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S.L.A. Marshall Quotes

Brigadier General Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, also known as SLAM, was a military journalist and historian. He served with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, before becoming a journalist, specialising in military affairs.

In 1940, he published Blitzkrieg: Armies on Wheels, an analysis of the tactics used by the Wehrmacht, and re-entered the U.S. Army as its chief combat historian during World War II and the Korean War. He officially retired in 1960 but acted as an unofficial advisor and historian during the Vietnam War. In total, Marshall wrote over 30 books, including Pork Chop Hill: The American Fighting Man in Action, later made into a film of the same name, as well as The Vietnam Primer, co-authored by Colonel David H. Hackworth.

His most famous publication is Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command, which claimed that fewer than 25% of men in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. While the data used to support this has been challenged, his conclusion that a significant number of soldiers do not fire their weapons in combat has been verified by multiple studies performed by other armies, going back to the 18th century and continuing into the 20th.Why this is so remains contested; Marshall argued that even with their own lives at risk, the resistance of the average individual “...toward killing a fellow man" was such that "he will not...take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility and at the vital point, he becomes a conscientious objector". Others argue so-called 'low fire' is a function of training and discipline, and is a positive attribute. These debates continue since understanding is crucial to overcoming them through training, as well as dealing with actual or potential combat-stress disorder. Wikipedia  

✵ 18. July 1900 – 17. December 1977
S.L.A. Marshall photo
S.L.A. Marshall: 13 quotes0 likes

Famous S.L.A. Marshall Quotes

“…. most of our textbooks and commentaries on leadership and the mastery of the moral problem in battle are written by senior officers who are either wholly lacking in combat experience or have been for long periods so far removed from the reality of small arms action that they have come to forget what were once their most vital convictions and impressions.”

S.L.A. Marshall

Author's note. p. 9-10.
Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (1947)

“A few of them fire their pieces. At first they do so almost timidly, as if fearing a rebuke for wasting ammunition when they do not see the enemy. Others do nothing. Some fail to act mainly because they are puzzled what to do and their leaders do not tell them; others are wholly unnerved and can neither think nor move in sensible relation to the situation.”

S.L.A. Marshall

Combat Isolation. p. 48.
Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (1947)

“The familiar and always popular warnings against the dangers of a growth of militarism among our people are raised anew by leaders who never having served in their country's uniform, are loath to recognize that those who do so may have a devotion to the nation's welfare and a love of its free institutions quite equal to their own.”

S.L.A. Marshall

The Aggressive Will. p. 167.
Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (1947)

“We are reluctant to admit that essentially war is the business of killing, though that is the simplest truth in the book.”

S.L.A. Marshall

Fire as the Cure. p. 67.
Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (1947)

“Truly then, it is killing men with kindness not to insist upon physical standards during training which will give them maximum fitness for the extraordinary stresses of campaigning in war.”

S.L.A. Marshall

The Aggressive Will. p. 174.
Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (1947)

“The rifleman in training is usually under close observation and the chief pressure upon him is to give satisfaction to his superior, whereas the rifleman engaging the enemy is of necessity pretty much on his own, and the chief pressure on him is to remain alive, if possible.”

S.L.A. Marshall

Fire as the Cure. p. 71.
Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (1947)

S.L.A. Marshall Quotes

“War must always start with imperfect instruments.”

S.L.A. Marshall

The Illusion of Power. p. 20.
Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (1947)

“The first effect of fire is to dissolve all appearances of order.”

S.L.A. Marshall

The Multiples of Information. p. 90.
Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (1947)

“The enemy, no more willing to be shot than was his opponent, was rarely seen, only fleetingly if at all.”

S.L.A. Marshall

Introduction. p. 3.
Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (1947)

“The basic theme is elementary and should be beyond argument: No logistical system is sound unless its first principal is enlightened conservation of the power of the individual fighter. The second theme, in 1949 a radically new idea, as yet unsupported by incontrovertible scientific proof, is that sustained fear in the male individual is degenerative as prolonged fatigue exhausts body energy no less.”

S.L.A. Marshall

The Soldier's Load and the Mobility of a Nation (1950)

“The first duty of the officer is to challenge whatever seems illusory.”

S.L.A. Marshall

The Soldier's Load and the Mobility of a Nation (1950)

“With respect to the effect of "friendly fire" hitting among troops. however, it is to be observed that if the circumstances leave any room for doubt as to the source, the men will jump to the conclusion that they are being victimized by their own guns.”

S.L.A. Marshall

Men Under Fire. p. 193.
Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (1947)

“Undue emphasis on conservation is as great a danger to fire power as is an excess expenditure of ammunition.”

S.L.A. Marshall

Fire as the Cure. p. 81.
Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (1947)

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