability to f... around more is way more tempting and naturally sustainable.
>there were no laws or campaigns to allow harems or one man - multiple women combinations.
You don't need laws or campaigns, it happens naturally, due to the increased sexual selection availability. And of course, given that, why would men opt of harems (especially where they aren't even historically relevant to their culture)? They'd just have relationships on the side, jump ship and marry again, etc.
> You don't need laws or campaigns, it happens naturally, due to the increased sexual selection availability
Again, do you have any examples of this actually happening in the real world? It naturally happens that men become more desirable because there's less of them, but is there any actual case where it became widespread for men to get multiple different women pregnant to repopulate the country?
Not to mention, even if it did happen (and again, nobody has come up with any examples in the tens of times I've asked this question, and Google hasn't been helpful either), unless there was a concentrated government policy to that effect, you'd be mistaking correlation with causation - less men than women, so men are more desirable and can pull off multiple kids from multiple women doesn't mean that's the reasoning why only men were drafted.
>Again, do you have any examples of this actually happening in the real world?
You were given examples already: "Using unique archival data, the results indicate that male scarcity led to lower rates of marriage and fertility, higher nonmarital births, and reduced bargaining power within marriage for women most affected by war deaths"
You can read about similar post-war periods with similar problems and outcomes in history books too.
>unless there was a concentrated government policy to that effect you'd be mistaking correlation with causation - less men than women, so men are more desirable and can pull off multiple kids from multiple women doesn't mean that's the reasoning why only men were drafted.
Women were needed to raise the present kids, and to be able to raise future kids. People didn't need to have this spelt out in law, or to have subsidies for sex with more different partners post war.
Even so, the very link you continue to ignore mentions such legal changes too in the case of post-WWII USSR:
"The impact of sex ratio imbalance on marriage and family persisted for years after the war's end and was likely magnified by
> You were given examples already: "Using unique archival data, the results indicate that male scarcity led to lower rates of marriage and fertility, higher nonmarital births, and reduced bargaining power within marriage for women most affected by war deaths"
The fertility rate (amount of kids per woman) dropped, so no.
> policies that promoted nonmarital births
Nonmarital births does not mean that men were getting multiple different women pregnant at the same time.
>The fertility rate (amount of kids per woman) dropped, so no.
Of course it did, since tens of millions men still died and tons were left with severe impairements. It's not about it remaining stable or raising after the most horrible war casualties in history it's about it not dropping as much. It's about it being elevated to where it would be if what we describe wasn't the case.
"The magnitude of the effect on completed fertility is relatively small in light of the scale of male losses, perhaps due to the pronatalist policy that promoted out of wedlock births"
>Nonmarital births does not mean that men were getting multiple different women pregnant at the same time.
Who said anything about "same time"? Men had more choice and thus more affairs/women and reduced being tied to marriage. This translates to more women pregnant by fewer men over the previous period - doesn't mean men got 2-3 women pregnant at a time.
In any case, I think this is more of a "hands on the ears" mode, than a discussion mode, so I'll stop here.
Post-WW2 Soviet Union, or maybe Paraguay post-War of Triple Alliance
In no cases were there laws, government doesn't need to pass laws to make it happen, just just because there weren't laws doesn't mean it didn't happen a lot
> Historically countries didn't let women fight in wars because they didn't want their civilisation to die out.
No, women have been excluded from front-line combat because they are physically weaker than men and would be killed quickly without accomplishing much. Men are just much more aggressive, have higher stamina etc. It's never been about repopulation. Nothing biologically stops a woman having 10 children with a single man, it's just rare.
Israel tried it some time ago. I don't agree women are weak per se, yes their peak in strength and stamina are lower as proven by literally any professional athletic sport, but this doesn't matter that much as before in current combat.
What went wrong - in fubar situations, men instinctively lunged for protecting women, instead of rationally estimating situation and acting accordingly. We men are simply still too much gentlemen to have women around when bullets are flying, despite feminists trying hard erasing this. Give it 2 more generations and western society will be there.
FYI eastern Europe countries like Ukraine have women in the military, including combat positions. Not surprisingly they keep getting injured and dying just like rest of them.
The only requirement of a resistance movement is knowing to aim a gun and pull a trigger because you are desperate for a force at all. History is littered with such groups enlisting children who meet that criteria.
Lots of militaries have looked at this. There is enormous ideological pressure on militaries to treat women the same as men, but unbiased studies always conclude that it would be a bad idea to do so. And no it's not the fault of the men's gallantry. Women are just physically weaker in ways that matter a lot for fighting. The idea strength in soldiers doesn't matter isn't believed by the military itself and the strange justifications in this thread don't have much basis in actual military doctrine (militaries aren't generally concerned with family planning...)
This report might be useful. It summarizes a large scale study done in 2002 by the British army. The tests were heavily rigged in favour of the women but even so the conclusion was to keep them out of combat roles. Note the part where they say that fewer than 2% of women were as fit as the average male soldier:
A panel of subject matter experts conducted the study. They issued a report, A Study of Combat Effectiveness and Gender, to British ministers in 2001.[24] The study's tests were designed to examine the feasibility of mixed-gender tank crews, all-women crews, mixed infantry units, and all-women infantry units. They also were designed to examine how men would react to the presence of women on the battlefield and how each gender coped with the physical demands of combat.
According to news articles, some reports maintain that the exercises found that women were as capable as men for service in combat units, but the results were mired in controversy [56]. Senior military officers, including Brig Seymour Monro (the Army's director of the infantry), stated that the Army field tests were so diluted that they “amounted to little more than aggressive camping.” Brig Monro also said that tasks that women were not physically capable of doing were simply dropped from the trials [56]. According to the final Ministry of Defence report, the study showed that fewer than 2 percent of female soldiers were as fit as the average male soldier [57].
Specifically, news reports stated that the trials stalled early on when women were not able to complete a number of tasks under battlefield conditions:
• When asked to carry 90 pounds of artillery shells over measured distances, women failed 70 percent of the time (compared with a male failure rate of 20 percent).
• When asked to march 12.5 miles carrying 60 pounds of equipment followed by target practice in simulated wartime conditions, women failed 48 percent of the time (compared with a male failure rate of 17 percent).
• Women were generally incapable of digging themselves into hard ground under fire.
• Women were generally slower in simulated combat exercises involving "fire and move" drills.
• Women suffered much higher injury rates in close-quarter battle tests, such as hand-to-hand combat.
Well, supposing this is true, the situation has changed dramatically - women just don't want to have babies in general, globally. And I doubt a war or some patriotic duty would change their minds.
They still want to have sex with sexy people, and many people, when they're in the mood to have sex with sexy people, don't want to use protection. And some of those people who were not in the mood for protection also don't have access to abortions, and some others actually want to raise children by themselves for some reason.
This is the actual process of human natural selection, and it's not much influenced by laws and things like that, no matter how hard the law tries.
> and many people, when they're in the mood to have sex with sexy people, don't want to use protection.
I don't believe not using a condom with a Tinder date is an option, at least in the West. No matter how attractive and insisting the male is, a woman knows she is the one to bear the consequences. Even if they're on a pill, STDs are still a thing, so why take the risk.
The problem is that a person's "lizard brain" is set to override rational thoughts. Although this effect can be decreased with training (something we do to all humans as they grow up) it's hardly an effective thing to rely on them following. Try telling a hungry person they can't eat without a napkin tucked under their collar (the nearest napkin store is 10 minutes away) or telling a person with a very full bladder they can't cut the queue for the toilet. It just isn't reliably going to work. They're probably going to ignore you.
(Although having sex isn't something that you need to survive (like eating), or something that will happen embarrassingly for physics reasons if you don't choose a voluntary place to do it (like peeing), it is controlled by similar mechanisms thanks to evolution being evolution.)
See, that was my point. They still do, because it's sexy and that is the only thing they want to matter in that moment. With penalties you are trying to make the signal from the person's rational brain strong enough to override their lizard brain, in a moment when the lizard brain is emitting very strong signals already.
It works somewhat, but to a much lesser extent than, say, penalties for driving without carrying a warning triangle, which is a rational-brain activity. At some point the penalties are creating a cost that is bigger than the cost of dealing with the thing they are trying to prevent, while still not working all that well.
Anyway, that's extremely off topic. I think the point is that there's no shortage of babies wanting to get made, and if you want the population to make more babies, you should reduce the things that are preventing them from doing so, not add positive incentives (unless they cancel out negative ones).
You're right but this isn't a conscious calculation - its deeply rooted, evolved behavior. It evolved because of the dynamic you described. Its the same reason women left the Titanic first, men are more likely to task risks, the Y chromosome has a higher mutation load and a million other things.
> Historically countries didn't let women fight in wars because they didn't want their civilisation to die out.
Really? Might is also have something to do with women having trouble moving 80-100 lbs of gear like in WW2? It was 50 lbs in the Civil War. Do you think the leaders at the time had the foresight to keep women out of the war for future breeding purposes?
That's thinking 15-20 years into the future while they are fighting wars now.
Ask anyone with half a brain who sincerely believes in gender equality if men should take a pay cut and they’ll say no, women deserve what the men are paid.
i thought the "gender pay gap" was due to different jobs and amount of time worked - otherwise companies would hire only women and have to pay out way less in wages.
Market forces, spread over long enough time, are usually a strong force of rationality. So on average, across long time, yes. At least according to the level of contemporary wisdom.
That assumes that there aren't strong psychological/cultural forces acting against rationality.
Like not wanting to hire non-white people.
Like not wanting to hire people who are "too old"/"too young" for the field.
Like not wanting to punish men who harass women.
Like not wanting to make sure that your employees are well-treated, satisfied with their jobs, and healthy enough mentally and physically to concentrate on the job regularly.
The idea that The Almighty Market will solve all problems and be perfectly rational is notably unsupported by evidence.
Huh. It's almost like these bigotries are structural, embedded throughout the system and making it much harder for anyone subject to them to get into the "owner class"...
Begging you to stop holding onto your thought experiment and look at the actual data. There’s a lot of it. There’s literally an academic consensus on the question. They’re not all wrong because it never occurred to them to apply an arbitrage argument.
It doesn't "only take one person" to try something like that. It takes one person who is already part of the capital class—ie, someone who is already wealthy, a category correlated, if somewhat loosely, with the exact bigotries listed here. It takes someone who has, statistically speaking, made their money by being ruthless about it deciding they want to take a huge risk with it rather than do the sure thing (hire from the privileged classes). It also takes them having an idea for an actual business that's not merely viable, but highly lucrative. It also takes enough people in the marginalized classes who are within the target industry, who actually hear about the business, who are looking for a job, who are qualified, who can prove to the hirers' satisfaction that they are qualified.
This is not an exhaustive list.
You are oversimplifying in service of justifying an irrational ideology.
> It also takes enough people in the marginalized classes who are within the target industry, who actually hear about the business, who are looking for a job, who are qualified, who can prove to the hirers' satisfaction that they are qualified.
I thought the assumption was that they were already present in order to get a lower wage. if they are just not present, then I don't understand the argument. your belief that there is absolutely nobody greedy enough to make it happen seems unrealistic.
* Women can be hired for a discount relative to hiring men
* Women are just as good at those jobs as men are, i.e. the lower wages are not due to worse job performance
Then it follows that some company or other would be going out of its way to hire women in preference to men. Yes, not everyone is a rational actor - but even if many companies are run by raging misogynists, not all are. And the companies who are willing to get a cheaper (but just as effective) workforce will have a significant advantage, and over time outcompete the other firms.
The fact that this hasn't happened is very strong evidence that one of those two premises is false.
I think people underestimate how powerful market forces are. Bear in mind that they do not apply within a firm, except in fairly extreme circumstances. Instead most things are done on the basis of perception, which is where racism and patriarchy thrive.
but firms live and die based on how profitable they are. if employing all women teams to do the hard work would cost less, firms who did so would thrive at the expense of the sexist ones who value penises. the lack of such firms suggests a conspiracy on a society scale, where not only will women be penalised within companies by getting paid less, but companies that employ all women and therefore cost much less to run would have to be shunned by every customer out there to make sure they don't succeed and take over the business of the more expensive ones!
Take a look at the gender pay gap reports large companies produce. It’s very much a problem even with people sat next to one another doing the same job.
As I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, people take it as axiomatic that markets would react to this, but the evidence is strong that they don’t.
It could be, but is that really an excuse? I mean, one couldn't really justify the pay gap in slavery by saying the slaves were working different jobs to the free people, either.
Yes, of course it is. If people choose different careers, it is perfectly reasonable that their pay will be different. Paying a woman less for the same job is wrong, but there's no problem if women in aggregate are making career choices that mean they have lower average income as a group.
I hear you. But women can continue the line —society. Men can’t bear children —society dies. Men get sent to war, women stay in the homeland, many of the men may not return and the women may have to persevere, with sacrifice but society can push on. If it were reversed, that society may well collapse.
The Spartans didn’t send their women off and let the men stay back in the homeland.
How many people do you think are in the military? It’s way below one percent in the USA. In the last war we fought, we lost barely any soldiers compared to the number deployed. It’s bad that we lost any, but your argument is logically null. Women aren’t just baby machines, in any case. Nothing is being “reversed” it’s just more equal if everyone is registered for selective service.
In WW1, so many French young men died in the battles that the average height of the French soldier declined by over an inch in WW2. It became popular for French and German women to marry old men and foreigners after both wars.
By preserving the women, society can bounce back from a catastrophic loss of young men.
Luckily here in America we have hundreds of millions of men and women to give up to the altar of democracy, right? We’re not France in 1915 or 1939. Not only that, but maybe you want to consider more modern war’s attrition rates.
Ukraine doesn’t have 350 million citizens and the world’s 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 7th largest air forces, ten times more aircraft carriers than the next country, the worlds most effective military training, and a total military budget of more than the next 15 or 20 countries. If we sent troops to Ukraine, Russia would be out within weeks, and we’d have less casualties than Iraq and Afghanistan, assuming Putin didn’t start nuking.
"If we sent troops to Ukraine, Russia would be out within weeks, and we’d have less casualties than Iraq and Afghanistan, assuming Putin didn’t start nuking."
Big assumption. Other options are also North Korea sending troops. Or Iran. Or while the US engages there, China uses the opportunity to take Taiwan. Geopolitics is complicated. No one wants a nuclear war, but at some point there is no more rationality, when a side feels pushed over the limit.
I really do not want to see how all of this plays out, but I believe China has also quite some manpower and their military capabilities are not exactly known. The outcome will likely depend, how the rest of the world reacts. And if there are nukes.
That's never been doctorine for the simple reason US hasn't had (near) peer rivals until PRC in last 30 years. Peak hyperpower US 90s doctorine was calibrated for 2 "major" wars, when major is with adversaries who were frankly all medium powers (IRAQ tier). Then in 00s-10s it shifted to 1 "major" war, 1 holding war, i.e. actively fight 1 major war, fix another major war in place so resources can shift to second war after active war. Now half the think tank writing is questioning if US can win in PRC backyard, where PRC is characterized either as near peer, pacing power, or peer. US doctorine right now is maybe can deter PRC until post 2030s "decade of concern" but right now US IndoPac posture in PRC backyard a tossup.
I think they now have 3 carrier groups out in the world at the same time. each of these is basically enough to best a foreign military excluding nukes.
Gulf war against 90s Iraq with 20m people and ~800 1960s missiles (scud Bs) required 5 carrier groups + regional air basing for air campaign, completely compromised Anti Air (by french who designed Iraq IADS and gave schematics to US). Relative to modern Iran with 80m people and 4x more missiles with 2000s rocketry tech, much more favourable geography (facing water), 1990s Iraq/Gulf War would not even measure up as a medium power / major war. One (1) carrier with 150/270 (short term surge) sorties per day is not remotely enough against a medium power. Can US surge 6-7 carriers + forward deploy air force with advanced notice to tackle Iran, yeah, but it wouldn't leave much left for anything else. CVN69 isn't exactly defeating the houthis right now. That's the numbers behind why US doctorine downgraded to 1 major war + 1 holding war (with medium/small adverary), while near/peer war with PRC is currently a toss up.
If Ukraine needs to draft people at all, they should just surrender. If they can't maintain the manpower they need just with volounteers, then clearly the population has "voted" that they'd rather not fight.
Historically the rich and powerful would keep harems and mistresses, have scores of children, and send poor young men off to be killed (and possibly rape women on the losing side). And most of the wars were to preserve the wealth and power of the rich.
To everyone’s surprise, we still are engaging in trench warfare. Maybe the USA isn’t currently involved in a war where they’re digging and in the trenches, but Eastern Europe right now is proving that trenches aren’t going anywhere.
I'm being a bit unfair in that I'm counting hesco as a kind of trench warfare, but you're right in that that doesn't exactly apply on 'patrol'
Still, I believe earthen barriers are still used to solidify the 'frontlines' if you squint a bit
Afaik the Iraq Iran war was still doing straight up trench warfare (at points) and the Syrian civil war + Afghan theater were using caves (in some areas). Same with Korea and Vietnam.
Then again you're right in that I don't think sudan etc have used trench warfare (in the first civil war, apparently the second one has on a post edit search: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-65962771 )
You're completely right on the second Iraq war, I don't see any sources for trenches, minus hesco.
I think what I comes down to is trench warfare is popular for the same reason earthworks are popular in civil engineering. Cheap, locally sourced, and effective in its purpose.
> the Iraq Iran war was still doing straight up trench warfare (at points) and the Syrian civil war + Afghan theater were using caves (in some areas)Same with Korea and Vietnam
Static versus combined arms. The U.S. military is deadly not only because it is big, but also because it practically invented and then mastered modern combined-arms warfare. (It’s why we put so much emphasis on air superiority over e.g. armour.)
Are you defining trench warfare as "has a trench"? Because I meant the system of long lines under fire for weeks/months and high-attrition infantry attacks across the narrow no man's land to take slivers of territory.
Ukraine is running low on conscripts because they're not drafting 18-20 year olds.
their national birthrates, just like in the rest of Europe, are low, and losing 20-40% of the 18-25 year old cohort means population collapse.
Russia is in a similar place, and is generally only drafting from ethnic minorities, far eastern locales, and prisoners, plus a hearty dose of mercenaries. that said, they have 3x the population and can just pull way more people.
in both countries the average of a trooper is like 38-45.
They aren't running low on conscripts. They ran low on people they could conscript using the previous set of conscription laws that were extremely "leaky". Then they changed the law, and now they're not really low on manpower anymore.
No, but the Spartans did send their slaves, who outnumbered Spartan warriors 7:1. Spartan women were also somewhat more independent than the women of other Greek city states. Considering Sparta was not a particularly large city-state, and if they didn't control so many other city-states and have such a large cache of slaves, they might have needed to send their women after all. (bot that it matters as we're comparing a 2,500 year old society to a modern day one...)
Would you be ok with mandatory draft registration for women if conscription began with only women aged 36 and above? National fertility would be unaffected, since women of that age rarely have children anyways. Then the draft would be gender-balanced and the war hawks would get more bodies for their machine. Everybody wins.
Fertility only happens if women can find a partner. They are not baby making machines. If you have a catastrophic loss of men, you can still experience a demographic disaster.
Not really, a society that sends women to war is more or less a cowardly society dressing it up as equality.
What sort of male sends the female to check on the noises that sound like an intruder in the wee hours of the night? Do they set turns and when it's her turn she's gotta check out the noises? Any gal married or shacked up with a guy like that should kick him out before night is over.
Can you imagine Paul asking Nancy to check out the basement noises in SF?
Also, those war hawks should see duty in the front lines. None of this sitting behind "green zones" directing grunts. Get out there, get in the line of fire. Imagine Washington, Nimitz, Yamamoto, Zhukov, etc., let's just phone it in.
I mean, when things go bump on our farm my wife won’t hesitate to grab the rifle and haze a black bear or coyote. I’ll lay down my life for my wife and kids but I assure you she can be as dangerous as the next guy; in general much more.
This blatant mysogyny is shocking so out in the open. There's nothing "cowardly" about asking a woman to protect her country, or her husband.
Not that I support the idea of drafting civilian populations as soldiers in general: it's mostly a way to get innocent people killed and not much more.
> Not that I support the idea of drafting civilian populations as soldiers in general: it's mostly a way to get innocent people killed and not much more.
Not if you train them before sending them to the front. Check Ukraine, they would have been defeated without the massive influx of conscripts due to the massive Russian influx of poorly trained conscripts.
I think you mean misandry. Perhaps it is. Men bear the burden of conflict. Women bear the aftermath. But that’s how things shake out due to biology. Same as we frown upon sending children to war. Yes, they are easier to indoctrinate and can pull a trigger just as well as adults (see today’s conflict ridden areas of Africa). Yet, we know better than to send “future us-es” into the grinder guaranteeing societal collapse.
No, I do mean misogyny. Women are just as capable and willing as men to fight and defend. With modern weapons especially, there is no real difference between the fighting capacity of a woman and that of a man. And women are people in their own right, not things to be protected to perpetuate society.
Also, women are not children. Children deserve protection because they don't know any better, their minds are not fully equipped to understand what going to war means. Additionally, children make very poor soldiers, as their motor skills and reasoning skills and emotional control are just not developed enough to function as well as an adult, particularly in times of extreme stress such as war.
So again, children require and deserve protection from the rest of society. Women neither require it, nor deserve it, not any more than any other civilian.
If going to war front as an infantryman were a privilege, we'd see the likes of Hollywood actors and actresses volunteer for the front as well as any wealthy folks and any other privileged folks --but they rarely do --this indicates it is not a privilege, but rather something the poor and of lesser means, those whose lives are worth less are sent to the front. It's violence, it's abuse. Sometimes someone has to endure it. I don't see how not sending one is either misogyny or misandry. Sending someone however, is both of the above; however, if we must, then I think it's the duty of men to do the fighting. Women, can of course be in support of the front lines.
Of course it's not a privilege. But if you're saying women aren't good at it, that women need to be protected, that's misogyny. It's like saying women can't receive the death penalty because they are not mentally sound to be held responsible for their actions, which was a real misogynistic argument at one point.
Misandry would be saying men must be sent to war instead of women because they are inferior, or because they deserve a worse life, or something like that.
Misogyny is believing women are less capable than men for certain important things (there are other ways of being misogynistic, but this is one of the most common). Warfare is a very good example.
Besides Sparta the starkest example of a slaveholding society and the brutality needed to enforce that, they weren't even all that great militarily. They had a run of one to two centuries where they dominated militarily and then they tended to be mediocre at best. Sparta ended up as a tourist spot for romans to see people in funny costumes and hats.
Which raises the question of why they thought they'd approve this bill in committee? It's still very odd, weird, ungentlemanly and somewhat uncivilized.
To follow the analogy, the reason they did it is because the "DEI outrage machine" needs fuel, and this was the next low-hanging fruit. To the machine, women aren't as important as perpetuating itself, so hence we now are starting to get women drafted into traditionally (and oddly, actually gender appropriate) male-roles that are actually dangerous.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted. I am aghast with the press-ganging going on in Ukraine. I think if Ukraine can’t motivate volunteers to fight then they must surrender. I get that we (the west) wouldn’t like that but they’re taking volunteers so anyone who wants to fight that war is free to do so. Too many people wanting other people to fight their wars for them. I don’t even like my country, the thought of being press ganged by them would make me like the country even less.
It's literally a question of life or death. If Ukraine surrenders, that could very well be the end of the country and ethnic/cultural identity. Look up what happens to Ukrainians captured by the Russian army - rape (irrespective of gender), torture, starvation, daily beatings, etc. Russia has kidnapped hundreds of thousands of kids too.
Surrender is not an option. Unfortunately, everyone (men and women included) must do their duty to stop a genocide.
They could pretend to surrender (ethically speaking, surrender can never be a valid contract because it's always performed under threat of violence, so feigned surrender is always a valid military tactic), pretend to integrate into society, and then continue fighting as guerillas.
Slavery is always evil, including military slavery ("conscription").
There are degrees of evil though. I'd prefer to be conscripted to an army that's fighting the Russians, than to become russian slave and die in a concentration camp somewhere in the Siberia over the next couple of years (a common scenario during the Stalin reign). The first kind of slavery is designed to give me with an ok life, provided my side wins. The other kind (the Stalin kind) is about exploiting me and tossing me onto the body pile, there's no good outcome there ever.
Also, the guerilla scenario is not that realistic. Russians are experts at fighting guerillas and insurections, they have accumulated centuries of experience in it. That's because they've been a multi-ethic empire consisting of a lot of conquered unhappy minorities for a long time now, so they had to learn how to keep them in check. They have world-class spy network and surveilance state, so that any dissidents will be quickly found (torture enough people and someone will give up the location of their guerilla relative etc.). Moreover, they begin the occupation of a given region with mass-murdering people who have leadership capabilities ( see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre ), so that there's literally no one left who could organize the guerillas into anything meaningful.
For context - in the part of Poland occupied by Germans during WW2, there was a vast Polish underground state (there were 200k guerillas soldiers alone, but there were also underground schools, universities giving diplomas, underground theaters etc.). That was all operating under Gestapo's nose, and in spite of heavy military commitment to occupy Poland. Meanwhile, in the Soviet-occupied part of Poland, there was practically nothng. Russians were that much better than Germans at squashing dissidents.
That's why suicide vests should be standard issue equipment for all soldiers. The suicide vests should be equipped with heart rate sensors to automatically turn them into land mines if the wearer dies without triggering them (with a short delay to avoid collateral damage). Cyanide pills embedded in false teeth should also be standard equipment as a backup in case the vest fails.
Are you in Ukraine doing your duty? If you are not Ukrainian they do take volunteers.
Surrender is an option, none of those things is worse than death. I would not make that trade. If the Ukrainian men want to stop it they can still volunteer, so can anyone else. And it looks like they will lose the war anyway, so they’ll have to surrender anyway except now after a huge amount of death and destruction. Ukraine is heavily indebted and the belief that some Marshal plan reconstruction would enable them to pay that off is unrealistic.
Your kind of thinking leads to societal decay like the kind seen at Uvalde. Each of the 374 cops chose to prioritize their own wellbeing over collective interests, ultimately leading to 19 kids and 2 teachers getting killed despite overwhelming odds against the perpertrator.
And there are many things worse than death. Do you know how Russian combat medics are trained? Instructors pick a prisoner, cut off their palm, then instruct the medic on how to stop the bleeding. Then they cut the arm off up to elbow, teach how to stop the bleeding, and repeat it until the prisoner has no limbs left. Stories like these are a common occurrence. The number of documented war crimes has exceeded 100 000, and investigators don't even have access to most of occupied land.
It is natural that no-one wants to take the risk of ending up in the situation I described, but at the same time, someone has to take the risk, otherwise Russians will simply exterminate Ukraine and Ukrainians as they exist today. Like at Uvalde, more people will die as a result.
Wow. That second paragraph sounds like _blatant_ war propaganda.
Unless there’s plentiful evidence for the above (it’s possible one-off, I suppose), I think you’ve gone full fruit-loop territory.
I humbly suggest you look in the mirror and ask what’s actually going on in your head, and why. This sort of distorted extreme thinking is what creates monsters.
I dont agree with your framing but doubt I could change your mind. Instead I will ask what is your excuse, unless you’re posting on HN from some battlefield you must have some sort of excuse as to why you are not acting on your supposedly strongly held beliefs.
I am a reservist in a country that has such a high risk of Russian invasion that defense leaders have stopped all non-essential spending in favor of hoarding as much artillery and rockets as they can for when the time comes. I do not have a suitcase packed and I do not intend to flee anywhere.
And people here are taught since childhood that this not about being an useful little soldier for the government, but an essential duty to your friends and family, because when the situation gets tough, there won't be anyone else to protect them. A huge professional military that can come to your rescue - like the US Army - is a luxury that most people in the world don't have.
So because you don’t need the freedom to not volunteer others shouldn’t have it either? The issue pertains to pressganging which of course does not apply to volunteers.
I don’t agree with the framing again, but again I don’t think I’ll be changing anyone’s mind here.
As with Uvalde, I believe that the choice to maximize own wellbeing at the expense of others will often lead to worse outcome for all.
Vaccines are a good example of this. Everyone is better off when they take a personal risk to eradicate polio from the entire group. In the process, some people will suffer side-effects ranging from allergic reaction to even death in the worst case, but that is the sacrifice that needs to be made. Unfortunately, modern imbalance towards individualism has produced a generation of parents who cannot tolerate any risk, choose the selfish option and leave their children unvaccinated, leading to re-emergence of old infectious diseases that kill and maim more children than the universal vaccination would.
Individual and collective interests need to be fairly balanced, and Ukraine has done that by preferring older conscripts over younger ones, but you will never find enough volunteers for any truly shitty situation that requires more people than the tiny fraction of natural-born risk-takers who fill the ranks of firefighters and other dangerous professions.
> Surrender is an option, none of those things is worse than death
Being tortured, raped and beaten until you die is not worse than death? Beg to disagree.
> And it looks like they will lose the war anyway
Highly unlikely. Russia is bleeding men they can afford to lose for now, but don't in the long term. Russia has absolutely no way of achieving victory, so by definition Ukraine can't lose. It can't really win either, because Russia as it is today cannot accept defeat.
Russia has been trying to conquer Ukraine for 2 years now, and has had very limited success. Things are looking so good for them they're importing North Korean troops and artillery shells.
They have shown no serious improvement in military tactics or armaments.
Meanwhile Ukraine is being armed by half the world, and has shown crazy advancements in unmanned tech (like hitting Russian ships with underwater unmanned vehicles hundreds of km from Ukrainian ports).
Russia cannot win. Even if they somehow manage to conquer the whole of Ukraine which will not happen easily or soon, it will still be at best a Pyrrhic conquest at the expense of guerilla warfare.
Schrodinger's Russia, the Upper Volta with missiles simultaneously can't take Ukraine yet also at risk of taking half of Europe.
Ignoring the details of your statement I will instead focus on the inherent contradiction of using the slow pace of advancement as evidence of lack of prowess at the same time as confidently stating that gorilla warfare would render such actions a Pyrrhic victory.
I would suggest that maybe Russia knows that, they dealt with a serious insurgency in Chechnya. I would also suggest that the slow progress is in part intentional in order to maintain defined battlefield lines and avoid such insurgencies. They know it costs more in Russian lives but that is price they are willing to pay. People who want to fight them can go out and meet them on the battlefield.
> I would suggest that maybe Russia knows that, they dealt with a serious insurgency in Chechnya. I would also suggest that the slow progress is in part intentional in order to maintain defined battlefield lines and avoid such insurgencies. They know it costs more in Russian lives but that is price they are willing to pay. People who want to fight them can go out and meet them on the battlefield.
Oh, you're either very naive, very stupid, or Russian. You mean to tell me that when Putin announced a 3 day special military operation, it was on purpose that it's taking 2 years of a meatgrinder with hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties to take barely any land? Cool, makes sense if you're braindead.
They also said they would not invade and then they did. You don't tell people what you're actually going to do for a whole raft of reasons and it would be foolish to do so. Also, did they say they would take it in 3 days? That was General Milley (US) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39155605. That's the problem with trusting Western media. The West ascribes these metrics and then judges the Russian results by the same metrics using it as an opportunity to call them fools.
Russia has been planning for this war since before 2008 it is ridiculous to think that they thought it would only take 3 days, if they did they would have started the war much sooner. They knew there were in for the long haul and had already made steps to prepare their economy for long term sanctions. There were not completely prepared but prepared enough.
Additionally, this conflict sits within a broader US/China conflict and a long drawn out conflict with Russia benefits China to which Russia is largely a vassal state, now more so than ever. China is prepping for a great powers war and understandably would like to undermine the west substantially before that happens. Bogging the west down in a series of regional conflicts is an effective way to do that. China would much rather their adversaries economically implode than to fight a massively destructive WWIII.
> Russia has been planning for this war since before 2008 it is ridiculous to think that they thought it would only take 3 days, if they did they would have started the war much sooner. They knew there were in for the long haul and had already made steps to prepare their economy for long term sanctions. There were not completely prepared but prepared enough.
I know you're probably Russsian or identify strongly with Russia, so it doesn't matter what I say, but think about it...
Why would Russia get themselves involved into a protracted multi-year war meatgrinder? They know what happened in Afghanistan.
Also, if they were planning a long war, why would they throw paratroopers at Hostomel airport right outside of Kyiv? Why would they throw multiple brigades attacking Kyiv and getting stuck in a traffic jam? Look at a map, Kyiv is not far from the Belarus border, and the capital, but any such attack would be extremely isolated and risk being cut off. Also, the Ukrainian government could just run away to Lviv and coordinate the fight from there, so Kyiv would be little more than a symbolic victory if they managed to capture it.
It's obvious they were hoping to capture Kyiv quickly and have Ukraine fall apart. They weren't ready for a prolonged fight.
> They also said they would not invade and then they did
> That's the problem with trusting Western media
The same western media that called it that Russia will invade?
Not a Russian, don’t particularly like Russia, my criticism focuses on the West because that’s my home and I want to clean house. That ad-hominin attack on my intention does not make sense. This tautological notion that because I disagree with your framing I must be Russian and therefore wrong.
Russia is worried they will be Balkanized by the west and that is clearly against the interest of the Russian leadership. To not understand that Russian are willing to pay an enormous cost to do so is to not understand Russian history, beyond Afghanistan where they really didn’t want to be there in the first place.
As a policy I would rather see Russian tanks turned around and go into China. The West courted China in order to undermine Russia but underestimated China and overestimated Russia. Russia was successfully turned against Germany in WWII and if the west was smarter we would swallow our pride and do that again for WWIII. Having your enemies engaged in destructive conflicts is a big part of realpolitik and an essential part of remaining a dominant hegemon.
I’m repeatedly bemused by those who emphatically declare that Russia will fail because it is corrupt as if they have discovered something that the Russians themselves are not aware of. Russia has taken a learn-by-doing approach which is the only way of improving war-fighting capability in such an endemically corrupt country. This externalizes the negative signal for bad ideas, those failed excursions having died are no longer able to make future decisions. The average intelligence of those who remain has gone up. To paraphrase Napoleon; we mustn’t teach our enemies to fight by fighting them too often.
The media is telling the truth when it’s in their interest to do so. I’m not sure how you are trying to generalize this to them always being right when clearly they contradict themselves on so many matters. In the weeks before the invasion I was telling right wingers that they are about to look like fools when Russia really does invade. US intel provided proof by noting the movement of blood supplies to Western Russia which would only be done in preparation for a war as opposed to the exercises that was claimed.
Thats a nice sentiment you got there. Mind if i take it: Every dictator everywhere everytime. And it turns out the international order cant survive defectors.one large party going imperial or isolatinist and its bsck to olden times.
No boots on the ground. Deliver freedom and justice from afar on the business end of a fast moving vehicle, whether that is subsonic, supersonic, hypersonic, or ballistic.
Not one, but several large parties have been globally "imperial" for centuries.
Except if by international order we mean "the will of the stronger dogs imposed upon the whole world, with tons of mayhem and blood, but it's not done to white people so it doesn't matter"?
Violent deaths per capita is trending down both inside states and between states, and has been for nearly a century despite increases in tension and extreme improvements in weaponry.
This is the kind of research I've been yearning to see on suicide.
Just telling people not to, or to call a hotline, seemed like the worst most patronizing advice as it never solved the underlying thing.
I've since learned that there is a subset of suicidal people where that's enough, where the suicidal tendency is a kneejerk decision that can be disrupted, but it bugged me that its not serving everyone that becomes suicidal with a recurring condition that's not improved by merely being present.
It always feel like people are too uncomfortable to talk about it enough, or to question the response measures. A "I'm Helping!" sentiment by copy and pasting a suicide hotline memo, when they're not helping at all, just offloading their discomfort into a protective layer for their own psyche.
In contrast, I'm comfortable enough to wonder whether suicide was the most rationale and objectively best choice, as someone with strong self preservation circuits you can see how far apart I am from everyone else. But this is opinion, a hunch, what I really want is a data driven analysis of the conditions. As with real science, I am accepting of any conclusion, instead of trying to conform a conclusion to preventing it if prevention isn't what winds up being on the table with our current infrastructure.
It's important to view suicide not from the "I don't want to live" perspective and rather from the "I don't want to be in pain" viewpoint.
I feel this article does a good job of not explicitly saying this when describing what must have been an agonizing existence for David Metcalf before he took his life.
Suffering as a more general term IMHO... I can imagine having no pain per se, but being so bogged down from few well placed catastrophes in life that continuing would be much harder than not.
One way to think about it is via the concept of body autonomy/sovereignty: your life is in your hands. IMHO dignified peaceful suicide should be a right granted to all free individuals. If one is free to live, why is one not free to die?
But that is too radical of an idea, and upsets all sorts of people (especially the money men)
Sometimes opting out is the only rational choice. If there is no support in society for an individual who cannot work and generate profit, if there is no support in society for an individual who is terminally ill (expensive palliative care aside), if there is no support in society for an individual who has "fallen throigh the cracks" (and the cracks are mighty wide), then what is there to do? Slowly die on the street?
This thinking can lead to all kinds of dark paths, such as the state being in charge of the matter (and abusing it, as they can already abuse it via the carceral system), but ultimately we have to confront the fact that as a society we often leave people with no way out, collectively shrug our shoulders, and then act horrified when they take the only viable option that immediately removes all suffering.
People who are uncomfortable with suicide are ultimately uncomfortable with facing the reality that they live in a society that encourages it.
Suicides do not just happen due to being in extreme, incurable pain. People commit suicides due to emotions which seem powerful immediately(failure in love life, academics, career etc.) but would not seem as such a big deal if they were to look back on it afterwards either due to the passing of time or due to finding something else which made life worthwhile.
This also is the problem with the autonomy argument - this is not what the person might themselves would choose if they were in a more sober mood. The autonomy argument is also seen as invalid in other situations like when signing oneself to slavery.
Money men being against suicide for economic reasons runs contrary another other point in your post - money might be saved by the suicide of the invalid and sick. Making suicide legal can easily be abused by powerful state officials incentivizing people to commit suicide for economic or political reasons.
So yes, create a good social support system, but don't encourage suicide.
Sometimes suicides are not due to emotions, but facts. Please do not assume emotionality or irrationality on the part of those who do it or consider it.
Source: I am a man who has, and is, "falling through the cracks" as a child abuse victim with multiple disabilities, no hot job skills, and a marginalized identity.
My life is slipping away and I'm almost 40. I am an extremely suboptimal individual as far as capitalism is concerned. The passage of time has only cemented this very real and very grim outlook.
The "powerful state officials" are already doing what you fear they might do, and have been doing it for longer than I've been alive. They do it with prisons or under terms like "austerity" of "welfare queens" or "dole moochers"
Disabled people are treated like garbage. Look to the USA or UK for immediate examples.
"Aktion T4" never went away, it just got privatized.
There is no support or viable path forward for people like me, short of going on Social Security Disability and living in basically a slum if I'm lucky. Honestly If something like MAID was available, I would absolutely take it.
No, I am not irrational or acutely suicidal. No, I do not need some hotline. My upbringing and disability has taught me exactly how society views me over the course of decades. No, touching grass isn't going to solve it.
I have a partner and a job (for now). Partner understands what I'm going through, and is also marginalized and partially disabled, in a dead-end job, also circling the drain.
I was writing about myself and others I know in the same boat.
Go talk to some disabled people and otherwise marginalized people (due to skin color, sexual orientation, neurodivergence, disability, etc. -- often several overlapping things) who are clinging by their nails to the workforce. You'll find many similar stories.
Many of us are gone already. Many of my friends are gone or on their way out (homelessness, etc).
The kind of comprehensive help we need simply isn't there. We disappear quietly. You don't see us go, and we are not noticed or missed by anyone except our immediate circle or whatever community we can cobble together.
Seriously, go talk to people. You'll find that this is a common but unspoken thing.
My post was not meant to trivialize the problems you are facing or that there are easy fix solutions. Dont know how I can help as an anonymous stranger on the net, but just in case you want to talk to someone, you can always send an email.
FWIW, my point was that in many cases suicidal feelings can be relieved and the abuses (that you point correctly say exist already) can become more dangerous when directed towards getting rid of vulnerable people. But, that doesn't mean that chronic, hard-to-cure situations don't exist.
No, this is wrong in both ways. Painful emotions are painful and not necessarily transiet and transiency is irrelevant to autonomy anyway. In fact, any argument that doesn't underminde the assumption of the right to bodily autonomy is trumped by autonomy.
People with temporary problems have a right to bodily autonomy and so do irrational people. Everyone does and doesn't need to justify themselves to anyone. The only exception is if they're hurting somone else.
If you are allowing transient decisions for giving away a life, then transient decisions would be allowed for lesser stakes too.
Most societies are debating even something like unrestricted access to drugs. There are people who would take drugs as a conscious/long-term plan for whom the transiency distinction is irrelevant but there are also those who hate it while succumbing to it and would gladly sign a contract to stop access to consumption, if that were practically possible to enforce.
Contracts often involve trading away autonomy of a future self whether for the good or the bad. Signing such a contract is often not legally valid if the person is in a disturbed mental state.
A more common example, children are not allowed to buy alcohol or consent to a sexual relationship with an adult.
The issue being that the immediate decision of the child can be something they would reject if they have more experience and had the ability to make a more informed choice. Of course, the problem of impulsive bad decisions doesn't go away as an adult, but considerations of intrinsic freedom and the problems of giving power to a state become much bigger.
When a criminal commits a crime, a premeditated/planned action is treated more severely than an impulsive action which in turn is treated more severely than an action caused by a mental illness.
Taking one's life is a much more drastic step than drugs or signing a contract.
> not necessarily transient
Not assuming this, chronic examples don't rule out the existence of large families of cases where things can and do look better due to time and a change in circumstances.
This is such a terrible argument. "People might regret things, therefore we should abolish freedom." I guess we should have the state make all decisions for people, just in case. Wouldn't want anyone to ever change their mind about anything and have negative feelings*. Good thinking.
* Dead people don't even have feelings and can't regret anything. Your argument isn't even applicable. There are literally zero consequences for the person.
This is an obvious strawman('We cant deregulate X when we are heavily regulating Y which is much weaker than X' -> 'The government should regulate every aspect of life '), So bye.
You say that suicide hotlines are more for the friends of people at risk, than the people at risk, as if it is a bad thing. We as a society generally dont know how to help people who consider suicide for its myriad of causes. We do know how to help their friends though, and pretending that there is help to be had is a big part of it.
A lot of special forces have been doing what we used to call "door kicking" in the last few wars. Lots of explosive breaches, firing weapons and throwing grenades indoors. I'm sure this is the main contributing factor. The percussive force of firing and explosives indoors is horrible and I say this as an ex artillery officer, so I'm used to chest-breaking bangs from firing big artillery guns
As a 13B1O that saw all three sides of this, loading/firing, driver for platoon leader, and while deployed with orders to act in the door-to-door fashion. You are correct. I will add that while operating the gun, the percussive forces are pretty well shielded on the inside of the at least motorized versions, was a paladin crew member here.
Artillery was around for 500 years and shell shock was hugely discussed for past 100 years.
There is much better corellation with divorce. Soldiers returns home with PTSD, only to have their house, children, savings and pension stollen. Because they were not around to guard it! And they may get thrown into prison for being too poor!
Shell shock is very convinient excuse, when victims do not get proper recovery!
From the article, they have objective evidence from studying the brains of deceased servicemembers:
"It was not chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., which is found in football players and other athletes who have been repeatedly hit in the head. It was something new.
The lab’s research team started looking for similar damage in other brains. In civilians’ brains, they did not find it. Nor was it in the brains of veterans who had been exposed to a single powerful explosion like a roadside bomb. But in veterans exposed repeatedly to blasts, they found it again and again."
It seems that all that's needed as a counterargument are soldiers with the same set of symptoms that remained married. Additionally, we could compare the divorced who were never exposed to such explosions and see how suicide rates compare.
In other words, data is always a better choice than narratives.
Those words were spoken almost exactly 100 years ago
"Shell shock" is a made up term. Other than on hearing the effects of
high impulse on a human are long-term, complex and still an areas of
research.
In WW1, in Northfields hospital they started to define PTSD in ways
that didn't quite add up. Some soldiers had never been under
bombardment but had the same symptoms.
Nonetheless, the term remained in use because
1) "Shell shock" was deemed curable with rest, and the main objective
was to get soldiers patched up and back to the front.
2) It was a way to avoid getting shot for desertion. A decent officer
would not order traumatised men disciplined but send them on to
hospital with "shell shock".
All the best to you, just wanted to add that it’s interesting that I’ve read similar opinions about the Russian SOF coming from Russian grunts, too, so I guess this is a general feeling among the world’s forces. If it matters I personally am in the grunts’ side, they’re the backbone of any army.
Do you think it's because of whatever brain damage they may have encountered, or because they could not find meaning in their civilian lives? I've read it's often the latter in military men, especially the ones that really believed in the mission and experienced highly stressful life or death situations. They come back and they're taken aback by the mundane bullshit that our lives are in comparison to what they've been through. Intuitively that rings true, but having never served, I can't fully relate.
I would say that of almost all predicaments of the world. We like to reduce our problems down to single factors but they are almost always a marbled symphony of good & bad, black & white, up & down.
While we cannot find a response to everything, we can isolate the key significant factors.
What if there is no ‘primary cause’ that can be fixed, while still solving the underlying need the country seems to have - which is ‘have a large standing group of highly trained, extremely focused, non-conformist, insanely competitive, and professional killers ready at a moments notice’?
It’s not like the mere fact of creating/concentrating the population of the folks willing to be this doesn’t also create a whole swath of secondary effects.
Since after all, if steroids and similar PEDs do actually improve performance - which we wouldn’t be getting worked up about them this way if they didn’t! - then isn’t using them nearly a duty of the folks we are talking about? After all, mission first, and they’re (somewhat) expendable due to the nature of the work.
We make them do all sorts of other things which regularly puts their lives and health in danger, after all, and all the ‘high speed low drag’ folks I’ve personally known have had some kind of long term health impacts. Even if it’s just a lot of joint pain, or screwed up knees/backs.
And barring undesirable secondary effects, isn’t it saving lives and accomplishing missions that otherwise would not be? That is what they signed up for, literally. That and having the absolute craziest stories at the bar later.
note: professional bicyclists and weight lifters will also always have a doping issue that needs mitigating. Well, mitigating if we care about their health vs absolute performance anyway.
What if there is a primary cause, and brain trauma is not it? Seems pretty likely that the issue is psychological in nature, otherwise contact combat sports and eg rugby/football would show similar incidence of suicide. I can see how after a couple of years of high intensity combat civilian life would feel like a complete waste of time and a road to nowhere.
Interestingly, if I remember correctly, other contact sports like football do show similar increases in suicide (and unexpected homicide). It’s why football is getting phased out in a lot of areas for kids. But oddly, based on [https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/04/10/health/student-athlete-su...] cross country athletes actually have the highest rates, which is surprising.
Unless, like you’re saying, it is as much about the group being selected for as it is whatever is going on during the activity itself.
> otherwise contact combat sports and eg rugby/football would show similar incidence of suicide.
As the article says, the brain damage described here is from blast shockwaves passing through brain tissue with different densities. It's entirely different from the brain damage caused by sports injuries like in American football.
That doesn’t mean the same type of effects don’t happen. I knew a guy who suffered a closed head TBI due to
a commercial trucking accident - not the same as a concussion or a shockwave induced tbi mind you - and his personality changed in similar ways to those I’ve heard described.
He started to isolate, got paranoid and (more) violent, and ended up divorcing his first wife and marrying a second woman who seemed to be a kind of hoarder, and isolating at home with her - long before it was ‘cool’.
No idea what ended up happening to him, but murder/suicide would not have been surprising.
That's the destructive wasteful thinking of "every little bit helps". 80/20 can be applied to almost everything and looking at the second top factor of anything is a waste of time until you properly looked at the first and can't do anymore.
In a multi-stage process, even if you fix the cause with 80% responsibility, the outcome may not improve by much, as there is failure now at another stage. Of course, fixing that single cause is still progress.
Then it didn't have 80% responsibility and you failed to identify the bottleneck, it just means you identified a local optimisation, which is again "every little bit helps" thinking - what you should do when thinking about queueing systems (or multi-stage) like you describe is to identify the bottleneck. An improvement on the bottleneck should directly translate to an improvement to the end result.
The issue is when there is overdetermination - fixing a single cause resolves 80% of the current cause of failures, but the process fails at another point which becomes the new bottleneck. Say, most people are failing at a task due to stress(A). But even if you solve that, then most people can start failing due to another cause, B, say laziness. Fixing A is not "a little bit" and any solution will have to face A(in order to have success rate > 20%) but it is not sufficient to fix stress alone.
You can of course agglomerate A & B into a single cause C but for that to be meaningful C has to be the 'root' of A and B, otherwise the solution for C also just becomes an agglomeration of the solutions for A and B.
All I said is you identify the major factor first and fix it, and keep doing that. What you're saying now is basically what I started with, except applying a recursive step of "keep identifying new bottlenecks". But the algorithm should always be "Look at the biggest factor and nothing else", of course you should check if the biggest factor stays the same over time
"80/20" absolutely can't be applied to "almost everything" and assuming it can is lazy thinking.
Even if it does apply in this case, just because as secondary cause has 1/4 impact, that doesn't mean you should ignore it. Sometimes secondary causes have cost effective solutions that mean it is more efficient to address first. Simply ignoring this possibility like you are suggesting is not smart.
Many situations don't have a primary cause. There's no rule in the universe that says physical objects can always be decomposed into simple systems with a hierarchy of priorities.
If I break my leg and have COVID, I'm not going to be better until both of those problems are fixed and neither has any bearing on the other. There is no primary cause. There may be different levels of urgency, but some problems in the real world are just intrinsically messy and complex.
This makes a lot of sense. People are fundamentally changed by their experiences in combat zones. I'd imagine that going somewhere new afterwards allows you to be whoever you now are on your own terms, whereas going home means continually experiencing the pain of no longer fitting in to the life and loving relationship that you'd had before, with no relief in sight.
Could also be the difference between having a plan with long term goals that leads you to a new city vs not knowing what to do next and defaulting to just going back home. Maybe it's not that home is bad, but the fact you ended up there.
Changed maybe but not a whole new person. And its not binary - my experiences will different to yours even if we were in the exact same situations. After two tours I am not so different that I cannot interface with friends or family as I did before. I think the misconception of this statement does more harm then good and shows a rather negative interpretation of combat veterans.
I've heard similar comments from civilians, that dealing with extreme situations overseas isn't as stressful as dealing with folks when you go back home.
I don't know whether home folks are actually the problem or it's just delayed response. I think it was T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) who said that reactions to the trauma of war continue to bubble up long afterwards. Maybe that is suppressed for as long as you stay "in the field."
Sounds like what makes military service a good path is that 1. enlisting puts you in a better place than the previous day or 2. the time in the service enables a step up of some kind afterwards.
They don't do anything without $40 billion of air assets circling their position providing cover and get pissy when you tell them they have to shave and can't paint their weapons arbitrary colors.
Also they're all on drugs and will kill you if you report them for embezzling unit funds.
> Also they're all on drugs and will kill you if you report them for embezzling unit funds.
This is maybe not too related to the brain damage stuff (or maybe it is?), but I don't think the wider public knows nearly enough about the frankly shocking kinds and amounts of criminality in the various US special forces units. OP is not kidding about these people operating as gangs (but worse, because they're sanctioned killers).
The journalist (and Army vet, iirc) Seth Harp does yeoman's work on this topic, and is a good Twitter follow. He's got several excellent long-form investigative articles, often for Rolling Stone. Here's one on the rampant murders (ongoing!) at Fort Bragg that the Army won't talk about:
I think it's time to have a big cultural conversation about how much our current era of spec ops worship is worth all the war crimes and other less-than-normative behavior.
Every time I bring up the military, I get down voted. That's because (I believe) suggesting anything is wrong with military spending, military behaviour, or foreign adventures, is simply off limits.
Discussing or criticizing anything military related us seen as disrespectful to troops, and Killing the argument there kills more problematic questions (like 'was the invasion of Iraq a symptom of a larger problem like a too-bloated budget?')
One can appreciate those choices served, and support their assimilation into society, while at the same time questioning military ideals, spending levels, and behaviors.
And yes, training people to function well in situations that are borderline suicidal, training them to follow orders that put them in harms way, is going to have psychological effects on at least some of them. When you train people to behave abnormally you shouldn't be terribly surprised at abnormal behaviour patterns.
I say this as an ex military person myself. There are a lot of questions worth asking, but unfortunately society would prefer to remain ignorant. It's easier to live guilt free if "we didn't know".
With the war in Ukraine, I have a newfound appreciation for defense spending and intelligence gathering(We know Russia was going to invade), while at the same time I am able to view Afghanistan and Iraq as disastrous and unnecessary as well questioning indiscriminate surveillance and other immoral activities done under our name.
I don't know exactly what our military budget should be. It is probably undoubtedly bloated and perhaps full of white elephants, while we're underspending in some area. It seems that the peace dividend is over.
> Discussing or criticizing anything military related us seen as disrespectful to troops, and Killing the argument there kills more problematic questions (like 'was the invasion of Iraq a symptom of a larger problem like a too-bloated budget?')
I've seen this too, and it doesn't make sense to me either. Asking if it we shouldn't have sent our troops to do something isn't being disrespectful, IMHO; they didn't choose to go do the thing that shouldn't have been done; I'd like to ensure we respect the troops by only sending them on appropriate missions. I can respect the people, and not the mission.
> In late May, a 21-year-old enlisted man from California was killed — beheaded, in fact — while on a camping trip with six of his fellow paratroopers; once again, no arrests have been made in the case.
It isn’t just in SPECOPS. A lot of the current mess going on in society with politics is about ‘as long as they do what we need them to do, crimes don’t matter’ too.
There are a lot of factors around military members and civilian law enforcement. Generally civilian law enforcement will let the military handle their own under UCMJ. Under UCMJ they can lose rank, retirement benefits, or get jail time and a dishonorable discharge. The prospect of losing retirement could be earth shattering g for these guys I imagine. Further complications are these SOF people have A LOT of classified information. The government absolutely does not want them testifying under oath about anything.
UCMJ can take a long time to process similar to civilian cases. All that time the accused is with their unit, as usual.
Different roles. Everyone has a part to play but SF relies upon relative superiority. Assets and ignoring military customs which do not increase effectiveness and lethality are requirements to get the job done. An infantry company is more able to defend its position than a troop of SF without heavy weapons if bogged down. Camouflage works and when you're rolling multicam with a black gun it reduces its effectiveness.
Are they? a farmer shoots one of them in the leg and they nuke a town? there is a reason that medals for bravery don't goto SF but to forgotten army guards who die defending little hinterland hillforts against insurgency.
sf era is closing rapidly with flying ieds getting everywhere..
I anectodally heard that some US special forces soldiers joined the Ukraine war, but after a few weeks of getting shelled, being wet and cold and not getting three square meals and a bed to sleep in, they packed up and went home.
Digging into an issue that is affecting lives in such a drastic way and bringing these issues to light.
Like this part of the article for example:
Until The Times told the Navy of the lab’s findings about the SEALs who died by suicide, the Navy had not been informed, the service confirmed in a statement.
A Navy officer close to the SEAL leadership expressed audible shock, and then frustration, when told about the findings by The Times. “That’s the problem,” said the officer, who asked not to be named in order to discuss a sensitive topic. “We are trying to understand this issue, but so often the information never reaches us.”
Artillery crew members who fired thousands of rounds in combat came home plagued by hallucinations and psychosis
Could this problem also be affecting civilian gun enthusiasts? Or is the order of magnitude of the exposure just wildly lower compared to the military, even in the most enthusiastic?
If you ever get the chance, go shoot some small caliber weapons. I think everyone should at some point to have a baseline in their head for what guns are. Plus, I think it’d be good for people to know you can become really hard to hit by all but the best shooters by… walking away slowly in a zigzag. Near impossible if you run.
And then if you have a chance to be around some small artillery, do that too. It’s hard to describe the difference.
(“You” here is used to address HN in general, not you personally)
Tangentially related: Caltech has a cannon on campus (most notable for being stolen by MIT in 2006)[0] that fires twice per quarter, once towards the beginning and once towards the end. It is loud—you can hear it on the other end of campus[1]. Although to be fair, I don't know what they put in it and/or how the blank's loudness would compare to a modern artillery piece firing an actual projectile....
> If you are a fast runner or have bad knees, run in a straight line away from the attacker towards cover. The faster you can get away, the fewer shots they will be able to fire.
>If you are a slower runner and do not have knee trouble, a zig-zag run may be a better option. You may still be hit in this case, but the chances of being hit in a vital area may be reduced.
I’m guessing there aren’t many studies on this, but as a young, fast runner I’d zigzag every time if they’re shooting _at_ me. At least run in a straight line that isn’t collinear with the shooter’s position. Obviously, if you can find cover, put it between you and them and cover distance.
It’s so, so hard for any amateur to hit a target that is moving radially in a polar coordinate system centered on them, at all. I’d bet your average shooter who makes the news can’t put 7/10 shots in a stationary silhouette at 10yd. It’s harder than you’d think.
Radially might be the wrong word; I thought for a while about it. You’re correct, your goal is to present a target that is moving from the perspective of the shooter. Ideally not moving at a constant angular velocity.
> you can become really hard to hit by all but the best shooters by… walking away slowly in a zigzag. Near impossible if you run.
Idk if i would trust my life with that. What if they just spray a bunch of bullets in the general direction I am? Also what is the minimum distance where this tactic becomes effective? I just can’t imagine that zigzagging helps that much when you are 2 meters away from the shooter. And then there is the question of what is the typical distance between the shooter and the victim in most gun violence scenarios. Would not be surprised if that is inside the “zigzag helps you” distance.
Besides… how would going to a range and shooting guns help one learn this information? It feels what you really would need is someone practicing running away from someone with murderous intent to get an intuitive understanding of what you are claiming. And of course people are reluctant to practice that.
> What if they just spray a bunch of bullets in the general direction I am?
From what I understand, real soldiers generally don't spray bullets like you see in movies or video games unless they are in a defensive machine gun nest or on some sort of vehicle. Ammo is an extremely finite and precious resource on the battlefield. You can't carry much with you, and you don't necessarily know when you can resupply, so every shot has to count. If you spray bullets you'll be out within seconds and then you're on a battlefield unarmed. Not good.
> And then there is the question of what is the typical distance between the shooter and the victim in most gun violence scenarios.
In a war? Can be quite high.
> how would going to a range and shooting guns help one learn this information?
Ranges have moving targets, you try to hit them and observe that it's hard.
A standard NATO soldier should carry 210 rounds of 5.56 ammo. That's 7 30-magazine clips if he actually has all of them in clips.
If you ever saw any combat video, soldiers often fire a LOT, experienced or not (experienced just tend to hit more often). Maybe not a full auto, but nobody thinks in '1 bullet per enemy' mentality, self-preservation makes you overdo it, and they train you to not save on ammo unless you are cut off from supplies.
> U.S. forces have expended at least 250,000 small-caliber bullets for every insurgent killed in the present wars
Think about that number for a second. Technically, 1000 fully equipped NATO soldiers fire all their carried ammo per 1 single dead enemy. Life ain't Call of Duty.
Of course nobody thinks they're going to get a kill shot with every single bullet. But if you were to fire continuously you'd get through 210 rounds in like 20 seconds or something. Unless you plan to be in the battlefield for only a few minutes you've got to be pretty careful with that ammo.
I was the victim of an attempted robbery in NYC. I had fired a pistol before, so when the robber threatened me with one (which he may or may not have had) I did some mental calculations and came to the conclusion to run, hard, in the direction where there seemed to be the most people. If he had a piece on him, by the time he drew it from his hoodie and aimed, I would be far enough away to make an accurate shot difficult... and if he missed he might hit someone down the road. I calculated he wouldn't be stupid enough to risk it.
I interpreted it as “there’s such a big difference between artillery and a handgun you clearly have never been around an actual gun being fired before”
What did GP say about brain damage at all? Downthread he mentions people shooting 9mm pistols with hearing protection and navy SEALS as if they are the only two groups while not mentioning brain damage at all.
Aside from the cavalier “I know something you don’t” there was nothing of any value posted.
How does saying “you should expose yourself to both things if you possibly can” express that there is a difference between the two?
I suppose I can imagine that GP said that you can feel the difference between levels of brain damage incurred (they did not), but even if that were the case then why would you encourage someone to expose themselves to artillery if you thought the damage was more than zero?
“The damage from both is different but also zero if you zig zag check mate 8-)”
I’m only going to engage with you once, because I think you’re being deliberately obtuse in your comments. The following is in case you’re being genuine, and for other’s benefit:
There are several orders of magnitude difference between a 9mm handgun and a small artillery round. The difference is in terms of concussive force.
If you shoot a handgun with earplugs in, you hear a pop that sounds kind of like dropping a small ball bearing on a wood floor. You feel a shock in your wrists and a bit in your elbows, like high-fiving someone.
Now, you stand a few yards from artillery - and I’m talking Korean war artillery, not modern stuff. Also not talking about reenactment stuff; they usually just put a bit of black powder in there. I’m talking about small tow-behind artillery that you’d see at the Big Sandy Shoot (Google it).
You _feel_ the sound before you hear it. You’ll look for some shooting muffs to put on _over_ your earplugs. The concussive force comes through the ground, through the air, moves through your head and stimulates your eardrums from the backside. You feel your guts vibrate a bit. It feels like the ground moved under you, like you’re landing after jumping in the air.
And _that_ is an order of magnitude or so below what we’re talking about with SEALs here - those guys are placing explosive with a sticky backing on doors, and torching it off from not very far away. There’s stories from them of not being able to get physically “far enough” from a charge, and having to detonate it anyway because you’re in a freaking war zone. When a SEAL says “oh, this is going to fucking suck” before pushing a button, you know it’s real.
Aside from your advice to find an opportunity to expose oneself to the concussive force of artillery fire, it appears that you meant to answer “no” to this question:
> Could this problem also be affecting civilian gun enthusiasts?
Since you are clear that you do not think that civilian gun enthusiasts could be affected because they
> shoot a handgun with earplugs in
I thank you for your service for sharing your advice on how to become invulnerable to gun fire. Without that I might have doubted your expertise on this issue of brain damage from concussive force
>Plus, I think it’d be good for people to know you can become really hard to hit by all but the best shooters by… walking away slowly in a zigzag. Near impossible if you run.
I hope they never invent a gun that fires more than once per trigger pull, then you would be able to just sweep it around in the general direction of Invincible Mr. Zig
Unlikely, but… Small arms enthusiasts are often not great with hearing protection. As hearing declines, men especially tend to be less proactive in seeking care, mostly hearing aids.
Why does this matter? Hearing loss is often a causative factor with depression, social isolation, anxiety and early onset dementia.
Fear and anxiety drive a lot of the behavior that gun merchants leverage to sell guns. It’s a vicious cycle.
Artillery is orders of magnitude more powerful than guns.
Doing something is a stressful situation (combat zone) is infinitely more likely to lead to stress-related disorders than doing it in a safe, controlled environment (shooting range)
The whole article is about how brain damage caused their hallucinations and psychosis, instead of it being caused by stress disorders as is more commonly believed. The brain damage itself was likely caused by the shock waves from explosive shells they were firing.
I think it depends on the shockwave. Maybe someone can math it out, but it’s like the sound leaf blower makes vs standing right next to a jet engine. I have never seen a shockwave on the ground behind a “normal” firearm, but it seems commonplace with artillery.
Ex artillery officer here, the shockwaves from firing artillery can be so powerful they can knock you off your feet if you're standing in the wrong place at the wrong time and caught unawares
I've been surrounded by guns most of my life, going out to the shooting range at least once a month, sometimes more. Range days are busy, with sometimes dozens of people shooting on the line at the same time. The range is open air.
I have some hearing damage (which I actually think is from somewhere else - we've always been anal about protection). Other than that, no other issues to report with myself nor my family/friends who participated with me in this hobby. Small calibre gunfire does not have a big enough shock/impact to really affect bystanders. Interestingly, I dislike shooting in an indoor range, because so much of the shot is radiated back to the shooter and bystanders. Where in an open air range that impact goes up in the air and away.
Risk of lead exposure is very real though. A friend almost passed away due to too much shooting in an indoor range with poor ventilation. After some serious negative personality changes and other related symptoms he was finally diagnosed with nearly acute lead poisoning. Lead bullets basically vapourised when they hit the backstop, so the dust that's kicked up is very nasty.
Its the back of the bullet that is vaporizing from the start from the explosion and hot gases (since it has very low melting/vaporizing point), and then second, smaller spike is when hitting hard surfaces and melting instantly into 100s of pieces (if you watch any slow-mo impact of a lead bullet they mostly don't vaporize, just melt and fly parallel to surface being hit).
There is safe ammunition these days, but it costs more. Swiss make their military ammo lead-free (they have cca same ammo as US/NATO but bullets are most effective with different barrel twist compared to NATO ones, I think 1:7 vs 1:10), but both can fire each other's rounds safely.
Safe ammo is essentially just back of the bullet covering lead core (if present at all), but for some reason most manufacturers don't do it by default. Some stuff doesn't have lead core at all, but then desired weight needs to be achieved via other substances and is priced accordingly.
Almost all rifle (and quality handgun) ammo are copper jacketed, meaning no lead vaporisation until it hits the backstop.
I use solid brass ammo on one of my larger caliber rifles, but not the others. Guns can be very finicky about their bullets, and not all like solid brass ammo which results in weird accuracy issues.
Oh yeah, muzzle brakes are actually prihibited in many disciplines where multiple shooters share the same shooting line - they're extremely disruptive to competitors next to you.
Artillery has actually gotten smaller. Propellant charges have gotten "boomier" high explosive instead of smokeless propellants hence the traumatic brain injuries on the teams firing them.
Not at all. It might be a cause, but tons of PTSD has nothing to do with concussive trauma, so much so that the other cases overwhelmed the correlating cases when they investigated the causation.
I doubt they had the right technology back then to actually investigate for physical brain trauma. Even today CTE diagnoses are made post mortem. And one can end up with CTE without ever having a full blown concussion.
Navy Seals aren't firing artillery. The article says the Seals brains were damaged by their own weapons which I assume to be rifles but maybe I'm wrong.
they're talking about blasts from open-air combustion shoulder mounted anti-tank weapons.. very nearly artillery, and very loud.[0] . The article linked is the one mentioned in the parent article.
one of the major problems with such weapons is that although the support crew can shield themselves, often the firing soldier cannot due to operation of the weapon.
SEALs and other special forces use a lot of heavy weaponry and explosives in addition to small arms like rifles and sidearms. Think door breaching charges, grenades, rocket launchers, heavy machine guns.
I used to shoot competitively. We always wore ear protection. Even without it though, I would imagine there's a huge difference between an artillery shell and a .45 round.
although I agree that there are worlds of difference between small arms and artillery, I would like to point out that ear protection.. protects your ears.
there is no good way to protect from concussive blasts aside from avoidance and shelter.
fwiw most DoD studies have found that concussive blasts that seem to be damaging to personnel start at around the AT4/Carl Gustaf range of large shoulder-fired almost-artillery -- understandably since they're large and mostly open-air combustion driven.[0]
A .45 gunshot feels like a sound, and with hearing protections at a few meters you hear it but cant feel it in the slightest. You feel it in your hand but not further. Artillery is more similar to how it feels standing next to gigantic speakers at a concert, even with hearing protections you feel it throughout your entire body, except sharper.
I think the key here is to explore all options, not limiting yourself to the obvious.
Steel Industry:
In the steel mills people reported similarities 100-60 years ago. I remember talking to workers and their problems after being exposed to huge mechanical machines that form steel. Usually they are extremely loud, feel like a permanent earthquake, dusty and toxic air, hot temperatures and high risk for life threatening events.
I see some similarities here between steel worker’s mental impact and military. It is fair to say that some conditions are not really helping you as an individual “unlocking your full potential”. Some conditions are simply very detrimental to your health.
It’s not just the orders of magnitude difference in number of rounds fired; it’s the size and power of the rounds. SEALs don’t shoot soda cans with .22 rifles.
Unlikely, handguns produce significantly smaller shockwaves. Additionally the problems described in the article are a relatively new phenomenon related to the introduction of high explosive propellant cartridges, which small arms don't use.
Exposure to lead is a much larger risk for gun enthusiasts from my point of view.
Guns don't make shockwaves that damage your brain. Damage your hearing without ear protection, sure, but they're not sending shockwaves through your skull.
Shooting as a popular passtime has been around long enough that we know what the risks are: commonly tinnitus, rarely injuries related to what the firearm actually does, more rarely lead poisoning.
On the other hand, artillery and rockets are extremely loud. If you want to look it up and start comparing things, keep in mind that every 3 decibels represents a doubling in pressure, so a howitzer having twenty or thirty decibels on a handgun is actually saying a lot.
I think this is probably correct. There are people who shoot thousands of rounds per year and there hasn’t been any mind of established pattern of brain damage like this (at least to my knowledge).
It’s possible small arms fire doesn’t make big enough shockwaves. To cause the effects. I’d hypothesize it’s the larger blasts… perhaps even a frequency component to it? Blasts from a fast explosive like C4 could do more damage than slower shockwaves like mortar or artillery shots.
To someone familiar with the subject matter, “shooting guns gives you brain damage” is an absurd, incorrect idea that one feels obligated to voice an objection to, in order to perhaps slow the spread of misinformation.
A 3 decibel increase represents a doubling in sound energy. Sound energy is proportional to the square of sound pressure, so you need a 6 decibel increase for a doubling in pressure.
I'm into sports shooting, and during winter our club has an indoor range that used to be an old bunker. So we're in this 25 foot by 60 foot concrete tunnel, that's about 8 feet tall at most. Not a giant cavern by any means. And closed doors, so just (forced) ventilation open to the outside.
I've shot .357 magnum and shotguns in there. It's loud, yes. I wear ear plugs and ear muffs when doing that.
But not by any means do they rattle my brain, and I can't imagine it's anything close to what you see around an artillery when firing.
I mean look at the ground towards the camera in this[1] shot, clearly a powerful shock wave going out in all directions.
An interesting thought popped off in my head: what if it does, and the crowd that leans heavily into enthusiast firearm usage is giving themselves micro-TBIs -- could that over the years create certain changes in personality and psychological workings that lead to certain, similar outcomes? E.g. could it be correlated with political affiliation?
Don't read into it too much, though. This isn't snark or passive aggression, just genuine interest.
The thing I suspect will prevent this from being an issue for sports shooters is that I'm not sure the energy in typical sport shooting calibers is enough to induce micro-TBIs.
Sports shooters who shoot larger calibers, ie a 7.62 NATO or higher in terms of sound energy, are typically shooting relatively few rounds at a time. Those who shoot a lot of rounds typically shoot smaller calibers.
Now, I think you might have a point when it comes to competitive practical/dynamic shooters[1], who shoot open division with hot .40 super loads or similar. Especially those, like in my club, who train a lot in indoor ranges.
However these would make up a relatively small percentage of the overall recreational shooters out there I imagine.
I did a lot of clay target shooting with 12 gauge shotgun when I was young. That involves a lot of shots each session with pretty powerful cartridges, I'd suspect it is more deleterious than target shooting, even with large calibre guns.
Don't know about micro-TBIs but it sure fucked up my hearing.
Unsolicited tacticlol advice aside, I would say that the risks would vary dramatically between individuals. If one’s mental model of gun users is “firing a derringer into a pillow or operating heavy artillery” then the answer to your question would be “no”.
However
I’ve personally met a gun enthusiast that collected elephant guns [1] and shot barrels filled with tannerite [2] for fun. He was also… not all there. So who knows? ¯\_(ツ)_/
As an aside I entreat everyone not to entertain confident proclamations about secondary damage from weapons from someone that claims that they can avoid primary damage (bullets) by the proper tactical battlefield execution of a Sesame Street dance. [3][4]
* to quit with the games, relatively moderm firearms are 1700-1800's tech, with things like 3D printing banning them is as nonsensical as banning alcohol. Its just too easy to make.
"We performed a multimodal study of active-duty United States Special Operations Forces (SOF)—an elite group repeatedly exposed to explosive blasts in training and combat—to identify diagnostic biomarkers of brain injury associated with repeated blast exposure (RBE). We found that higher blast exposure was associated with alterations in brain structure, function, and neuroimmune markers, as well as lower quality of life. Neuroimaging findings converged on an association between cumulative blast exposure and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), a widely connected brain region that modulates cognition and emotion. This work supports the use of a network-based approach, focusing on the rACC, in future studies investigating the impact of RBE on SOF brain health."
"The blast exposure cases showed a distinct and previously undescribed pattern of interface astroglial scarring at boundaries between brain parenchyma and fluids, and at junctions between grey and white matter. This distinctive pattern of scarring may indicate specific areas of damage from blast exposure consistent with the general principles of blast biophysics, and further, could account for aspects of the neuropsychiatric clinical sequelae reported. The generalisability of these findings needs to be explored in future studies, as the number of cases, clinical data, and tissue availability were limited."
In bootcamp my SDI was a stinger gunner. It cost something like 60k for him to "practice" firing, including the cost of the drone. He was a SSGT, had been in for 11 years at the time I knew him, and he'd actually fired the weapon once. There was another gunner there training at the same time, so two people fired at the same drone.
We can train everyone without this level of exposure, and I can imagine a world where your dose is tracked like radiation, kept to a safe level, and people are forced into retirement after they hit the limit.
In many cases, doctors treating the injured troops give them diagnoses of psychiatric disorders that miss the underlying physical damage. Much of what is categorized as post-traumatic stress disorder may actually be caused by repeated exposure to blasts.
I've said for years that people who are suicidal typically have very serious, intractable personal problems but get dismissed like it's "mental" or emotional. They need actual help for actual problems, not "attaboys" and not empty assurances that "Someone cares."
Your comment doesn't reflect what you're quoting, you call it "personal problems" which implies extrapersonal problems occurring in their life, when the quote describes actual physical damage done to their brains.
Maybe I’m missing something here… is there a “real” solution that they should be getting instead? My impression is that there aren’t any remedies for brain injuries yet, that we’ve only just been able to detect them, but I’d love to hear that I’m wrong about this.
Anecdotally, I know of cases of improved neurological function from alternative remedies. No, I'm not aware of any vetted medical studies, new research etc.
I'm not really trying to say "Just give these people x drug, clearly!" I'm trying to make a broader point that people who are suicidal need some problem resolved.
Homeless people are frequently suicidal. They need housing, not to be dismissed as "crazy."
People with torturous medical problems are frequently suicidal. I'm pro right to die but I also would like to see the world take their problem seriously and not act like you are "crazy" to feel like your body is a prison, you just want the torment to end and to feel your only hope of escape is death.
Etc.
People who are suicidal are routinely dismissed as "crazy," like they don't have a real problem. This needs to stop.
What an incredible article. The other articles referenced within are also excellent.
My concern: given that this is becoming more common knowledge, in a world in which other, potentially adversarial, countries are more than fine sending their soldiers through the mental meat grinder, how can we prevent outcomes like the ones shared here while retaining hard power?
In the medium term, these posts are all voluntary. They say you volunteer 3 times before you're a Ranger (enlisting, Airborne, Ranger). As people learn that they will likely kill themselves at 45, when you're supposed to retire at 40 and have 40 years of retirement, then they will leave SF early.
In the short term I could see leadership pushing a fourth volunteering (volunteering to commit suicide so the Mission can continue)
Its mostly a question of pr I think. More highly trained troops are less likely to die or mess up, and that is bad pr. So we train them more, but if that training also causes deaths, which becomes bad pr, we will train them less. Younger less trained soldiers are cheaper too, so I think the tradeoff will favor less training as soon as this becomes common knowledge anyways.
The only usable EMPs we have are nuclear weapons. So if you are willing to use one, then just detonate it a bit closer to the surface and it will work just as well against everything we have.
"It was not chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., which is found in football players and other athletes who have been repeatedly hit in the head. It was something new."
OK, so not that.
There are going to be a huge number of people with this problem from the Ukraine war. There haven't been years of artillery duels since WWII.
The Carl Gustav 8.4cm recoilless rifle now be procured by the Marines has a big back-blast through the typical venturi used by these kinds of weapons. In training, (Sweden at least) they are limited to the number of rounds they can fire. I do not know if this for merely hearing loss, or if there are concussive effects.
Also, while "small arms" do not typically have concussive effects, I have stood behind a.50 Barrett rifle discharge and there was a noticable shock wave in the air. I didn't feel it in my head, but my intestines were not happy. If you were in the front hemisphere of the muzzle blast it would be far worse.
Muzzle brakes on rifles usually make the blast wave propagate more to the side. A high caliber rifle with a muzzle brake could easily hit 160db. Maybe a .50 cal could go higher. So now you are even punishing your friends, not just folks downrange.
I live in a small town with a gun dealer who is not particularly thoughtful about others. One year he had a truck-mounted cannon made for the fourth of july parade, and he fired it off numerous times throughout the parade. Everyone who didn't already have their ears covered, including so many young kids, doubled over each time it went off. He just laughed at everyone, even with kids crying on both sides of the street. People were talking in person and online about how their ears rang for days afterward.
The only people who could do anything about it probably have age-related hearing loss and don't see it as a problem. Same reason nobody does anything about extremely loud motorcyclists.
I fired a 50 as part of my job for years, it is nothing like the effects of being near arty being fired. I can't speak to being in an IED blast, but I can speak to being concussed. Yes, the 50 is loud. With hearing protection, I never felt an effect. Whacking my head playing hockey, a motorcycle crash, being knocked out fighting... all of these felt like something. So did being near arty.
One of the things that is becoming apparent in football CTE is that damage is not limited to the big hits, the chronic effects of smaller hits are causing damage.
My money is on the breaching charges that these high speed folks use. Particularly in conjunction with the thousands and thousands of reps that folks put in practicing breaching. It's enough force to rip a reinforced door clean off the frame. Grenades are a close second but I don't think they train into the thousands with actual field grenades.
Maybe an instructor sure, but we're talking about SF here.
I don't doubt that artillery will also do this kind of damage, so I'd be curious about what the brains of field artillery folks look like.
From a NYT article about the Lewiston, Maine shooter's brain injuries [1]:
> Researchers found that before they worked around blasts, the instructors brains looked healthy. But in follow-up scans five months later, their brains were teeming with an abnormal protein called beta amyloid that is associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
> “In a young brain you should see no amyloid. None. Zero,” said Dr. Carlos Leiva-Salinas, the University of Missouri neuroradiologist who ran the study. “We were surprised, very surprised.”
Prisoners is another population where we would find pervasive brain damage if we scanned them.[0] In time I believe we will find that a ton of destructive/aggressive behavior is due to physical issues in the brain.
When we learned that lead poisoning was bad for you and increased aggression, we didn't kill everybody with lead poisoning. We changed our society to reduce lead poisoning, by getting rid of leaded gasoline, lead paint, etc.
Topical: just a few minutes from where I live, in Lewiston Maine, a former grenade range instructor walked into a bar recently and killed 18 people. His brain was found to have the same kinds of damage- he had been hearing voices and experiencing other psychotic symptoms and he had access to guns. It seems likely that the repeated concussions at the grenade range were a contributing factor.
Interesting how the obvious exposure to violence and what psychosomatic/organical damage it causes also to those merely exposed to it, regardless of which “side“ you’re on, is not mentioned at all. The correlations are well researched in trauma studies.
I've said for several years that my estimation of the United States military's treatment of its enlistees makes it basically indistinguishable from psychological torture in my eyes. I'm glad there's finally research that says something essentially similar.
Wonder if something similar happens to people who have exposure to drilling sound for significantly continuous amount of time (few hours a day). I often see construction/roadworks crew around my area without ear protection while drilling is going on.
I think it is pretty obvious that there should be more government funding to determine whether the brain damage occurred while defending our freedom within the US borders or outside it.
There's plenty to be done mostly in research: Regular checks on every solider after they had a blast that potentially affected their brain. Training can certainly be adapted as well as the gear that protects their heads and brains. I bet there's something of a gradient in the brain damage and not just a single event that causes it to go bad, the ages of those mentioned in the article are all within a decade. Reassigning soldiers earlier in their career to tasks without risk for their brain will save them and their families lots of pain.
I suspect it's like a lot of DoD-funded research. The work gets done, the report gets written, and then it goes on a shelf (or rather, some ancient SharePoint site on a classified network with no functional search ability). When a crisis occurs, the word goes out to everyone, the one lifer analyst spending too much time in windowless rooms at the Pentagon pipes up about something he remembers, and then everyone is satisfied that the work got done, "the problem is understood". Everything goes back to normal until it happens again.
I find it difficult to believe that a coterie of seal spouses coordinated a brain study of their dead husbands and after finding a smoking gun, none of them thought to fire off a message to anybody in the Navy.
It's entirely possible that they actually did send messages, but the people they informed didn't give a fuck, and are in entirely separate divisions from the Navy officers The Times interviewed.
the way people understand mood and suicide is completely wrong. i have had very unusual bipolar disorder symptoms in the past and it allowed me to experience extreme depression one day and then good mood the next day. i have experienced depression that is so bad that it was difficult to physically move. i remember not being able to stand up from being seated in a chair. this is what i consider to be basically the far side of the spectrum of symptoms — the worst that depression can be. its absolutely deadly because at this point you are effectively experiencing unbearable pain as well as, for some reason, having trouble moving. it hurts to think about the future. every moment is agony. people in this situation kill themselves to end the pain most of all and because they feel trapped. and also because in this state of mind you are unable to work, support yourself or even have relationships. but the real insight is whats next.
luckily i only experienced those lows for a period of time. and some days i would be lifted out of it and feel perfectly normal. this experience is what made me realize what almost nobody realizes: that there is no situation where a healthy person will feel the desire to kill themselves. this is because mood is an illusion. i would go from having this entire world view that my life is hopeless and being completely lost and almost instantly switch over to having lots of things on my mind and looking forward to many things and wanting to get on with life. having a normal mood involves being blind to negative things as much as being depressed involves seeing bad things that arent bad. the human mind is designed to translate sensory input into action by any means and when this system breaks down it weirdly feels painful and makes you want to kill yourself. i think the breakdown of this system can be isolated to a domain, concept or situation or be global. and i think that high stress can cause this effect through inflammatory dysregulation or some other stress pathology giving the incorrect impression that suicide is a reaction to stress. if there were a pill to stop the root cause of depression, nobody would ever kill themselves except for terminally ill people. and just because someone killed themself doesnt mean that their life was especially hard, hopeless or messed up or whatever. it just means they were sick. thats it. and yet every time theres a suicide, all people talk about are the circumstances surrounding the suicide even though they probably are indirectly involved at best!
when i was in those deep depressions i would connect the dots of all the things about my life into a causal web and would be convinced myself that it was the circumstances of my life were the reason i felt depressed. but then within hours that mental framework would disappear completely and i would feel fine. its an extremely powerful illusion. thats why the word trapped resonates so powerfully with people who have been through it. the illusion makes you feel trapped.
this realization has made me basically immune to depression. i recognize mood disfunction immediately now and i have coached myself to remember its an illusion. i am sure that i have experienced significant mood dysfunction in the past, and that most people have, and gotten lost in it simply because i didnt understand what was going on. i think that this is a huge component of the decision to commit suicide: people start experiencing pain, they think its intrinsic to their life situation, they get lost in it, and they would hold on if only they had some context. i wish there was a way to induce severe depression temporarily to show people what it is and educate them so they could not go into it completely blind when the time comes. that would really help people.
I didn’t read the article. I mainly come here for the commentary and the backdoor links. But!
Hormone replacement therapy is a game changer for a lot of men who have CTE. I’m a clinical social worker. I’ve worked in emergency medicine, correctional medicine, and now outpatient psychotherapy. I used to think HRT was for ego lifters and old ladies. But I have seen first hand the value of HRT for CTE patients. I’ve seen guys go from three OWIs and unable to manage an entry level job at Lowe’s to law-abiding, midlevel executive at national corporations within months of starting on HRT.
> Nearly everywhere that tissues of different density or stiffness met, there was a border of scar tissue — a shoreline of damage that seemed to have been caused by the repeated crash of blast waves.
> It was not chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., which is found in football players and other athletes who have been repeatedly hit in the head. It was something new.
What do you think the mechanism behind this is? I wouldn't intuitively think HRT would help much with a damaged brain, unless the damage itself somehow caused a hormone imbalance.
Estrogen in the brain is neuro-protective and neuro-trophic. The primary source of estrogen in the brain for men is testosterone converted via aromatase.
However, that's speculative. I found no significant studies on point, notwithstanding physician interest. Because some men seek out testosterone, some doctors might be quick to offer it off-label for other conditions.
Low testosterone in adult men causes pretty severe fatigue and depression that resolves quickly with treatment. You become almost unable to experience joy or desire, so you go through the motions of life with as little effort as possible.
HRT does not help with scarring or issues caused by scarring. Lots of other things sure, but not scarring, which is what the article claims is the problem.
It’s more like a mid level capable person was working at lowes until they got their hormones in balance to function optimally which resolved their depression or other symptoms
How is fabricating a justification for invading a country that never attacked America benefit the average citizen who's quality of life has fallen in the past three decades?
I just don't understand this "freedom" argument that seems to gloss over the obvious--poor people dying for a small group of people that benefit massively from war
