TAMPA, Florida — Promises of transformative military technology were around every corner at the Special Operations Forces conference, but few compared to the idea of upgrading human beings themselves.
“I think that’s the future. It’s getting there where we’re going to be able to create superhumans,” Alex Guerrero, the medical practitioner best known for his work on the “TB12 Method” with legendary NFL quarterback Tom Brady, told the Special Operations Forces Week audience here.
It may sound like science fiction, but Mr. Guerrero’s declaration dovetails with a multipronged effort inside the U.S. armed forces to usher in the next phase of evolution for America’s warfighters.
From biomechanics to mental health, from psychological toughness to spiritual reawakening, military leaders are fully embracing the idea of nurturing the mind, body and soul in concert to create warriors fully equipped for the conflicts of the 21st century — both on the battlefield and inside one’s own mind.
Mr. Guerrero’s concept of “superhumans” hinges on culturing the microbiomes of elite athletes or other prime specimens and quite literally incorporating them into other humans’ makeup. Such a radical step could in theory upgrade the strength, speed, physical endurance and recovery time for otherwise average individuals, using cutting-edge science to build more capable men and women.
For the Pentagon, that’s the extreme end of a rather wide spectrum, and one that’s not ready to implement on a significant scale. But military leaders already have embraced the broader idea of optimal human performance. No longer is the focus only on how high soldiers can jump, how fast they can run or how quickly they’re able to solve problems in a high-stakes environment.
Case in point: Air Force Maj. Gen. Michael Martin, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command-Korea, said the most important factor in ensuring that his elite unit is ready for potential war with North Korea is that the mental toughness, physical fitness and emotional health of his personnel are all in top form.
“The gunship is a great platform, but it’s not worth its weight in gold unless the crew is full up, i.e., cognitively, preservation of force and family, all the pillars for us to be high-functioning military members,” Gen. Martin told The Washington Times in an exclusive interview.
“Whether you’re stationed in Korea or the United States, or somewhere else and coming to Korea to train hard, [it’s important] that you have all the opportunity to ensure you are functioning at the highest rate, cognitively, physically, emotionally, everything is in order,” he said. “You bring that operator, that combat support person, forward. That to me is the secret sauce.”
Marrying man and machine
Deep inside the Pentagon, there’s been a subtle shift in how best to use technology to aid America’s warfighters.
The best, most advanced equipment has long been a part of U.S. military might, but the focus increasingly is turning to not just how humans can use that technology, but how the two can operate together in an almost symbiotic manner to create capabilities far beyond what people can accomplish on their own.
Perhaps no program better exemplifies that approach than the military’s “hyper-enabled operator” initiative, the offshoot of an ill-fated effort to build a futuristic suit similar to Marvel superhero Iron Man’s famed battle gear.
The suit itself failed to meet some of its lofty expectations, but the technological aims of that program are moving full steam ahead. Officials describe a future in which special forces personnel are outfitted with a range of technologies that can compile and analyze mountains of data — including information collected from commercially available sources or through social media channels — in order to accurately predict what will happen next on a battlefield.
With all of that data available to them in real time, military personnel may be able to find and identify threats without ever laying physical eyes on them.
“We want this operator to be super users of their environment across multiple domains, so they’re a little bit [able] to see around corners,” Army Col. Jarret Mathews, director of the Joint Acquisition Task Force at U.S. Special Operations Command, said during a presentation at the special forces conference here.
In a wartime environment, Col. Mathews said, the hyper-enabled operator system could translate road signs, graffiti and other messages from foreign languages to English or whatever language the operator wants. Such a tool could be vital in battles in a foreign land.
What’s more, officials say the system will ultimately be able to understand and respond to the user just as a human would, helping to solve problems and gather necessary information in a matter of seconds.
“Don’t think you have to utter certain keywords or key phrases. You just talk to it like you would another person, and it understands your intent and puts together responses,” Col. Mathews said.
Mind and soul
Building better soldiers with the aid of modern equipment is just one part of the equation. What’s arguably even more important, officials say, is caring for the emotional and psychological well-being of warfighters.
Technology can help with that, too, as America’s special forces community is building new artificial intelligence-driven tools that could soon predict when personnel are on the verge of an emotional upheaval or mental health event that could impact their readiness and performance under pressure.
“We select folks in SOCOM to be resilient. And sometimes there’s an assumption that once we pick those resilient people, they’re going to be resilient from here on out — once they’re good, they’re good,” said Army Lt. Col. Amanda Robbins, command psychologist at U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM.
“I think the challenge has been for the psychological domain and for that psychological support to be thought of as something that can aid performance,” Col. Robbins said at a panel discussion here. “I think the next horizon is often going to be how do we get ahead of finding out where those [emotional] snowballs are going to come? How do we get ahead of taking that data, that AI, that machine learning, and how do we incorporate that with the human element?”
“How do we incorporate those to provide commanders, to provide organizations, with a good risk assessment of how this is going to impact later on when the stress comes?” she said.
Underlying that psychological analysis may be something even more elemental. Maj. Gen. Thomas Solhjem, chief of chaplains for the Army, said an individual’s spirituality — and finding ways to nurture it — is the core principle upon which all other physical and psychological concepts are built.
“It’s really the docking station for everything else we’re talking about,” Gen. Solhjem told an audience here. “Now I think we’re at another major inflection point … About 40, 45 years ago we threw out the baby with the bathwater. We threw out religion and with it spirituality in an effort to be more inclusive as a people, not realizing the damage that we inherently did to our culture as a result of that.”
• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.