This is pretty simple: assuming the 50 people are unarmed, there isn't much they can do. There is really no place to hide, but people will try anyways. The big difference is that there is a larger probability that somebody will try to take down an attacker while he is reloading - if he/she can. With 3 attackers, that's not likely.

I suggest you read up on the 2009 Ft Hood shooting by MAJ Nidal Hasan. 13 dead and more than 30 injured. 3 actually tried attacking Hasan - two died and the third was wounded.

Furthermore, what exactly does "react in a disciplined manner and fall back" mean? For the scenario you've described, this would only apply to a few who were lucky enough to be located near rear doors, and they would need to slip out quietly in the confusion. Which is exactly what happened at Ft Hood.

"Military training" is not magic, and it basically lets you do what you have been trained to do - no more, no less. Unless that training specifically addresses being confined to a killing field with no weapons, it's hard to see how it can help.

Gary Klein did a number of studies with military and fire departments, studying how people made decisions in very high stress situations. He has written several books detailing this research and Sources of Power is the easiest to read. He calls his model of decision making Recognition Primed Decision-making. While this isn't exactly the scenario you were looking for, Klein's studies were about how real-world experts can/did make decisions in very high stress environments.

a lot of people just stay there, stunned by what's happening

That is exactly the purpose of sudden violence. SWAT teams depend upon it to surprise, stun and overwhelm their targets. A majority of civilians would first respond with "this can't be happening" followed by a long pause to try to determine what is happening: trying to orient and decide what to do (in the terms of OODA).

You may wish to ponder the sort of response to such an armed robbery that would happen in Switzerland and Israel. Both countries have mandatory military service.

In your post-WW3 world, you may want to have your future Hollywood prepare civilians by showing exactly how they should behave. Not the freezing of current Hollywood movies, but instead the sort of responses you want your public to have. I think people significantly underestimate the power and influence of storytelling that movies have on the public.

Depends upon the "military training." Six months is paltry: That means a couple weeks of orientation, but most training on-the-job. Little combat training for many before the six months expires.

So a former aircraft mechanic's assistant or single-cruise submariner is likely to know very little about close quarters combat or active shooter situations. Under stress, many folks do indeed tend to freeze...until somebody reminds them to focus upon what they have been trained upon.

Conscription-based (or National Service) militaries tend to use a small career cadre to provide training and leadership...to do that reminding. This type of organization tends to be hierarchical (of course), and much of the orientation for conscripts revolves around obeying orders and NOT exercising initiative. This is very different from the professional forces that do encourage initiative in, say, many (not all) NATO countries.

This is a longwinded way of saying that six-month conscript response is unlikely to be much better than non-conscripts, except around the edges - rallying around the police, initial first aid, etc.

There's an assumption here that the six-month conscription does not include some kind of Active Shooter or Emergency Response or Close Quarters Combat or First Aid training. If your society DOES include several days (preferably a week) of that training, including (expensive) multiple exercises and scenarios, then your citizenry's response will be much better.

Six months of millitary training is a laughable amount and wouldn't change a single thing.

Mandatory millitary training is mostly utilized to "shape" young men into responsible and strong people and maybe give one or two of them a perspective for the future. The training itself consists of blindly following rules and orders, keeping your room and uniform in order, doing lots of physical excercises and some shooting, and being woken up in the middle of the night to be sent on some equivalent of adventure camping.

Only those who saw a perspective for themselves in the millitary and who enlist for a longer period of time are given additional training in a specialized field of their liking (like paramedics, paratroopers or engineers).

Most people I know hated basic millitary training, even though some of them actually enlisted for several years. Whoever didn't enlist was happy to forget what little they did learn. 6 month are much too little to develop the kind of muscle memory required to make a difference in a hostile situation. As soon as you are a common civilian again, you forget the training within a few months anyways.

Basic military training does nothing in a situation of armed robbery, because that situation isn't covered by the training.

The more general effects of training are twofold. First, to make reactions automatic. I'm trained in martial arts, and when I was in full training, the specific blocking technique I learnt became so much second nature, that I'm confident I would've had a good chance to instinctively block an attack coming out of the blue.
Secondly, training prepares you for the general situation intercepting the flight-or-fight response. I'm not afraid of fights anymore and would more or less calmly stand my ground against an unarmed attacker. In fact, I've done so. Without having experienced contact fights, I'd probably run or try some panicked stupid attack.

So, in your situation, the military trained people would benefit from not being totally shocked by the mere presence of guns. They are unlikely to run around screaming. But they wouldn't know how to react to the specific situation anyway. They'd be more calm than untrained people, but would probably not do anything specific, and still react as individuals.

Veterans, people who have actually experienced combat, are a different thing.

From what I have seen, the effect of training to deal with emergencies (such as military training) has one primary effect. Such training permits the individuals to incorporate information about what is happening faster.

Tangurena mentions that many people often end up standing around, stunned. They can't incorporate the information about what happened fast enough. Non-emergency training might help you decide to run towards the nearest exit (if you knew where it was to begin with). Emergency training might permit:

• Ducking for cover while looking for your next move. This would be most visible in posture. A person who intends to make a next move will keep their limbs in a position to act if given a chance. A person who intends to stay put may flatten their body as much as possible.


• Identify who is attacking and how they are armed. Perhaps determining what kind of training they appear to have.


• The ability to remain still when the opponent is trying to get them to move. Shock and Awe is a lot less effective against trained opponents. A trained individual retains the ability to stay still or move when they want, not when their opponent wants.

There is a considerable difference but...

It really depends on the type of situation at hand.

Like you, my knowledge of such situations is second hand - or 1.5 hand, as you're about to find out. I say this because a member of my family is what you would call a "field nurse". He has been trained as a first responder to several kinds of situations like broken bones, stabs, gunshots... you name it, including those with multiple victims (which is, I believe, what you're looking for), like a gas leak, an explosion or the collapse of a building due to a super someone being punched against it.

I saw him once trying to control a small backyard fire with an extinguisher and it really looked like a hard task for him. Since didn't get this particular kind of training, it's only natural that he wouldn't excel at putting out fires, even though he is an amazing nurse. While he might be very good at guiding people through the smoke to safety during a fire, the skills to ease the flames are not part of his toolkit.

Note however, that each "event" is unique. You can't say that all gunshot wounds or wild fires will be the same. There will always be unpredictable elements to responding to such situations - elements that might be too much even for a prepared person to deal with.

You don't need to look very hard to find videos or angry posts about trained professionals being shitty at the very thing they should master. Maybe that person was having a bad day. Maybe he didn't pay much attention to class. Maybe she confused technique A with technique B.

The truth is that, under extreme stress, there's no certain way to predict the outcome. And this was all said considering that the trained people were not killed in the event itself.

To answer your question, I do think that trained people will almost always do better under these kinds of stressful situations. The sheer fact that someone told you (and you listened, of course) what NOT to do is already a huge advantage in front of the guy standing still in awe at the huge building coming down on him.

I just don't think you can be prepared for anything in the strict sense of the word - specially in a world where people have super powers.

Key point: one with training/certifications is held to a different level of accountability than one without.

Your example is rather extreme; here is a more common case:

Imagine an auto accident, where a person has sustained a neck injury.
They have fractured a vertebrae in the neck, but no damage to the
spinal cord. Two people--one with training, one without--perform the
following action: Without sign of immediate danger (such as the car on
fire), they drag the person from the car.

As they are dragged, the neck is wrenched, the fractured vertebrae
severs the spinal cord, and the person is left paralyzed from the neck down.

• A lay person (without training) This person would probably be forgiven for this action under some form of good Samaritan interpretation.




• A trained person (with training) would probably be prosecuted--and rightfully so. Never ever EVER would I move someone in this situation. In our training the following is made crystal clear: unless there is an immediate threat to the injured, do not move them in this manner.

In sum, yes, there is a dramatic difference in response. Honestly, sometimes the best action is to simply call 911, and let those on call with the proper training and equipment handle things. A trained person will often be the one to call 911. Many are afraid to get involved, and won't even do that much.

If I see something really dangerous, I will stop to "help," which basically means adding sanity to the situation: get everyone to safety, keep onlookers away from danger, CALL 911, stop people from doing anything stupid, and get the scene organized for the first responders.

Well, taking into account that basic military training's purpose is to basically (pun somewhat intended) train conscripts/enlisted to obey orders, instantly and without question. So all it would do in your case would be to make quite a lot of people easier to manage... Maybe, depending on the type of that training, the quality of the drafted material etc.

I believe the answer is: what would be the typical reaction would depend on type, duration and methods of that compulsory training. I believe concept would work in an overall military-oriented society, where it is fashion/badge-of-honor/something-necessary-for-life-later to complete one (compare with Starship Troopers by R. Heinlein), but even then it cannot be basic. If you make it compulsory service (i.e. Israel), then it would work also, because your requirement needs actually military service, not merely training.

Why that is is somewhat complicated (but when it isn't?). First, there is a reason why military prefers volunteers over conscripts, and the most successful military organisations screens the volunteers based on a number of parameters, including IQ (don't blame me for raising it - US Armed Forces are banned from enrolling anyone with IQ below 81, and max 20% of the total force can have IQ between 81 and 93, and it's apparently a huge thing supported by decades of careful studies).

Based on statistical data from my home country on conscription (until abolished in mid-to-late 90'), what you really get from general population is a force that is very rigid in structure, with soldiers of very low quality (initiative, determination and combat readiness almost non-existent, but with high PTSD levels developed during training), yet with very high levels of aggression (which is actually a bad thing).

This comes from the fact that most of the training is done by other conscripts inducted earlier, so they do not see the purpose in the brutality of the basic training beyond basically a retribution on "fresh meat" for what was done to them in turn. Admittedly this may have been also in part an effect of eliminating from draft a good portion of the higher quality material (i.e. deferred or exempted from draft due to enrolling to a college or employment in industry critical to the "defensive effort".

It is in stark contrast to training done by career instructors, where there is brutality also, sometimes also bordering on sadistic (for which there is a very good reason), but is reined in by their own service experience.

There is a difference between a career non-com who may end up with recruits he trained under his own command some day and a non-com who is there for fixed period and will probably never see his trainees again in his lifetime...

The reactions would largely be the same. They're not prepared for it, not armed for it, so it is a surprising situation and the initial reaction is to probably just freeze all the same while assessing what to do.

There are countries with universal conscription and having gone through the required stint in the military, I don't think my reactions would be any different than if I had not gone through military training - and the Finnish national service is pretty much for the reasons you described.

Also curious what the correct way to handle such a situation would be? since unless they're psychos who start killing everyone right away, freezing and following orders does the trick pretty much, in the psychos case just panic run out. If your thinking that they would improvise some weaponry from the banks interior or overwhelm them by hurling themselves on the attackers, then no, no conscript would do that any more than an untrained civilian would. If they saw an exit opportunity they might take it slightly more likely but only slightly.

And if anything conscripts are more capable of(and mentally trained to) following orders than untrained civilians. That's what (conscript) military is all about. It's not a security guard school - it's about orders and waiting and 4% combat training.

There's a few movies that get it right: a pickup truck full of guys with AKs show up and murder the entire village, and/or worse. It doesn't need to be post WWIII, mutants, or military training - to have the intelligence to not put yourself in a situation as part of a group of people susceptible to getting rolled-up on by a squad of AKs. If everyone's so poor that there would be no other way to survive, then I'm not sure what else the bad guys would be after except for, 'or worse' ...

Military training would have prevented 40 out of 50 of those people being there. The rest get shot. *

I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars outside. I can tell you that our waitress is left-handed and the guy sitting up at the counter weighs two hundred and fifteen pounds and knows how to handle himself. I know the best place to look for a gun is the cab of the gray truck outside, and at this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. – The Bourne Identity

– Said by a man with his back to the wall, facing the front door, sitting in the booth by the back door. Ready at a moment's notice to not be part of the situation, which is expert level training. However, knowing when it's safe enough to stop and have a cup of coffee is entry level. But it's WWIII with x-military mutants; it is no longer safe to stop and have cups of coffee.

(*) Depending on how much time there is to react, and how cohesive the group is. Get rolled-up on: and probably everyone dies. But, spend any amount of time together with mostly military backgrounds, and have seen the pickup truck coming in the distance, then maybe the 35 people still standing there can plan something after everyone calms down... which is probably finding that many more places to hide or run away to.