BoyElroy
02-17-2006, 02:18 AM
Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
February 12, 2006 Sunday
HEADLINE: MENTAL WAR;
The Army is seeking to train leaders to make good decisions under extreme duress
BYLINE: By David Wood, Newhouse News Service
FORT LEAVENWORTH, KAN. -- Staff Sgt. David Chatham had just dropped off a couple of rifle squads at a checkpoint outside Fallujah, Iraq, and turned toward his 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 it around the jagged stump as a tourniquet. 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?
The Army says it can. 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 abdominal muscles.
Cataloging experience
Highly competent leaders, said Brig. Gen. Volney Warner, deputy commandant of the Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., "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, he said. "This is something that can be trained."
Preparing for the worst
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 laboratory built at Fort Leavenworth 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 answered that firepower with improvised weapons and tactics. Where the United States has been successful, many officers say, is in applying what Lt. Gen. David Petraeus calls "nonkinetic" 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, experience counts. 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 Scales Jr., an author and strategist.
Enter virtual experience.
Chaos breaks out
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 then come the crises.
One student, Lt. Col. Brian Mennes, a square-jawed infantry officer, learned that a friendly crowd -- large enough to pose an attractive target for an insurgent suicide bomber -- was gathering at a school. Mennes could 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 happened.
Each initial decision has consequences. Sending U.S. troops pulls them away from other, perhaps more important duties. Sending Iraqi troops could set Shiite soldiers against Sunni civilians -- potentially volatile. Ignore the crowd and the situation could explode out of control. And Mennes was already late for a meeting with town elders.
He decided to delegate, because radio reports were pouring in as multiple crises erupted: one of his convoys hit and killed an Iraqi youth; his infantrymen came across a houseful of suspected insurgents and wanted to attack; a group of Navy SEALs was pinned down and needed help (it was an Army simulation, after all); a young woman was offering to turn in her father for aiding the insurgents.
He pondered the school situation for a moment before radioing his sergeant major: Go take a look, he said, and tell me what's going on. On the radio back to his headquarters, he barked 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 leaned back in his seat. "This is huge, this is graduate-level stuff," he said. "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 four-star Army commander who led the invasion of Iraq in 2003, is to teach soldiers "how to think, not what to think."
Chatham, who was promoted and awarded the Silver Star for his heroism in Iraq, said he 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.
GRAPHIC: NNS PHOTO
Badly wounded in an ambush in Iraq in 2003, Army Sgt. 1st Class David Chatham tied a tourniquet around his leg and turned his crippled Bradley Fighting Vehicle around to rescue fellow troops. The Army is experimenting with ways to teach such quick, intuitive decision-making.
LOAD-DATE: February 12, 2006
Prev
February 12, 2006 Sunday
HEADLINE: MENTAL WAR;
The Army is seeking to train leaders to make good decisions under extreme duress
BYLINE: By David Wood, Newhouse News Service
FORT LEAVENWORTH, KAN. -- Staff Sgt. David Chatham had just dropped off a couple of rifle squads at a checkpoint outside Fallujah, Iraq, and turned toward his 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 it around the jagged stump as a tourniquet. 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?
The Army says it can. 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 abdominal muscles.
Cataloging experience
Highly competent leaders, said Brig. Gen. Volney Warner, deputy commandant of the Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., "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, he said. "This is something that can be trained."
Preparing for the worst
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 laboratory built at Fort Leavenworth 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 answered that firepower with improvised weapons and tactics. Where the United States has been successful, many officers say, is in applying what Lt. Gen. David Petraeus calls "nonkinetic" 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, experience counts. 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 Scales Jr., an author and strategist.
Enter virtual experience.
Chaos breaks out
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 then come the crises.
One student, Lt. Col. Brian Mennes, a square-jawed infantry officer, learned that a friendly crowd -- large enough to pose an attractive target for an insurgent suicide bomber -- was gathering at a school. Mennes could 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 happened.
Each initial decision has consequences. Sending U.S. troops pulls them away from other, perhaps more important duties. Sending Iraqi troops could set Shiite soldiers against Sunni civilians -- potentially volatile. Ignore the crowd and the situation could explode out of control. And Mennes was already late for a meeting with town elders.
He decided to delegate, because radio reports were pouring in as multiple crises erupted: one of his convoys hit and killed an Iraqi youth; his infantrymen came across a houseful of suspected insurgents and wanted to attack; a group of Navy SEALs was pinned down and needed help (it was an Army simulation, after all); a young woman was offering to turn in her father for aiding the insurgents.
He pondered the school situation for a moment before radioing his sergeant major: Go take a look, he said, and tell me what's going on. On the radio back to his headquarters, he barked 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 leaned back in his seat. "This is huge, this is graduate-level stuff," he said. "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 four-star Army commander who led the invasion of Iraq in 2003, is to teach soldiers "how to think, not what to think."
Chatham, who was promoted and awarded the Silver Star for his heroism in Iraq, said he 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.
GRAPHIC: NNS PHOTO
Badly wounded in an ambush in Iraq in 2003, Army Sgt. 1st Class David Chatham tied a tourniquet around his leg and turned his crippled Bradley Fighting Vehicle around to rescue fellow troops. The Army is experimenting with ways to teach such quick, intuitive decision-making.
LOAD-DATE: February 12, 2006
Prev