dyre said:
Judging by how every other soldier seemed to have a nervous breakdown in the first major battle in the series, I think it's safe to say that they don't receive the same level of psychological conditioning as Navy Seals.
Also, given the long training time, and considering the extremely low number of trainees per class who sign up for the survey corps, and the survey corps' apparent casualty rate of 95%, I wonder how they still have soldiers left in that group...
Well see here's the thing. The main thing that the military does in basic training is break you down and make it so that your body responds automatically in the heat of battle. This is just with things like rifles and grenades, mainly to make sure that in the heat of battle you don't choke and, say, drop your magazine while reloading or miss the slot. Needless to say, getting the reactions of soldiers who have to grapple through the air, avoiding being crushed and slicing open the back of a Titan's neck with surgical precision would take a lot longer to get down.
Actually it seems right. The causality rate of the Survey Corps is only around 33% per mission, with the survivors usually becoming very skilled. The main characters are part of the 104th trainee corpse, meaning that a new class of recruits is probably put together and starts training every year considering that the walls have been standing for 105 years. Also, considering that their mission outside the wall during the series was called the 57th expedition, that means they probably only go out once every two years. So they go out, lose 33% of the men who goes out, gain experience, go back in, get two graduating classes of recruits to make up for the lost numbers, then go back out again. Rinse and repeat.
Of course, in more recent events the Survey Corps takes quite a thrashing, and if you're up to date on the manga, you'd see evidence that they're only hanging on by a thread.
