Well, it’s official.
Dr. Breck announced it on his Patreon, and word has spread!
The Pulp Fiction Renaissance Podcast will be doing an in-depth, line-by-line, multi-episode takedown of Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.
It all began while watching Dr. Breck’s controversial take “Americans are Natural Cowards”.
In it, he mentions Grossman’s infamous magnum opus, and I knew in my heart…
It was time to set this train motion.
Dr. Breck thought it was a great idea to takedown the book that has been the guiding light of US Military and Law Enforcement training doctrine for the last 30+ years, and so the adventure was set!
In preparation for this, I have published my own in-depth, detailed rebuttal of Grossman’s thesis that I penned in October 2016 and updated in June of 2021, entitled “From the Vault: Live and Let Die: Kill Like a Christian”.
And when I told James Lafond about this endeavor, he was over the moon, and had a few cents of his own to add to the discussion…
WHAT THE ANCIENT WORLD REVEALED
“I have been thinking about this for some time,” James Lafond revealed to me via email sent today at 11:35 AM.
“I fell for Grossman’s argument,” he went on, “Because he had 4 aggression attitudes, not just Fight and Flight, but Posture and Submit, the latter two being how most violence works out from antiquity until today. Most civilized soldiers refuse to close and when faced with those who do close, refuse to stand.
“In modern war, the Germans had all of their men going at the enemy, as teams while entire US units cowered while a few soldiers did all the fighting.
“See Kirchner’s Deadliest Men, firefight in Italy and Audie Murphey, Sergeant York. The Soviets were driven into combat like ancient slave soldiers, guns to their back. His entire thesis can be replaced by Gibbon’s deduction that the fall of Rome was the triumph of barbarism.
“Might it be that simply not being vested in as a volunteer, but being compelled to go to war that one would have chosen not to fight, makes all the difference here?
“Look at the Battle of the Thames, October 1813 for a case study.
“The one point he is good on is that team work operating crew served weapons increases morale in soldiers. See Turtle’s defeat of Sinclair in 1797 and the performance of the artillery men compared to the soldiers.
“I use these Frontier Battles, as the soldiers were conscripts and the Indians and Kentuckians were volunteers. The fact that Indians fought above their weight so much might be accounted for by the volunteer factor. No war chiefs had impressment powers.
“A close reading of ancient battles shows very few men fighting in most engagements.
“Agricola’s three legions stood and watched as he took his barbarian mercs against the Bretons.
“Most of Alexander’s army simply stood while the Archers, Agrianes, guards and companions did 90% of the fighting. He only used 7k of 35k troops to actually attack.
“The wounds he and his father sustained indicates very low Macedonian commitment, to include the lengthening of the spear to the sarissa from 11 to 18 feet.
“We think of Alexander’s army as Macedonians, but his killers were almost all mercs and elite nutjob ‘knights.’ Trajan and Agricola’s killers were not Roman, but Barbarian mercs fighting cousins.
“I think Nam was fought the way it was in order to destroy the USG conscript army and get a volunteer force going, the latter being more in line with its imperial mission.
“My own personal experience shows that most American men will not fight, ever, and those that do fight like girls, fearfully and this is just with empty hands and sticks. Most prize fighters will not even duel with dull steel.
“I think Grossman went full psychobabble trying to explain why civilized men make for reluctant combatants.”
But that wasn’t all the wisdom that James Lafond had to offer!
WHAT ABOUT THE STRONGMAN?
In a follow up email sent shortly thereafter at 11:45 AM, he opined:
“If you want to buttress your Every Man Follows the Strongman thesis outside of the [G]WOT, with antiquity and black powder examples, I can rattle off a few dozen examples for you by phone while I travel this week, of strong leaders at the head of volunteers punching way above their weight against managed forces directed down a chain of command.
“Anglo naval gunnery in the 1700s and 1800s was in part an answer to this problem faced by a soulless empire which has ultimately succeeded in replacing leadership with management.
“That leader versus manager combat duality is most apparent in the careers of Alexander and Nathan Bedford Forest.
“Onate’s defeat of the Pueblos, and other Conquistador battles shows Empires served by Leadership and tiny forces taking down Empires and settled enemies served by Management.”
ON THE SAME PAGE
Well, good old James Lafond and I are on the same page again!
It’s uncanny, we think a lot alike…
Is it because there are only so many avenues you can go with this stuff, and we are a very small number of people looking at them?
At the beginning of the year, I wrote a series of articles asking the same question he has…
How to expand upon what I discovered in my book, All Men Follow the Strongman: The Forgotten History of the Iraq War, and go beyond the late great Global War on Terror?
These articles are, in order of appearance:
But I knew there had to be more…and that has been the Quest of 2025, and now into 2026!
WHAT I HAVE OBSERVED
I revealed all this to James in a phone call we had shortly after going over his emails.
I told him that from what I have observed, from having Family and Friends in Law Enforcement and Military Communities serving over the course of the GWOT, from being involved in Combat Sports, and even from watching my ten-year old Brother’s pee-wee Football games, I have come to a conclusion:
We can make American Warrior Culture in the 21st Century a heckuva lot better.
This is an iconoclast statement that seems blasphemous to many people today, as those heavily invested in 21st Century American Warrior Culture take any criticism of it as sacrilege.
This is still in spite of the fact that we have lost not one, not two, but three of our last major Wars…
That in those last two Wars we lost approximately 7000 troops in combat but over 30,000 to suicide..
And even at home in the Combat and Contact Sports arenas,which are preparation for War, we see contact and non-contact injuries alike going through the roof!
The evidence is clear:
From the highest level to the lowest level, something is very, very wrong with the way we are doing things.
And as always, there is only one way to fix it…
By taking a look at History, and reverse engineering what the greatest Warriors and Warrior Cultures did.
And heck, even taking a look at what Friend and Foe alike are doing successfully today!
But we can only do this if we have the humility to take a hard long look at the Man in the Mirror…
If you’re ready for that, then join us, as we embark upon the ultimate in-depth, line-by-line, multi-episode takedown of Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.
Coming soon to airwaves near you!
Sincerely,
Richard Barrett
11-17-2025,
Written at 9:31 PM, somewhere in the USA…
PULP FICTION RENAISSANCE 