Commentary
Just about everyone in the military is familiar with the sheep, wolves, and sheepdog analogy, as popularized by LTC (Ret) Grossman in his book “On Combat.” We all fit into one of those categories, he says—we need protecting, we are a predator, or we are a protector.
While Grossman’s analogy has a lot to do with the psychology of how an individual deals with trauma or how they are mentally geared toward violence—e.g. the wolf enjoys killing rather than suffering from adverse effects from doing it—I am primarily concerned here with how this paradigm has been applied. Although I find some issues with Grossman’s approach (which will be addressed further down), the intent here is to dig into the common perceptions of these categories—what they have become rather than just what they were intended to describe—as they seem to be perennially accepted in the military, veteran, and law enforcement community….