Military command decisions are not exactly the same as the Trolley problem because the trolley problem presents a choice between two certain events, whereas in the real world there is an element of uncertainty. No one in the British or US Military is ever ordered onto a suicide mission. Uuslaly a few people escape. However, the loss rate of torpedo bomber crews in British service (and possibly US) in WW2 was higher than in the Japanese Kamikazi units. In one of the few real "trolley problems" occurred when a runaway freight train was switched away from station to a branch line in low density housing. No one died even though a woman had a lucky escape.

I am drawn to the trolley problem because it is about people forced to make unpalatable choices. There are several accounts of the stress of the "burden of command" on commanders and he guilt over the deaths of dozens, hundreds or thousands of people on their own side. In 1984 I heard a British WW2 general, Michael Carver, in 1944 a 28 year old Brigadier General talk about how he had to dismiss all three of the commanders of his tank regiments, because they were tired after two years of making these decisions every day.

The thinking about these philosophical experiments may offer an insight in how different armed forces approached the problem of the risk of friendly fire.

It took the French and British armies in the first world war about 750,000 casualties over eighteen months casualties to accept the idea that it was better to take 5% casualties from your own artillery than 30% from enemy machine guns in a tactic known as the creeping barrage. An assault was a rock paper scissors game That became an unspoken doctrine. There were manuals telling soldier that they had to be really close to the barrage, but nothing in writing about the likely cost. The Germans never adopted the idea and even promulgated a myth that the allies were firing dud shells. Even 20 years later in Normandy an SS General repeated the claims. It never seems to have occurred to them that their enemies would be so callous.

In the German air assault on Crete in 1941 Luftwaffe planes were ordered to attack the targeted airfields until "Y" Hour when German paratroops and gliders were landing - amidst cannon fire and bombs.

Three years later in 1944 the Western Allies had huge arguments planning the assault on the coast of France about the risks of friendly fire casualties. The resulting plan left the beach defences themselves un-attacked by allied aircraft and a ten minute gap between the last shell landing on the defenders and the first man ashore.

The ideas provoked by the Trolley problem may help to understand why these different decisions were made, and why previous (utilitarian) experience was ignored.