I co-authored an article that is published in the May-June issue of Military Review. It’s called Operational Resilience in the Infantry Rifle Platoon and details efforts our platoon took over the past year to implement resilience techniques at the platoon level.
I submitted the article last year, and the process for getting published in Military Review is long, but the timing couldn’t be better. A couple of weeks ago, USA Today published an article criticizing the Army’s resilience program and it was widely shared on social media among veteran friends with the damning headline Army morale low despite 6 year, $287 million optimism program. The insinuation is that the implementation of the resilience program was chiefly an effort to raise morale, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t the case. Anyone who has served in the military knows that maintaining high morale is tough nowadays – it’s not just chow, mail, and free time anymore.
I’m a fan of resilience training. It makes sense to me and as someone who spends a lot of time reading about productivity (I’m a big Gretchen Rubin fan), integrating resilience training and letting it set seems like a good idea in today’s Army.
The major problem with resilience training, as I point out in the Military Review article, is that it has been implemented mostly at the individual level. That is, NCOs go to the Master Resilience Course and learn the material, and then (mostly) return to their unit and periodically give a class on resilience. The only person who really benefits from that is the NCO, who has had the in-depth experience in the class to actually use some of the techniques. Implementing resilience at the unit level has not really been accomplished. My argument is that if units actually worked at implementing the techniques beyond the individual level, we might actually see better results.
The point of this post is not to simply counter the USA Today article, but to get you to go check out the article in Military Review, where you have at least one example of a small unit utilizing resilience techniques – not to raise morale – but to do better work.
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Carrying the Gun 