McNab - Mental endurance: how to develop mental toughness from the worlds elite forces

Above all, soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines need to possess mental endurance if they are to survive the experience of military service.

What It Takes

W hen men and women are recruited into the armed services, they enter a profession unlike any other, with the very real prospect that one day they might experience the violence and chaos of combat. From the outset, therefore, they have to exhibit mental toughness, self-discipline and a warrior spirit.

Youve never lived until youve almost died. For those who fight for it, life has a meaning the protected will never know.

This now-famous quotation was a popular saying in the Studies and Operations Group (SOG), the Special Forces units that operated deep within enemy territory during the Vietnam War. In many ways it encapsulates the profound distinction between civilian and military life. In the civilian world, the greatest mental challenges tend to come from the realms of work, money, health and family. Violence, by contrast, is generally an incidental and irregular occurrence, and one that can often be avoided by the simplest of safety precautions. (There are of course some troubled parts of the world that are unfortunate exceptions to this rule.)

Warrior Spirit

Combat is an intense experience both psychologically and physically. Here a soldier survives the blast of a nearby artillery explosion; exposure to prolonged shellfire has historically been a leading cause of post-traumatic stress disorder, even amongst elite troops.

For the soldier, airman, marine or sailor, however, violence can be encountered indeed, sought out on a scale or intensity that is almost unimaginable to any civilian who has not lived through a war itself. The experiences of combat present sights, sounds and sensations of unique force bullets splitting the air with a supersonic crack; explosions demolishing entire buildings with a single enormous blast; directing devastating air strikes with just a GPS designator and a radio; mutilations of almost fantastic horror; the violent deaths of friends, sometimes in large numbers; the misery of observing civilian families caught in the crossfire; the shock of killing another human being. Such experiences cannot but have a powerful effect on the human psyche.

Security Duties

A US Army patrol performs routine security duties at a checkpoint in Iraq. The psychological challenge for the men is to remain vigilant for long periods under sustained levels of threat, with each soldier taking responsibility for a particular aspect or sector of group protection.

Yet even in peacetime, the demands of military service are quite distinct. Soldiers have to endure hard training regimes, some of which would test professional athletes to their limits. They have to comply with harsh discipline, curtailed sleep, an often-unimaginative diet and a culture with a generally intolerant attitude towards weakness. They also have to be organized, smart and respectful of authority, articulate in communication and able to perform their duties with efficiency and intelligence.

Comradeship

Military service deliberately promotes comradeship and a sense of belonging. Shared experiences can unite individuals and improve unit cohesion under fire.

Making the Grade

We expect a lot of those we put in uniform, and not everyone is cut out for this service. Typical failure rates for those attempting to pass basic training in a regular infantry regiment can be in the region of 2030 per cent. If we look at those who attempt to join the Special Forces, such as the Special Air Service (SAS) or US Navy SEALs, then the failure rates spiral upwards to the region of 7590 per cent. Physical limitations are often a cause of drop-outs, but a significant proportion are sent home or back to their original units because they didnt quite exhibit the right mental requirements.

Basic Training

Basic training aims to prepare recruits for military life by combining physical and mental trials. On route marches such as these, the soldier needs mentally to compartmentalize the discomforts of heavy loads and focus on the job in hand.

In mass conscript armies, such as those recruited during the world wars or in many of the pre-20th-century conflicts, the psychological profile of the individual soldier was not necessarily an impediment to joining up during moments of genuine national crisis, every man who can be put into the field is of use. In modern professional armies, by contrast, selectivity can be put into play. Those who attempt to join the military must exhibit, or come to exhibit during training, a mixture of qualities that can be roughly compiled under the umbrella heading of character. The definition of character has been penned by many military theorists. Napoleon once said, with characteristic fire: True character always pierces through in moments of crisis There are sleepers whose awakening is terrifying. The great strategic thinker Carl von Clausewitz was slightly more nuanced: