Photo from Army News
During peacetime, militaries often wisely counsel reticence in opening fire, for safety and discipline reasons. The safety reason is self-evident. A sense of discipline in fire would also be useful for rules of engagement and ammunition conservation purposes.
To overcome this, troopers are often conditioned to take positions and fire their small arms only in response to certain stimuli - certain shouted orders from their junior commanders, man-size targets popping up on a range, and of course the sight and sound of their comrades firing.
However, in the opening skirmishes of a conflict, some may find themselves reticent in doing so if they get involved in an infantry fight. The remnants of carefulness in peacetime training may die hard, preventing an immediate response. There may also be a base reluctance to fire at what may be an unseen or obscured enemy, especially if the circumstances of the battle and location of friendly troops are unknown.
This in itself is not news, as it is generally acknowledged that armies undergo a process of macabre "blooding" in times of conflict, where they adapt to the new reality. Moreover, the S. L. A. Marshall assertion that 75% of American troops in the Second World War never fired their personal weapons with intent to kill at the enemy is a particularly often cited piece of trivia.
This may not be a particularly important matter to dwell on - even in the most desperate infantry fight there are more factors to survival than one's willingness to get into a fighting position and shoot at silhouettes.
Ultimately, this is as much a psychological question as it is a military one, and one that militaries have adjusted and trained for. One can only hope that soldiers survive this simple reluctance in trying circumstances.
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