U.S. Army - More Touchy, More Feely, More Resilient

Led by Brig. Gen. Rhonda Cornum, the U.S. Army has launched a resiliency training campaign for every soldier, encompassing emotional and psychological screening and counseling, to assist in dealing with stress.

Army leaders, led by Secretary of the Army John McHugh and the service's top generals, are convinced that they can prevent some of the negative fallout on the home front by making soldiers more "psychologically fit" before they deploy.

"Listen, you don't just decide to climb Mount Kilimanjaro one day," said Cornum, who is leading the effort. "You get ready for a year before you do something like that. In the same way, we need to mentally and physically prepare for these deployments. If you go into it psychologically fragile, you're not going to come out better."

Soldiers, particularly the young, are often ill-equipped to handle prolonged stress and become vulnerable to worst-case thinking, Army officials say. The emotional and psychological training is designed to help them "bounce back" through more positive thinking, a type of training one can imagine being received skeptically at the tank range or in the Ranger Training Brigade. […]

Alexa Smith-Osborne, a social-work professor at the University of Texas at Arlington who conducts research on resiliency among troops and veterans, credits the Army for attempting to give soldiers the tools to rebound psychologically from difficulties, even if the science behind the psychology is still emerging.

Thousands of NCOs will receive instruction to become "master resiliency trainers" to conduct 15-minute online assessments of every soldier's "emotional fitness by asking questions about relationships with family and friends, spiritual beliefs and social interactions."

The assessment kicks out a bar graph in several areas, with the "score" higher the farther it extends to the right. (The Army avoided numerical scores for fear of soldiers thinking they failed.) Then it offers feedback on areas where a soldier should get additional training for improvement.

Interestingly, Gen. George Casey, the Army's chief of staff, said he's not sure the culture is ready to accept the resiliency program. Col. William Rabena, resiliency campus commander in Fort Hood, said there is no evidence that the program works. Others simply say the Army is hoping it works.

Frankly, I suspect that the program might encourage some soldiers to show up at sick call because of low resilience.

Companion post at The Jawa Report.