Switching Off Empathy: How Modern Armies Rewire the Kindest Recruits and How We Can Flip the Circuit Back 🔧🧠✨

A precursor to my talk at *The REAL Summit, London, 9–10 June 2025

Photo by Lance Reis

Cold-Open: Meet Jake 😇➡️😈

Jake is 19, all freckles and gap-year idealism. At school he volunteered for Crisis Text Line, calmed classmates after break-ups, and cried the first time he euthanised a lab rat in biology. Eighteen months later, deep inside an intelligence bunker, Jake can map a hostage-taker’s childhood trauma in ten minutes… then snap, “Terminate the feed,” as a drone strike erases the target. He’ll tell you, flat-voiced, “We saved lives.” The kid who once apologised to ants now sleeps fine after a confirmed kill.

What happened? And, more urgently for policy-makers and investors gathered at the REAL Summit, how do we prevent the helpful from becoming the hardened while still defending a messy world?

Why the Military Actively Recruits Empaths 🎯

Recent US Army assessment programs such as Athena openly measure emotional-intelligence traits at recruiting and promotion gates, arguing that “intuition” is an intel force-multiplier (lineofdeparture.army.mil). Soft skills are suddenly hard skills.

Turning Feeling Into Firepower ⚗️🔥

Military pipelines don’t remove empathy; they compartmentalise it. Four levers do the heavy lifting:

1. Stress-Inoculation: Sleep deprivation, gas-mask runs and live-fire buddy drills flood the brain with cortisol; oxytocin binds the trauma to whoever survives beside you. Empathy narrows to the in-group, blunting outsiders (and sometimes your future civilian self).

2. Dehumanising Language: “Raghead,” “Target Package,” “Thwack.” Linguists call it functional necropolitics; soldiers call it Tuesday. The words strip agency so the trigger pull feels hygienic. (sciencedirect.com)

3. Instrumental Empathy: Interrogators learn to mirror affect just long enough to pry out intel, then yank the emotional plug. It’s empathy as a surgical tool, not a relationship.

4. Compartmentalisation Drills: After live tissue labs or classified strikes, instructors say, “Box it and breathe, next mission in four hours.” Recruits practice parking feelings like planes on a carrier deck. Over time the hangar stays closed.

Net result? A dimmer-switch empathy system: full beam for teammates, strobe for adversaries, blackout for personal guilt.

Data Check: Are We Growing Monsters or Adaptive Professionals? 📊

• Potentially Morally Injurious Events (PMIEs) hit ≈ 33 % of combat veterans even when they don’t meet PTSD criteria (sciencedirect.com).

• Clinically meaningful moral-injury symptoms (unforgiving guilt & shame) sit at 6.5 % for combat vets—double the rate in first responders (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov).

• A 2024 VA evidence synthesis shows empathy is not erased: vets score high on perspective-taking but low on emotional sharing—a textbook description of Jake. (hsrd.research.va.gov)

So no, we’re not mass-producing psychopaths. We’re producing empathetic technicians whose circuitry is locked to “mission mode.”

Intelligence: Empathy With the Safety On 🔫🪫

In HUMINT and SIGINT cells the paradox sharpens:

• Recruitment: analysts with high “empathic accuracy” predict adversary moves 20 % better in wargames (US Naval Institute review, May 2025) (kcmhr.org).

• Training: the new Military Health System seminars use VR to boost empathy for cultural nuance, then follow up with modules on “controlled detachment” to prevent burnout (academic.oup.com).

• Outcome: The brain learns to toggle compassion like night-vision goggles—on in analysis, off during kinetic approval.

Cue the monster headlines.

Moral Injury: The Invoice Arrives 💔🧾

When the empathy switch glitches, firing on a van that later contains kids, or obeying an order that felt legal but not right, the bill comes due as moral injury. Think PTSD minus fear, plus existential self-condemnation:

“I’m not haunted by what happened. I’m damned by it.”

• anonymous veteran testimony, 2024 Durham conference (durham.ac.uk)

Traditional PTSD meds barely touch this. Left unchecked, moral injury correlates with higher depression, substance abuse, and suicide risk than trauma alone .

Repair Kits That Actually Work 🔧❤️‍🩹

The good news: emerging therapies are catching up.

Adaptive Disclosure 2.0 Adds modules on forgiveness & making amends RCT on 174 vets showed larger functional gains vs present-centered therapy (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

Empathy-Training Seminars 30-min VR films + group debrief; boosts cultural attunement without compassion fatigue Pilot across 13 seminars, 2023-24 (academic.oup.com)

Compassion-Focused EMDR Combines eye-movement processing with self-compassion scripts for shame relief Early clinical rollout 2025 (Trauma Recovery Network) (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

Layer these on top of leader-led ethical briefings, proactive “moral capital” building that the US Army now calls force protection from moral injury, and the circuit can be rewired before it burns out .

Humour Break: The Empathy Calibration Knob 🕹️😜

Imagine if soldiers had a literal dial on their chest:

• 0 % 🧊 – “Sorry Mum, can’t feel anything, just passing through.”

• 50 % 🤝 – “Let’s solve this over tea.”

• 100 % 😭 – “I just adopted the enemy’s dog and wrote him a college reference.”

Current training cranks from 50 % to 20 % for external targets, then forgets the return journey. Our job: install a spring-loaded reset so it bounces back to baseline post-tour.

Implications for Finance, Policy & The REAL Summit 💷🏛️🌍

Why should portfolio managers and policymakers care?

1. Human Capital Risk: Replacing one experienced intel analyst costs up to $600k in training and clearance fees. Moral-injury attrition is an avoidable drag on defence budgets.

2. ESG & Licence to Operate: Firms investing in defence tech face reputational blow-back if tools are seen to exacerbate psychological harm.

3. Cross-Sector Transferability: Healthcare and contact-centre industries are already deploying “selective empathy” training; the moral-injury lessons transfer directly to burnout prevention (callcentrehelper.com, piton-global.com).

Potential Solutions 📌

1. Mandate Empathy “De-Programming” Modules in all transition courses—think off-ramp, not just on-ramp.

2. Tie Procurement Dollars to Ethical-Leadership Metrics—units that log regular moral-decision AARs get preference.

3. Fund Scale-Up Trials of Adaptive Disclosure and Compassion-Focused EMDR across NATO forces; ROI beats the lifetime pension costs of untreated injury.

4. Educate Civilians: your next hire might be Jake. Give him a culture that values regulated empathy, not “leave it at the door.”

Closing: From Monster Myth to Maintenance Manual 🔄💡

Young, empathetic recruits aren’t turned into monsters; they’re issued a mission-grade empathy toolset, and nobody hands them the quick-start guide for civilian life. The REAL Summit audience sits at the nexus of capital, mental health innovation, and policy. If we channel even 1 % of defence R&D into ethical resilience tech, we turn that oversight into an advantage.

Jake deserves better, and so does every board investing in human potential.

See you in London. Bring questions and a screwdriver, we’re rewiring empathy. 🔧🫡