{"id":28619,"date":"2015-08-27T13:17:31","date_gmt":"2015-08-27T13:17:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/armytimes\/uncategorized\/2015\/08\/27\/mental-armor-new-training-strategy-takes-warrior-toughness-to-next-level\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T02:25:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T02:25:09","slug":"mental-armor-new-training-strategy-takes-warrior-toughness-to-next-level","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/armytimes\/education-transition\/2015\/08\/27\/mental-armor-new-training-strategy-takes-warrior-toughness-to-next-level\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Mental armor’: New training strategy takes warrior toughness to next level"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The infantry soldiers pick up sounds and smells from the village. They see enemy fire take down a woman in front of them, see her bleeding, hear her friend screaming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As they clear a building and move upstairs, a grenade blast takes out a gunman and his hostages, an old man and a boy. Outside, a blast injures two fellow squad members.\u00a0In an instant, the soldiers must assess what to do first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Afterward, the soldiers report on how they are dealing with what they saw.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is one in a series of scenarios an Army team has devised to make immersive training as realistic as possible, then go beyond that\u00a0to put soldiers into stressful\u00a0combat training situations, each more intense than the last, to give them mental\u00a0endurance\u00a0for what they will experience\u00a0on the battlefield and to cope\u00a0with it afterward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new training approach\u00a0is aimed directly at preventing post-traumatic stress and ultimately saving soldiers’ lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It calls for a major shift in\u00a0how the\u00a0Army trains soldiers, how it\u00a0prepares them for the smoky, smelly, nerve-wrenching reality of the combat zone, say officials and researchers with the Squad Overmatch Study, an Army project by military, academic and industry experts. The study focuses on how to combine the most advanced training methods and technologies with stress management, resilience and situational awareness skills throughout soldiers’ warrior training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

The training “does require a paradigm shift,” said Rob Wolf, Squad Overmatch Study project director with the Army’s Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation, or PEO STRI. “It’s not so much about what they do, it’s training how they think. \u2026 Everything about this is mental armor.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Members of four squads from 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Georgia, have gone through the Stress Exposure Training to provide feedback. Some had deployed before, some had not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some soldiers reacted to the scenarios as if the events were real: A squad leader was distracted by screaming from a role player whose character’s mother had just been killed in a search-and-clear operation. He told his team to “go tell that girl to shut the [expletive] up.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“When you kill someone, you hear the thud and see the spray,” said another soldier about the realistic training, quoted in the Squad Overmatch Study report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In one scenario, soldiers encounter a simulated IED blast. If they feel a vibration from the haptic belts they are wearing, they know they’ve been wounded and they must act as if they’re injured so their buddies can react.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I went cold when I experienced the IED attack,” one soldier said in the report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The study is addressing a significant\u00a0way that training falls short: While the basic training-to-deployment cycle develops warrior skills, it largely overlooks the “human dimension.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We know we need to change the way we train, that’s for sure,” Wolf told Army Times.\u00a0“This program is providing recommendations for how to go about doing that.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team developed the Squad Integrated Training Approach for soldiers to learn and practice cognitive resilience, mental performance and situational awareness. A key part of that is Stress Exposure Training, based on research and experimentation in the armed services and law enforcement organizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The scenarios use gaming, virtual and live environments to make the situations increasingly real and gradually more stressful.\u00a0Soldiers use Virtual Battlespace Space<\/span> 3 gaming, an immersive experience with the Dismounted Soldier Training System. They\u00a0interact with reactive avatars that are expressive enough to show signs of deception in their body language, and realistic enough to show wounds and bleed.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soldiers encounter smells such as incense in a church or baking bread in the home where the hostages were being held upstairs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sensory immersion makes the scenarios more convincingly stressful so\u00a0soldiers can\u00a0learn cognitive and coping skills to deal with\u00a0it, Wolf said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later on, soldiers can use the skills to replay and review those situations, and think through how to deal with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Army supports the study as part of its wide-ranging effort to improve soldiers’ performance, readiness and resilience. The Squad Overmatch effort fits into the Army Strategic Planning Guidance, which calls for emphasizing the human dimension and training for operational adaptability, and to build the power of fighting formations so that “our squads are never again in a fair fight,” the report states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The study also relates to the Army’s Human Dimension and Force 2025 initiatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Squad Overmatch has gained recognition within the Army: It has won the national Army Modeling and Simulation Award for team training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the scenarios, soldiers are exposed to eight major combat stressors, identified in coordination with Walter Reed Army Institute of Research:<\/p>\n\n\n\n