New
Pattern Of Brain Damage Is Pervasive In Navy Seals Who Died By Suicide
https://archive.ph/MzZMw
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.
Thank you. That is enlightening. Not something I had ever thought about, but why I...
That's so disillusioning it must be true.
The special forces tale is heroism - being brave and tough in dangerous situations.
That the danger comes from your own equipment, used as intended, is just sickening.
Thank you for your service and sacrifice, and for helping us celebrate another Independence Day.
There are a lot of sports where players experience constant hits to the head or extreme physical contact, like MMA, boxing, rugby, hockey, and more. Some of these players do get brain damage, but I rarely hear about them committing suicide. What makes these Navy SEALs commit suicide is definitely the guilt. In these wars, they must have killed innocent civilians either directly, as ordered, or as casualties. That’s something most people can’t live with. No one is validating their feelings about it, and they can’t ask for forgiveness from those they harmed, so I disagree.
This is wild speculation, further an insult to the dead. Shame on you.
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.
Concussion is a film about football players & suicide
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.
Do you happen to have statistics about that? I would love to see them
I think the whole point of the study is exploratory. Looking for commonality in a search of a cause or suite of factors instead of making assumptions.
Maybe it is a physical phenomenon like adrenal fatigue or brain injury, maybe it isnt; that is why people study it.
> Much of what is categorized as post-traumatic stress disorder may actually be caused by repeated exposure to blasts.
that is to say, it's actually shell shock? as in, actual physical shock from actual shells? george carlin would be so proud
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc
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.
Firing a rifle may or may not cause shock waves that are strong enough. If you have been firing a whole day you definitely feel funny in the head.
> .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:
> If you have been firing a whole day you definitely fell funny in the head.
This should really be a big, fat, red flag that something is not quite right..
> Carl Gustaf
The CG is LOUD. Wicked backblast on that, too.
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.
I believe you but I wonder how that works
The explosive power is divided between forwards and backwards, there are no other holes in the tube and the weapon is basically recoilless.
https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/ImageVault/publishedmedia/fumm...
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.
My guess for most likely vector is breach charges.
that feeling might be partly due to the large amounts of lead compounds in primers being inhaled by the shooter
Lead poisoning symptoms take weeks to months to emerge. It would show in a blood sample.
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”.
It is a strong datapoint, but he may be using meaningfully different weapons / ammo compared to seals.
Math avoids this kind of uncertainty.
The guns are different, but primers are mostly the same.
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.
i don't think that is true of lead poisoning
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.
yeah, those do sound like more likely causes
as for diving, it's more about holding your breath for long periods of time repeatedly; look up national apnea teams
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.
I mean you'll get hearing damage for sure but I'm just saying that's a far cry from cavitating your brain tissue.
Yep. Clarified my original comment a bit.
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.
> diving deep underwater, which is also known to cause brain damage
never heard about that. can you back this up with a source or explanation?
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.
> got really fucked
https://community.atlassian.com/t5/App-Central/How-to-create...
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?
10.1096/fj.201701031R
Im assuming you are referencing this paper [1], which is about competetive breath hold diving - diving to hundreds of feet on a single breath.
I've never heard of seals doing that kind of training.
[1] https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1096/fj.201...
That’s about apnea though. Don’t seals mostly do scuba diving? Or are they really holding their breath?
Some have died from doing underwater breath holding training [1] but I don't know how many minutes they aim for or how regular that is.
[1] https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/1...
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.
i am specifically not talking about sleep apnea, which everyone already knows causes brain damage
I wonder if the Havanna syndrome is somehow correlated with this as well
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:
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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.
---
[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10913303/
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.
0. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/09/pentagon-funding-ex...
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.
[1] - https://apnews.com/article/health-cuba-havana-congress-e0186...
> 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?
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.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-lab-leak-deception-an...
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.
[1] - https://nypost.com/2024/06/02/us-news/house-covid-panel-chai...
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]
[1] - https://retractionwatch.com/2019/04/19/harvard-cancer-lab-su...
Pressure buildup in the cranium due to microwave heating? Victims have reported a feeling as if their heads are about to explode.
Huh. I feel like that almost daily nowadays. Maybe I should grab some tinfoil. Unless it's coming from inside the head...
If you believe someone may be pointing a microwave weapon at you, please do not wrap your head in foil like a baked potato.
Go see a doctor. Run. Don't walk.
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.
i don't mean nitrox, and i agree that scuba diving doesn't cause brain damage at all (except, as you point out, in accidents)
possibly people are upvoting because they know some facts you don't
But what diving except scuba is relevant when talking about seals? Are they doing apnea diving?
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
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.
This would take a much bigger explosion.
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.
Modern combat helmets don’t leave a “gap” between head and helmet, the “gap” is filled with padding to absorb impact/shock and improve comfort.
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.
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.
Shooting suppressed carbines and SMGs generates a completely different level of air pressure than Grandpa's 30-06 or Dad's .308.
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…
All of the above, yes.
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.
That's not all SOF shoot, of course.
SCAR-H, M14 EBR, M249 SAWs and M240 all shoot 7.52mm x 51mm NATO (compatible with .308 but slightly different chamber pressures)
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.
The FN Minimi (M249) fires 5.56. The others fire 7.62, not 7.52.
I shot a .50 a couple times and didn't feel much of anything tbh. Less of a shockwave than fireworks on July 4th.
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.)
I mean, yeah, still, they're probably spending more time near explosions and gun shots in aggregate even if most of the missions are spent idling.
How often do you shoot your guns when you hunt?
sure, nobody knows, but physically it just seems implausible
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.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
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.
The momentum of a projectile impact is very low, far lower than head contacts in sports. See, e.g.: https://i.ibb.co/7X6YCLD/ballistic-head-impact-updated.jpg -- from https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/13390/chapter/9
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.
I don't think it would break the neck. Typical AK47 bullet at 100yd has momentum 5 kgm/s, which is about the same as a baseball at 77mph.
Guns are kinetic energy weapons, not momentum weapons. It’s the kinetic energy that matters.
Momentum is conserved, recoil momentum is the same as bullet momentum, yet recoil does not kill the shooter.
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.
My favourite bit of AK47-helmet interface knowledge is that a French Jaguar pilot took an AK47 round to the helmet in the Gulf War. While flying.
(He survived, it's not really relevant here as it didn't stop the bullet - there was an exit hole too).
Deflecting it could maybe work though.
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.
ME/CFS can also be triggered by viruses. Epstein-Barr virus and SARS-CoV-2 both are suspected triggers.
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?
Maybe that’s because 100 years ago they still remembered the old wars and thus could compare.
It’s not either/or. The psychological shit is real, but the physical damage to the brain is real also. Both things are true.
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.
The distinction between physical and psychological problems just betrays our abysmal understanding of how the brain works.
Maybe, but some kind of property dualism still seems plausible to me.
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 - yes. "Carrying on" - well, maybe.
But the way you've phrased it implies a bit more and you should probably clarify.
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 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.
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.
Or both.
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 always wonder if it occurred more, or, in a modern society, was recorded more.
Just thinking aloud.
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.
Because if the rounds don't fly down field they'll fly back.
Shock damage from firing a gun might be bad, damage from incoming shells is much worse.
While that is true, you have years and years to get the proper PPE in the artillery before you ever need to lob shells.
Yet another reason to not join the military. You’re just fuel for the machine.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/06/14/armys-recruit...
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.
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.
Given one of their first goals was to end the discrimination against bastards (children with unknown father), I would say not.
There is research regarding this.
At least in Russia it meant: less options for women, a more male centric dating market and more children born out of wedlock.
https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/99/2/229/58403/...
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
Lower rate of fertility is the important bit.
Why on earth would you think laws would be necessary? This mechanism is older than laws or human civilization itself.
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150502095151/http://digitalcom...
>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.
Fertility rates do not decrease after a war, which means fewer remaining men get the same number of women pregnant.
From a sibling comment, in Russia fertility rates did indeed decrease:
https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/99/2/229/58403/...
Because so many civilians died, including women, and harsh living conditions due to wide spread destruction.
The URSS did draft women. Also, massive civilian casualties.
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.
Some people want laws for everything.
I suspect that humans will sleep around enough that you don't need specific laws to make it happen...
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
(...wait for it...)
policies that promoted nonmarital births"
> 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
Post-WW2 Soviet Union had a drop in fertility rates, so no: https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/99/2/229/58403/...
Any data on Paraguay?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8icpnrLqx0
Why do you think the sexual revolution happened right on the heels of WW2?
WWII ended in 1945. The sexual revolution was a full generation later.
> 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.
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:
https://www.cna.org/reports/2012/Practices-of-Foreign%20Mili...
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.
Resistance movements, notably in Europe during WW2 or the 'civil war' in Darfur, have commonly deployed women in combat roles.
It might be interesting to think about what sets them apart from regular armies, which have often had trouble in this area.
> Nothing biologically stops a woman having 10 children with a single man, it's just rare.
You'll have to forgive me for finding this non-explanation unsatisfying. Do you think there's any reason for it being "rare"?
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.
> I don't believe not using a condom with a Tinder date is an option, at least in the West.
It's a very common option. About 30% report non-use of condoms in their previous one-night-stand.
Most STDs are minor and/or easily treatable diseases. The worry about them has a huge moralistic component.
> a woman knows she is the one to bear the consequences
The man has to also bear the consequences in most nations, since he has to pay a lot of money. They like sex, but not at that price.
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.
I think this has historically been pretty limited in Europe because it’s seen as culturally inappropriate.
> 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.
Equality should mean equality! :D
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.
The draft should work the same way.
I think that’s what they were saying but their comment was so low quality it’s hard to be sure.
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.
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.
This assumes companies are rational actors.
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.
the market might not solve all problems, but it does follow the dictates of greed.
But greed is not always the strongest motivating force.
It is demonstrably often overpowered by classism, racism, sexism, queerphobia, etc.
You'd think new companies would form and employ all women and end up undercutting the sexist ones who pay men more?
they might not be rational, but nobody can accuse them of not being greedy.
If we assume:
* 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.
*overestimate
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!
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 myself work part time for mental health reasons - do you think I should get a full time salary?
We should certainly work out a system where you have enough money to live on.
I do. But it's not fair is it, that others get to spend more on holidays, when I do "the same work" (just for shorter periods).
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.
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...)
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 is now drafting old men.
I haven't checked their current age limit but I bet it makes me feel old.
Age limit is unchanged. You can only serve between ages of 18 and 60.
There’s a few anomalies where old dudes are sticking around voluntarily.
Also worth noting that a lot of the videos posted claiming to be “people being drafted” are actually videos of the police just arresting criminals…
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.
They probably said the same in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. "Merely weeks until victory." And as percentage of GDP, military spending was even higher back then: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...
You just have to cut the Russian supply lines, the situations are completely different.
Just bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail through Cambodia, then the North will capitulate.
In your comparison, is Viet Cong Ukraine or Russia??
Erm, probably neither? I don’t know a ton about pro-Russian partisan guerrilla actions.
"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.
the US can fight three peer wars at the same time. that's their military doctrine.
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.
>US can fight three peer
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.
*could. It seems to have lost the appetite recently, and bankrupted itself with the twenty year war on terror against itself, which it lost.
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.
Men dying in a war, Women most affected. Just underscores how disposable men are. Not like they had hopes or dreams or anything.
Maybe it would be fair if men had privileges to go along with such obligations but equality is equality. It’s not like the world is short on people.
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.
Ww2 killed 3% of the earths population. Our bombs are much worse now.
> Our bombs are much worse now.
Are you under the impression that we're still doing trench warfare, though?
And any big nukes won't be aimed at soldiers.
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.
Come to think of it, I'm unaware of any war over the last 100 years between conventional forces that didn't involve trench warfare.
The biggest difference/innovation as of late is inverting the trench, bringing the dirt/sandbags above ground instead of the soldiers below ground
> I'm unaware of any war over the last 100 years between conventional forces that didn't involve trench warfare
Anything involving modern combined-arms warfare. Iraq, for example.
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.
What rock do you live under? There is trench warfare going on right now.
Take a look at Ukraine. They're running low on conscripts despite "modern warfare"
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.
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.
> Not really, a society that sends women to war is more or less a cowardly society dressing it up as equality.
Israel is likely the most prominent country sending women to war. I'm eager to call Israel many bad names, but "cowardly" is not one of them.
I think it's a worthwhile discussion, but your argumentation seems to be mainly based on stereotypes (women are weak) and some old chivalric ideals.
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.
It usually comes down to proximity and appetite.
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.
There's nothing misogynistic being said here. You're stretching the word to cover situations it just doesn't apply to.
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.
>but they rarely do
World War 2 had a shitload of famous actors, athletes, politician's kids, etc go off to war. What are you smoking?
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.
This sounds like discrimination. Only women can produce offspring? Too bad, so sad. Everyone serves if it is required.
It doesn't sound like discrimination, it is discrimination, tautologically.
The onus is on you to show that it is bad in this case. We discriminate routinely, children are exempt from working for example.
I believe in the specific case of gender equality, the burden of proof is on the side which claims that discrimination is justified.
The genders are not equal, you're operating on fictional premise.
Well that's a bit daft, as men and women are as different as green and blue.
Can’t men just identify as women to avoid the draft?
No, changing your gender identity doesn't affect your selective service registration
I'm not sure why you're getting downvotes for this because it's a pretty straight forward question with a non-obvious answer.
Ever tried to actually "change your gender"? It's not really a thing you can do any more than "becoming gay" if you are straight.
can but dont.
We haven't drafted people since the Vietnam War. There's plenty of draft fodder to dig into without having to expand the eligibility criteria.
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.
Funnily almost none of the adjectives here fits what's described.
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.
> now are starting to get women drafted
We haven't even drafted men in fifty years.
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.
By this same logic, Russia should also surrender.
Russia seems to have little trouble forcibly conscripting men from their various territories and sending them to fight.
I agree, they should
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").
You should look up what Russia does to captured Ukrainians, military or civilian, before spouting such nonsense.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Those with that concern can commit suicide instead of surrendering, maintaining a lower bound for how bad things get for them.
We disagree on the framing and likely outcomes. I doubt I could your mind so I won’t even try.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
Unsubstantiated sensationalism.
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.
I swear I’ve read about something similar happening to athletes in bobsledding due to the vibration of the brain.
