Cannon fodder

"Cannon Fodder" is an expression used to denote soldiers who are regarded or treated as expendable in the face of artillery fire. Fodder is food for livestock - the livestock in this case being cannons, the food being the soldiers sent against them. It generally refers to situations where soldiers are forced to fight against hopeless odds, as in the trenches of World War I. The term may have been introduced during the U.S. Civil War.

Alternatively, the term is used to differentiate between differend kinds of armed forces, where the elite forces (such as artillery, airforce or the navy) are compared to ordinary infantry.

In video games, cannon fodder is a term for small, easily destroyable enemies, like those found within scrolling shooters.

In everyday use, cannon fodder merely refers to being lead or coerced into an unfavourable situation.

Literary References

• The hero of the satirical novel The Good Soldier Svejk is drafted into the army as cannon fodder during World War I.

• The video game Cannon Fodder made light of the expression by portraying the deaths of the animated soldiers in the game humorously, and allowing the player to quickly replace lost soldiers with new ones.

• In the movie Starship Troopers, the motto for enlisting troops is "You want to live forever?", implying that people are going to die anyway, and should die in the armed forces. The movie is notorious for having scores of people massively outnumbered by alien bugs sent on suicide missions with low ammuniton and insufficient weapons. The movie is a hypothetical scenerio of true total war, and the corruption the government faces even when faced with a threat that could destroy all of humanity.

See also

• Sacrificial lamb, a metaphorical reference for a person who has no chance of surviving the challenge ahead, but is placed there for the common good
• Redshirt, a stock character in science fiction whose sole purpose is to die violently soon after being introduced. This idea was widely used in the Star Trek series, created by Gene Roddenberry.