[Someone]

One might almost say the creation of psychopaths is the goal of military training. Without training a small fraction of soldiers ('natural psychopaths') will kill for pleasure, another small fraction will be the heroes that kill and put themselves in danger for the good cause, but the majority twill try and come out alive. The goal of military training is to make the army more effective by increasing that second fraction, but increasing the first fraction isn't that bad, either, from a direct military perspective.

(http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Killing:_The_Psychological..., http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology)

[philwelch]

Actually, psychopathic behavior is something the military works very hard to screen out. Psychopaths don't make very good soldiers because they're not especially inclined to follow orders or concern themselves with the safety of their fellow soldiers.

[harryf]

Yes and there's the difference between training someone to kill quickly and efficiently for a military objective and training someone to slowly inflict cruel forms of extreme suffering on another human over and extended period of time.

The former you may be able to rehabilitate afterwards. The latter is Hannibal material.

[rtpg]

Now I'm not aware of how modern military training is built, but I have to imagine that the top priority for the military is making sure that their own soldiers don't die. Apart from the ethical aspects, training somebody takes a long time, and having people with experience on the field seems valuable.

Much like how lifeguards are taught that the first priority is making sure that they are safe rather than saving the person drowning.

[Someone]

Yes, you want your soldiers to survive because training is expensive, and comrades dying is bad for morale, but it is not _the_ top priority.

If it were the top priority, very, very few attacks would take place. Taking that hill, destroying that gun, or gaining knowledge about enemy positions often gets higher priority than the lives of a few (or lots of. Generals knew lots of soldiers would die on D-Day, for instance) soldiers.