“The Mind is Primary.” Is the British Army doing enough to train it?
“The Mind is Primary.” What has the quote from an extreme Alpine mountaineer have to do with military training?
Mark Twight’s statement is part of a longer reflection on how to achieve peak performance. Physical training is the easy part. Psychological training is where it is hard, and unless you are training your head in concert with your body, you are wasting your time.
Simply, he sums it up as “unf**k your head and physical performance increases instantly.”
And Twight should know.
He pioneered a radical, lightweight, single-push approach to Alpine mountaineering on some of the most extreme and dangerous climbing routes throughout the world. He drove himself to the absolute physical and mental limits, fuelled by an insatiable desire to continually push the boundaries. Climbing fast, light and high, his logbook is littered with ground breaking first ascents, extreme tests of endurance, and routes often described as being
“so dangerous as to be of little value except to those suicidally inclined.”
Climbing defined who he was. He trained as he climbed — to the extreme.
He thought he wouldn’t live past 26.
He was wrong.
He actually made it to 39 before quitting professional climbing for good. Crucially, he quit before he went too far.
But I still haven’t answered what this has to do with military training?
It is all About the Head
While his training methods were extreme, Twight recognised one key fact — peak performance was all about the head. The mind is everything; it all stems from there. He firmly believed that no amount of physical training could compensate for an unprepared mind. If you wanted to be able to perform in extreme, high pressure environments walking the finely balanced tightrope between life and death, then the mind needed to be prepared.
The British Army would call this contention mental resilience. Indeed, great strides have been made in recent years to introduce specific mental resilience training under the OPSMART (Optimising human Performance through Stress Management And Resilience Training) programme. The aim of OPSMART is to help soldiers develop effective coping strategies, preparing them for the stresses they will face in training, on operations, and during general service life. It combines mental health with mental resilience. It is a crucial programme.
Mental resilience allows us to regulate psychological stressors and emerging emotions that are generated by the environment we are experiencing. In a combat environment, that could be information and sensory overload, complexity, fear, anxiety, lack of sleep, fatigue, time pressure, and climatic extremes. Through regulation of these stressors, we attempt to reduce the impact on our ability to function. Physical training seeks to do the same, minimising the effect of physically demanding activity. However, there is more to the mind than just pure resilience.
These management systems are simply providing space for cognitive processes to focus on the task in hand unaffected. Cognition is the ability to acquire, store, retrieve and process information. In essence, it is about learning, thinking and reasoning, and plays a crucial role in problem solving and decision making.
To maximise a soldier’s ability to successfully deliver a task, not only do you have to make sure they can manage psychological and physical stressors, but also that their cognitive efficiency, critical thinking and mental processing are all optimised. The cognitive load should ultimately not outweigh the individual’s cognitive resources, otherwise performance is affected.
This is what Twight was getting at when he told us to train the mind in concert with the body.
The Future is Cognitively Complex
The issue, however, is that the character of conflict is becoming increasingly complex and more cognitively demanding. Rapidly advancing technology, vast amounts of available data, integration of multi-domain capabilities, and the increasing appetite of our adversaries to utilise sub-threshold methods of warfare are all becoming essential components of the future battlespace. For the soldier, it is not going to be enough to just be resilient to the psychological and physical stressors that affect their performance.
If we are to truly be able to achieve the Chief of the General Staff’s aim of “matching brainpower with firepower,” then we need to consider whether we are getting the ‘brainpower’ part of our training right.
These increasing cognitive demands will manifest themselves in the following ways:
A. Pervasiveness of Information. The growing digital landscape means that information is available from a plethora of sources and sensors which would have previously been unthinkable. Our ability to act in the face of an adversary will not be constrained by information gaps, but by our capacity to cognitively digest large volumes of data, analyse it, process it, and incorporate it into our decision-making systems faster than our opponent. Artificial Intelligence will assist in processing the volume, but decision-making, for now, is firmly a human preserve. This requires soldiers with a capacity to intellectually deal with a greater cognitive load effectively.
“The sources of battlefield advantage will shift from traditional factors like force size and levels of armaments, to factors like superior data collection and assimilation, connectivity, computing power, algorithms and system security.”
Erich Schmidt, former CEO of Google
B. Technological Advancement. The Army has stated that it “will be an ‘early adopter’ of technology” to retain its competitive advantage. Such investment in the pursuit of a battle-winning technological edge will affect the intellectual capability of the individual soldier in five key areas:
1. Greater Dispersal. Improved communications and situational awareness will allow greater dispersal on the battlefield, generating mass only at the critical moment. The result will be that smaller teams will operate more independently from the chain of command for extended periods. Such a decentralised structure will push more responsibility further down the chain, maximising Mission Command, increasing autonomy and requiring more effective decision-making ability at the lowest level.
2. Reduced Numbers. Relying upon the ‘technical edge’ will see smaller numbers of physical soldiers in the battlespace. Less numbers constitutes less redundancy. Individuals will have to be more efficient and effective in the delivery of their role. Maximising their ability to deliver peak performance is therefore essential.
3. Increased Situational Awareness. Complex situational awareness platforms, previously held higher up the chain of command, will be driven down to the lowest level. This will require greater cognitive processing abilities further down the chain to make best use of this information and to support a decentralised decision-making structure.
4 High-Tech Weaponry. The demands of increasingly high-tech weaponry will also require a more cognitively able soldier.
5 Fighting Connected and Disconnected. While relying upon technical solutions will need a soldier to be able to work ‘connected,’ it also means they will need to be able to work ‘disconnected’ if an adversary is able to deny access to any of the technical systems. The dexterity to adjust to a reversionary, analogue mode at speed, and with minimal loss of output, will be of paramount importance.
C. Weaponisation of Information. Manipulation of our perception of the world is now occurring on unprecedented levels. The ubiquity of the internet and social media means that our adversaries can apply dezinformatsiya direct to an individual’s mobile phone. The truth has become a malleable expediency, weaponised to undermine democratic processes and to attack the cognitive resilience of populations. We cannot purely focus on the physical defence against denial-of-service attacks, the use of botnets, malicious code and virus attacks. We must also defend the cognitive vulnerabilities of our people.[1] Our soldiers will be vulnerable to cognitive attack directly by our adversaries. They, therefore, need to have the intellectual agility to recognise such manipulation.
D. Innovation and Experimentation. These are at the centre of The Integrated Operating Concept. The implementation of such bedrock modernisation will require soldiers who are able to quickly test, adjust and adapt to the lessons learned by new operating models, cross domain operations and advanced equipment. This will require a significant degree of cognitive ability, as will the development of sub-threshold skills to combat those employed so effectively by our adversaries.
Has Anything Changed Though?
While I have laid out the case for how the cognitive load will increase for the individual soldier, hasn’t it always been high? The fundamental nature of war has not changed. The psychological and physical stressors that dominate the combat environment remain. Indeed, to break your adversary’s will to fight, you have to ensure that your actions maximise these stressors on your enemy, resulting in their cognitive ability being overwhelmed to the point of capitulation. The nature of war is still essentially the clash of opposing wills in a Clausewitzian trinity of “primordial violence, hatred, and enmity.”[2]
While this is a strong argument, it fails to take into account that the complexity of the future operating environment is significantly dialling up the pressure on each individual soldier. This is because technology has fundamentally changed the character of war.
Rapid technological advancement over the last century means that we have transitioned from two domains of operation (sea and land) to five (sea, land, air, cyber and space). All of these are interconnected and interdependent. At the higher levels, senior officers are having to increasingly think across these five domains in order to achieve their aims. Equally, technology is also reducing the number of physical participants in the battlespace, driving increased levels of responsibility, autonomy and decision-making to the lowest level.
This, coupled with the need to process vast amounts of information to make decisions faster than your adversary, is increasing the cognitive demand considerably on the individual soldier. The nature of war may not have changed, but the character is now exceedingly more complex.
What Next?
How do we ensure that our training is meeting this increased cognitive demand? How do we match our ‘brainpower with firepower’?
I will attempt to answer that question in Part 2 of this blog series.
Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Husband is a British Army infantry officer with 22 years of experience in training, operations and the delivery of leadership and resilience training in the outdoor environment.
This BLOG is an academic study conducted as part of the KCL Master by Research programme on the Advanced Command and Staff Course at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. The views expressed are those of the author; they do not constitute the opinion of, or a representation by the British Army or the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom.
