 Do you like negative book reviews? Because if so, you've come to the right place. Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and we are back with another edition of Tactical Book Review. Today's book is on combat the psychology and physiology of deadly conflict in war and peace by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman with Lauren W. Christensen. I read this book because several years ago I read and I reviewed, it's on this channel, the book called On Killing by Dave Grossman, same author. And I, at the time I think, had some pretty positive things to say about that book. It definitely changed the way I thought about Killing. It's the only book on the topic that I know of. And it's a super interesting book. I would probably recommend that book. You can go back and look at that review. There are some caveats of things I don't like, but overall I like that book. This book I got because, you know, I like the first one, this is kind of the second one. So, hey, why not? And not as much. So let's start out with the good things because let's be clear, there are some good reasons that you should consider reading this book. Particularly the beginning of the book when he talks about the effects of adrenaline on the body and what that does to your body physically and how your body tends to physically react or how it can react. I found that section to be the most helpful section of the book. And basically what I learned is, is that in general, if you can avoid it, don't get an adrenaline dump because there's a cost associated with that and it just ain't worth it. If you're curious to know what that cost is, hey, well, read the first section of the book. Now, the book itself is broken into four sections and in general that first section is the strongest and the others are kind of take it or leave it. And there are some real issues on a philosophical level that I have with this book. The actual, when it gets down to the real information in the book, right? How does your body respond to adrenaline dumps? That's helpful. I think this book could have been about half as long and twice as helpful if you would have just really stuck with that. Like what happens to your body under adrenaline? How do people physically react? How do they emotionally react? How do people psychologically tend to process through things? Like that would have been super helpful. Unfortunately, he moved in a lot of his principles and philosophy here into this book and a lot of it I just find appalling. Now, to be fair, this book was written in 2004 and the last update, this is the third edition, the last update looks like it was 2008, okay? So this book is 15 years old, give or take. I say that because even at that point in 2008, my opinions might more of closely aligned with Dave Grossman's, they certainly don't align now and I don't think it's aged well. The first thing that he says that I really don't like is he calls police officers warriors. And most of this book is about police encounters. For a book that's called On Combat, there is surprisingly little reference to combat. Now, you could say, well, of course, police officers are warriors dealing, you know? I mean, they're getting in fights and of course, it's combat, you know, they get in gunfights and they have to win those and I mean, that's combat and of course, they're warriors. I mean, if they're not, what is? And I would say police officers are not warriors and we should not train police officers to think of themselves as warriors. And the fact that we do is in part what has led to a lot of our problems and distrust. Warriors traditionally in society, we send out to fight bad guys and kill everything and then they come back and they are reintegrated into a functioning society. And the behavior that you did out there may or may not actually be acceptable here within the bounds of society. You go out to fight foreign enemies, right? And I mean, foreign here, like not of us and our culture, right, we're talking about time and memorial. That's what we do. We send warriors out to fight the enemies. If that's a neighboring Greek city state, if that's the Persian empire, if that's the Gauls, right? It doesn't matter. We're sending our warriors out. That's a very important point, out to fight the bad guy. Policing is almost polar opposite because policing, we're not sending them out to fight the enemy. We're entrusting them to keep the peace within our society. It's a very different mission set. One is to go out and destroy, right? Destroy the enemy, keep us safe that way. Keep that out there and over there. The other one is, you need to live here and work here and breathe here and be here with these people. And you need to have a relationship with the people that you're gonna continue to police, especially if what you're policing to be as effective as it can be. And so there's a chasm, there's a chasm or there should be a chasm between those two professions when we talk about it. One of the big problems is in the last, I don't know, I'm gonna make up a number here, 50, 75 years, maybe 100 years, we've sandwiched those. And we've said, no, we want our warriors to be police officers. And we've increasingly militarized the police to the point where they don't look any different than military guys, right? You have SWAT teams running around in multicam with battle belts and plates and rifles and helmets and nods and all that stuff. Now, let's be clear here, I don't begrudge police officers carrying rifles in their car. In fact, I think that's probably a good idea. And if I was a police officer, you better believe I'd be going for that rifle every chance I get. However, what does a police officer need to wear multicam for? I mean, just think about that for a minute. We have multicam on soldiers because they go into environments to blend in, right? That's why we created camouflage uniforms, right? They go out into environments because they want to blend in and not be seen. What is a police officer wearing multicam for in downtown Baltimore or whatever? I just picked a random city. I mean, really think about that. What's the purpose there? Well, the purpose is because the military units do that, so they should do that. And I understand there's a lot of people who cross over and are a police officer or were in the military or are in the police officer and in the guard or whatever. I get that. But I think anyone with half a brain would tell you these are drastically different professions and we need to keep them that way. If you view your job as a warrior and you're to go out and crush and eliminate the bad guy, that is different than policing. Policing isn't going out to crush the bad guy. Policing is much more multifaceted, much more nuanced, much more diplomatic. And if you ever watch police shooting videos, the absolute best police officers are very good at talking. They're very good at talking and they're doing everything they can to talk the guy off the cliff. Those are the best police officers. Now, does it always go that way? No, some people you just can't reason with. And sometimes you gotta get the guns out and go to work. However, the guys who are the worst police officers go to their guns the quickest and they're all hopped up on a adrenaline and they're constantly yelling. The gun comes out and they're screaming, they're screaming and they're yelling and then there's no calm. The best police officers, they're calm, they're calm, they're calm, switch comes on, gun comes out and now they calm back down and they're able to talk level and even. You very few do you see actually be able to accomplish that, right? And again, they should probably read this book, might help them out. So that was a long rant to say, I think it's a very bad idea that we would conflate warriorship with policing. That's gotten us in a lot of trouble. And if we have any hope of getting out of this, we need to break that connection right now. I realized that that connection is probably not gonna get broken because most police officers and police or most police departments openly recruit into a quasi military organization, a paramilitary organization. And they talk about that and that's important. And almost all police literature, much like on combat, right, is based on this idea that you're a warrior and you're here to protect society and you're the guard dog and you go out there and be rough with the evil men to keep people safe. And not that there's not a place for that, but if that's your baseline mentality of what policing is, that's why we have so many brutality charges through the roof and you see all these videos of police doing shit they shouldn't be doing. So in addition, again, book was written in 2008, this book has way too much back the blue mentality in it. And again, at this point in current American society, I just have no tolerance for that anymore because police officers arrested people for going to church just like a year or two ago. Remember that, because I do. Yet to receive any apologies for that, by the way, this book was co-authored with a police officer and that might be part of the problem, but almost all of the studies are about police officers. Almost none of the studies are about combat. And I can understand that because he wrote his first book, which was a survey study of soldiers and this one's more of a survey study of police. This book should really be called something like, what happens to cops when the shit goes bad or something like that. It's gonna give him more accurate title. Additionally, in this book, he just copies in articles that he's already written. He's like, oh, I wrote this article for this publication and so I'm putting it here as a chapter. And it's just literally a copy pasta of his article. And I'm just like, this isn't even relevant. It's not even relevant to the book material. Why is this in here? So I certainly think this book could have suffered with a lot more aggressive editing, some warrior editing. I think that this book would be much better if it had cut some material out. He didn't just copy, paste some random stuff in here and it didn't seem to go all over the place. If it would have really stuck with the effects of adrenaline on the body, that's super helpful. So I will put an affiliate link to this book in the description below. If you get this book, what I would tell you is to read the first quarter, first half and probably after that, I don't know if you really need to bother much. The back quarter of the book is all dealing with PTSD. If that's something that interests you, well, hey, knock yourself out. I, by that point, was pretty emotionally worn out and wasn't really interested and didn't really care. And to be honest, I didn't read word for word the last section of the book. I did a lot of skimming in there because I just didn't care anymore. There are some helpful things to learn in this book. Just one example I will point out is that when he talks about using SimRounds and your training and how important that is and why that's important, I found that really helpful and have since integrated some SimRounds training with some people and it's been both fun and highly beneficial. So there are definitely some things to glean from this book and to take from this book and that you could learn. And so if you're interested in that, I would tell you to pick up a copy, read the parts that are interesting, dump the parts that aren't. But overall for everybody, I don't know if this book is necessarily for you. If you want to be a combat leader and you want to better understand how people function under high amounts of adrenaline and stress, I think there's some really good things to glean from this book. Don't be afraid to skip the parts that aren't worth it. But at the same time, if you never read this book, I don't know if you're gonna be that much worse off. A lot of this book has kind of worked its way into our popular understanding of psychology. For example, the whole thing's like under adrenaline, your fingers turn to flippers, right? And that's why you need a power stroke to go on. You can't operate that thing with your thumb. You can operate it just fine with your thumb, by the way. Turns out though that when I read this book that that does happen when you get under adrenaline, your fingers do turn to flippers. However, that happens when you are under extreme amounts of adrenaline and stress, and you're untrained. That's when that happens. If you've done 1,000 reloads in your life, you're gonna have to be under, I don't know, some obscene amounts of stress, like blackout level stress, in order for your finger to not be able to hit that button because you practiced it so many times, right? So we know that. We know that practice makes perfect. And the more repetitions you have, the less you have to think about it and the easier it just comes. We've known this in gun fighting and gun psychology now for a while. And to be fair, I think all of that started here in this book. So credit where credit's due. He certainly founded some helpful ideas and rolled them out. Again though, I think there's just a lot of, for lack of a better word, filth, that you have to wade through to really get the gems out of here. You're gonna have to make your own decision about if that's worth it to you or not. I hope you found that helpful. This is On Combat, the Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman with Lauren Christensen. It says in war, but there's no war in this book. Two brave deeds and endure.