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Resilience training key for preparing Indo-Pacific forces

Joseph Hammond

While taking aim at a practice target, a young New Zealand Army recruit, pictured, uses tactical breathing and visualizations to enhance performance. Meanwhile, a Singaporean Soldier learns to manage battlefield anxiety through progressive exposure to simulated stressors. In Australia, a Soldier uses a smartphone app to monitor her on-duty stress levels.

These are all examples of resilience training, an increasingly important aspect of preparing men and women for service in the armed forces of Indo-Pacific countries.

“A resilient defense force is one that has the capability to respond, survive and thrive in changing and challenging situations,” an Australian Department of Defence spokeswoman told FORUM. “Military personnel from the Indo-Pacific region participate in a range of training with the ADF [Australian Defence Force], in both Australia and their home nation.”

The ADF has used BattleSMART since 2009 to instill self-management and resilience in military personnel. The program covers four domains: adaptive behavior, adaptive ways of thinking about a situation, managing physiological responses and emotional regulation.

Service members test their responses in these four areas and adjust if an initial response is unhelpful or fails to enhance performance, the spokeswoman added. The goals are to enhance individual mental health and resilience and to achieve optimal performance for the individual and the team.

In addition to BattleSMART, the ADF employs High Res, a smartphone application and website designed to help members and their families manage responses to stress and build resilience.

In New Zealand, resilience training is embedded into courses at every level of Army training, according to the May 2020 issue of the journal Army News. The training centers on the Resilience Development Cycle steps: prepare, perform and recover.

Mental preparation and mental recovery sessions are led by instructors before and after each major field exercise, Army News added. At the shooting range, for example, Soldiers are taught tactical breathing and mental imagery to improve accuracy and timing.

Soldiers are intentionally pushed out of their comfort zone, then asked to practice self-reflection to improve response and recovery to stressors in future encounters.

The Singapore Armed Forces introduced task-specific resilience programs in 2018, developed by its Centre of Excellence for Soldier Performance (CESP) as part of a larger effort to maximize combat potential, according to Today newspaper.

During basic military training, Soldiers learn skills for managing stress and anxiety, according to a CESP fact sheet. Post-training, they are progressively exposed to stressors typical of combat operations to increase situational awareness and sharpen adaptive skills. Examples include testing a Soldier’s reaction to a team member gone missing or to an assignment that lasts longer than expected. Learning to cope with such exposure enables them to recover from setbacks to continue with their tasks, according to CESP.

Joseph Hammond is a FORUM contributor who reports from the Indo-Pacific region.

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