"Batting cage for the mind": Army training evolving to develop better combat leaders.

• Author: Jean, Grace
• Position: SIMULATION & MODELING

Traditional, hard combat skills are not proving decisive in Iraq. So Army and industry innovators are responding by focusing on cognitive training scenarios to resolve the complex array of challenges facing troops there.

In recent years, the ground force has recognized the growing importance of teaching troops, at increasingly lower echelons, how to take on leadership roles and how to make better decisions under fire--decisions that often have a crucial impact on operations, say defense officials and analysts.

Such an acknowledgment marks a change in the Army's approach to training. In the 1980s and 1990s, the thinking was that if soldiers "could do the top-end skills, we could do all the others," Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, deputy commander and chief of staff of the Army Training and Doctrine Command, told reporters at the Association of the U.S. Army annual convention, in Washington, D.C.

Iraq, however, has proved that concept wrong. "We learned that full spectrum is very challenging, particularly the cultural piece," he said.

To get at the "full spectrum," the service is developing training programs and revamping large-scale pre-deployment exercises to increase the soldiers' abilities to make decisions, essentially creating "pentathlete officers" who can adapt to multiple missions, said Metz.

The mission rehearsals at the National Training Center's simulated Iraqi villages in Fort Irwin, Calif., for example, are intended to build cognitive skills through realism, so that when troops go into actual combat, they feel they already have been exposed to the environment, said Metz.

But the initiative to improve combat leadership skills earlier in solders' careers, by better understanding the cognitive processes involved in decision-making, has gained momentum inside military academies and other academic institutions.

"Right now, there's an incredible premium placed on combat leadership, because soldiers and leaders are dying. So we feel very compelled, almost a moral imperative, to make sure that the graduates of the military academy and other people understand how to lead during in extremis situations," said Col. Tom Kolditz, head of the behavioral sciences and leadership department at West Point, N.Y.

He and a team of psychologists are researching the concept of in extremis leadership, or how leadership changes when lives are at stake.

Based upon observations of small units operating in Iraq in 2003 and two other West Point studies, Kolditz and his team concluded that in extremis leadership differs from business or academic leadership in non-dangerous settings in several ways.

Under dangerous situations, followers look for competence in their leaders to a degree that is unprecedented in non-dangerous environments, said Kolditz.

"In dangerous contexts, they don't need motivation from a leader ... Everyone's scared and fired up. So what they're looking for is less motivation and more direction, more competence," explained Kolditz.

The best leaders in combat tend to be low motivators who can give instruction under perilous conditions.

"Unless they are out there sharing the risk, the danger, they have no credibility," said...