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By Richard Barton, DSW, Clinical Social Worker, Defense Health Agency-Public Health
Richard Barton, who retired from the U.S Army in 2012, holds a doctorate in clinical social work, has served as a U.S. Army brigade behavioral health officer, and as chief of social work services while assigned to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. His primary focus at Defense Health Agency-Public Health is on behavioral health and suicide prevention.
While lethality is often connected with firepower and tactical know-how, there is a human component that supports warfighter lethality and readiness: resilience. For service members, resilience is not only about bouncing back; it’s about developing mental flexibility, having the ability to regulate emotions, and maintaining focus under stressful situations that enhance individual readiness. Here are some ways that resilience supports personal readiness and promotes warfighter lethality.
The Department of Defense defines personal readiness as the ability to perform effectively and efficiently in all aspects of life, particularly in military contexts. This includes five dimensions of personal readiness:
• Physical: Maintaining a healthy lifestyle, including proper nutrition and exercise
• Emotional: Recognizing and managing emotions, including resilience to handle stress and adversity
• Social: Building and maintaining strong relationships, both personally and professionally
• Spiritual: Cultivating a sense of purpose and personal values that guide one's actions and decisions
• Family: Supporting and maintaining healthy relationships within the family unit
These dimensions are essential for sustaining personal readiness and overall well-being.
Resilience: An X-factor in warfighter lethality and personal readiness
Enhancing situational awareness:
Combat environments are often intense; stress and anxiety can cloud judgment and narrow focus. However, resiliency can help leaders and their warfighters better manage natural stress responses, improve awareness levels, and develop an ability to make quicker and more accurate decisions under duress. Enhancing individual resiliency improves situational awareness and supports personal readiness.
Optimizing performance under pressure:
When in a combat situation, stress hormones surge, triggering many biological changes. Realistic operational training helps to optimize personal readiness and resilience by providing leaders and warfighters opportunities to successfully manage their responses and channel them effectively, supporting their ability to maintain composure, stay focused, and utilize fine motor skills during intense situations.
Learning rapid recovery and adaptation:
The combat environment is dynamic. Challenging training scenarios help leaders and warfighters learn from their failures and adapt in rapidly evolving situations. Resiliency is enhanced by exposure to uncomfortable training environments, which helps promote learning how to recover from setbacks and overcome complex challenges. Learning to think critically and quickly adapt to new situations are keys to mission success.
Sustaining the will to fight on:
Learning to be comfortable with discomfort helps to provide a firm sense of purpose and determination when facing physical and mental hardships. Physical resilience supports mental resilience. The ability to think clearly and adjust to the effects of an intense operational tempo is influenced by individual levels of physical fitness; a fit body supports personal readiness.
Cohesion supports resiliency:
Resilience can be contagious. A team composed of resilient individuals is more likely to sustain its cohesion, develop trust, and maintain morale in extreme circumstances. Team cohesion can translate into seamless teamwork, effective communication, and a shared commitment to accomplishing the mission, ultimately increasing the team’s readiness.
To maintain personal readiness, resilience involves not only the capacity to rebound from setbacks but also sustainable and flexible abilities, referred to as adaptive resilience. Likewise, resilience is not based on a single strength. Here are some examples of how units develop and maintain resilience:
• U.S. Navy SEALs and submarine crews demonstrate adaptive resilience through extended underwater deployments, where they must manage isolation, confined spaces, and make mission-critical decisions under extreme pressure.
• Pilots and aircrew develop resilience through high-altitude training and split-second, decision-making scenarios where maintaining focus and fine motor skills can mean the difference between mission success and failure.
• U.S. Marine Corps units exemplify resilience through amphibious assault training, where they must rapidly adapt from sea-based operations to ground combat while maintaining unit cohesion across diverse operational environments.
• U.S. Space Force operators build resilience through training in cyber-warfare simulations and satellite operations, where mental agility and emotional regulation are crucial for protecting national security infrastructure.
• U.S. Army medics develop adaptive resilience through high-stress medical simulation training that replicates the chaos of battlefield casualty care, where they learn to optimize performance under pressure.
The foundations of resilience are established during initial training, optimized further by the challenges faced during the duty day, in reality-based training, and during deployments. Those who develop adaptive resilience are better equipped with the behavioral and physical traits needed to overcome challenging conditions and events.
A resilient force is a lethal force. By cultivating resilience as a core competency, we not only enhance our well-being but also improve the readiness and lethality of our military.
Additional resources:
Resilience tools: www.militaryonesource.mil/benefits/resilience-tools/
Resilience training courses: www.militaryonesource.mil/resources/training/resilience-training-courses/
| Date Taken: | 09.17.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 09.17.2025 09:27 |
| Story ID: | 548383 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 14 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
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