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Army Uses Experimental Training to Bulk Up Brain Power
Newhouse News ^ | 2/8/2006 | David Wood

Posted on 02/09/2006 10:34:29 AM PST by Incorrigible

Sgt. 1st Class David Chatham. (Photo by Bob Mahoney)

Army Uses Experimental Training to Bulk Up Brain Power

BY DAVID WOOD

FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. -- Staff Sgt. David Chatham had just dropped off a couple of rifle squads at a checkpoint outside Fallujah and turned toward home base when insurgents attacked. A rocket-propelled grenade burst through his Bradley Fighting Vehicle, showering him and his gunner with shrapnel and filling the Bradley with choking smoke and fire.

Reeling in and out of consciousness, Chatham slipped down into the wreckage and felt for his leg: gone. In a haze of pain and shock, he stripped off his T-shirt and tied the tourniquet around the jagged stump. Then, hauling himself back up into the hatch, he got the crippled Bradley turned around and went back through the firefight to rescue his infantrymen. Once they were safe, Chatham surrendered himself to medics.


Courage, tenacity, physical endurance -- the Army has always sought these traits in its leaders. But can it engineer its soldiers' ability to make accurate, gut-level decisions under extreme stress?

In other words, can you clone guys like Chatham?


Yes, the Army says. The ability to reach into the subconscious for experiences that apply in the current crisis can be exercised and strengthened -- just as a weightlifter develops his abs.

Highly competent leaders, said Brig. Gen. Volney J. Warner, deputy commandant of the Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, "in reality are looking at extremely complex circumstances and sensing all the different variables and relating that to their life experiences.

"The more you have in your memory bank," Warner said, "the better your judgment is going to be."

Of course, no one who must make lightning-quick decisions, especially in life or death situations, catalogs every possible course of action. "You short-circuit" your library of experiences, said Gary Klein, a research psychologist and author of the classic 1998 work, "Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions." "You learn to be looking for subtle cues" that unconsciously trigger a decision.

"This is something that can be trained," Klein insists.


That's why seasoned Army officers, about to take command of battalions in Iraq and elsewhere, are spending time in the Combat Leaders Environment, an experimental computer lab built here by Lockheed Martin Corp. Using dozens of scenarios based on real events in Iraq, the officers pack their mental libraries with decisions that later will flicker through their minds as cues to action.

Driving the effort is the Army's sense that the next advances in combat power won't come from machines. Human ingenuity is the key to the war in Iraq and the "long war" conflicts the Pentagon sees stretching on for a generation.

In Iraq, the military's high-tech firepower has far overmatched the insurgents, yet the insurgents have stalemated that firepower with improvised weapons and tactics. Where the U.S. has been successful, many officers believe, is in applying what Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus calls "non-kinetic" skills -- language and cultural awareness, ability to manipulate people, and deftness in thinking through multiple crises.

"For the kinds of challenges we have in Iraq and Afghanistan and in general -- Katrina! -- the key is flexibility and adaptability; we need prudent risk-takers, effective communicators, adept statesmen," said Petraeus, who is responsible for leader development and collective training across the Army.

In an in-depth study at the U.S. Military Academy, University of Pennsylvania research psychologist Martin Seligman identified personal traits that predict who will make the best intuitive leaders. The first was surprising: "the capacity to love and be loved -- `Band of Brothers' stuff," Seligman said, referring to the battle camaraderie of the World War II book and television series.

Beyond that, what counts is experience. But gaining experience in battle is costly. "The Union Army was, by 1863, probably the best army in the world -- but the cost was 280,000 dead," said retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., an author and strategist.

Enter virtual experience.


Fort Leavenworth's three experimental trainers are work stations with triple video screens showing the view out the front windshield of a Humvee. The battalion commander sits behind the console with a radio, and the scene unfolds as he "drives" down a street in the volatile Iraqi city of Tikrit. And here come the crises.

One student, Lt. Col. Brian Mennes, a square-jawed infantry officer, learns that a friendly crowd -- large enough to pose an attractive target for an insurgent suicide bomber -- is gathering at a school. Mennes can order the people to go home, send a company of American soldiers to take control, send a company of Iraqi soldiers and police to take control, go himself to take charge or ignore it and see what happens.

Each initial decision has consequences. Sending U.S. troops pulls them away from other, perhaps more important duties. Sending Iraqi troops may set Shiite soldiers against Sunni civilians -- potentially volatile. Ignore the crowd and the situation may explode out of control. And Mennes is already late for a meeting with town elders.

He decides to delegate, because now radio reports are pouring in as multiple crises erupt: one of his convoys has struck and killed an Iraqi youth; his infantrymen have come across a houseful of alleged insurgents and want to attack; a group of Navy SEALs is pinned down and needs help (this is an Army simulation, after all); a young woman is offering to turn in her father for aiding the insurgents.

He ponders the school situation for a moment before radioing his sergeant major: Go take a look, he says, and tell me what's going on. On the radio back to his headquarters, he barks a series of orders:

"I want the company commander to take control of that fight but I am worried about the aftermath. I want the medevac guys standing by, and coordinate with the Iraqi police, have all those guys staged and ready to go and brief the intel guys to see if there's a pattern to these attacks."

Mennes leans back in his seat. "This is huge, this is graduate level stuff," he says. "There's chaos out there, but things are slowing down, I don't need to panic, I can think a couple of moves ahead, just like rugby."

The idea, said Gen. William Wallace, the Army four-star who led the invasion of Iraq in 2003, is to teach soldiers "how to think, not what to think."

Seligman, who is working with Fort Leavenworth, explains it this way:

Recognizing the face of a loved one is simple, even if you can't tell someone how you do it. But scientists now can unravel that act, isolating hundreds of facial features for that person and others. And through computational modeling, they can isolate which are the key factors.

The same analysis can be done for complex battlefield decisions, Seligman believes, by dissecting those made by intuitive leaders and isolating the key factors. An experienced commander might know, for instance, that once the temperature in Baghdad hits 120 degrees, crowds become irrational and unruly -- so watch the temperatures!

Now, said Seligman, run an untrained officer through the virtual simulator. When he starts getting into trouble with volatile public gatherings, stop the game and tell him: Watch the temperature!

"I think we can actually train people to do a better job of attending to the things that are not intuitively obvious" to the untrained person, he said.

Sgt. 1st Class Chatham -- promoted and awarded the Silver Star for his heroism in Iraq -- finds this way too complicated. "What I was thinking was -- not anything," he said of his decision to turn back despite his wounds.

When pressed, however, he acknowledged that even in the face of death, he made judgments and considered the repercussions.

"I knew if I didn't tie down the wound on my stump I was going to bleed to death," he said. So that came first.

Next, "I knew we had ammunition on board and the guys on the ground were going to need it."

"It boiled down to this," he said. "We had guys on the ground we knew weren't going to get any other help, and we couldn't leave them."


Feb. 8, 2006

(David Wood can be contacted at david.wood@newhouse.com)

Not for commercial use.  For educational and discussion purposes only.


TOPICS: Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Government; US: Kansas
KEYWORDS:
Awesome!
1 posted on 02/09/2006 10:34:30 AM PST by Incorrigible
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To: Incorrigible

Good post!


2 posted on 02/09/2006 10:41:06 AM PST by elfman2
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To: Incorrigible

IDF style battle management technique..


3 posted on 02/09/2006 10:45:05 AM PST by rahbert
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To: Incorrigible

Looks at a great way to be better prepared for what they will face.


4 posted on 02/09/2006 10:54:08 AM PST by skyman
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To: elfman2

my only objection was the line about "yet the insurgents have stalemated that firepower".


5 posted on 02/09/2006 11:04:46 AM PST by printhead
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To: Incorrigible

Regarding Sgt. Chatham, where do we get men like him?


6 posted on 02/09/2006 11:10:41 AM PST by OldPossum
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To: Incorrigible

Awesome post, thanks


7 posted on 02/09/2006 11:32:40 AM PST by Cruz
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To: Incorrigible
"The Union Army was, by 1863, probably the best army in the world -- but the cost was 280,000 dead,"

Perhaps the Major General should have said "1865".

8 posted on 02/09/2006 11:59:53 AM PST by glorgau
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To: Incorrigible

survival is a mindset ping


9 posted on 02/09/2006 12:02:28 PM PST by Rakkasan1 (Muslims pray to Allah, Allah prays to Chuck Norris.)
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To: centurion316

ping


10 posted on 02/09/2006 7:44:23 PM PST by centurion316 (Democrats - Al Qaida's Best Friends)
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