Blick Mang said:
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This has more to do with training than geopolitics. In Napoleonic/Civil War times, casualty rates were much lower and many men deliberately shot above the head. You would see massive lines of infantry firing at each other at point blank, but with few men getting hit. WW2 and Vietnam changed all this, when the word "kill" became ingrained during training. When I went through basic (2004) it was "shoot, move, communicate, kill", with "kill" said after just about everything. It's a way of reconditioning to become more lethal in combat.
What's worth noting in the ISIS conflict is their willingness to use knives and blunt objects, which are more "personal" methods of killing during war, leading to further psychological trauma. As illustrated in the book, the majority of soldiers have no problem shooting the enemy with rifles and grenades, but freeze up or have second thoughts when engaged in hand-to-hand.
WWII was still a far cry off from current warfare. There are countless stories of selfless heroism, where US pilots shot down German pilots over sea and then alerted US ships to save them from drowning - sometimes US soldiers were risking their lives to do that. And the GIs regarded this as common decency and the right thing to do - it was natural for them to do so.
The reasons for the lack of empathy right now are varied. Video Games were one of the more leading factors of "hardening" the youth and the future soldiers. As much as I like games myself I still am fully aware of the strong interest in the military in aiding the games industry. Hollywood did it's part too, but the shooter games were by far more effective to lower the killing threshold.
Nowadays pilots would not be rescuing shit - they might fly a next round and shoot them in the water to make sure they are dead. US and UK Soldiers in Afghanistan were routinely going on killing sprees where anyone - women, civilians - were fair game. Needless to say - this kind of behavior leaves even the young soldiers perpetrating it traumatized.
Now I am not advocating for Jihadists here, because they are a lot more fucked up, but still - we should be aware of the propaganda changing societies behaviors.