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50 Biobehavioral Resilience to Stress

Our Modern Military into the Future

Virtually every critical aspect of military policy and practice—force
structure, doctrine, equipment, and budget—is influenced by expectations

and predictions concerning the nature of future armed confl ict. Today’s

competing visions differ largely by the degree to which future confl icts are
foreseen as likely to resemble the Cold War (past) or as focusing primarily
upon operations designed to preserve regional stability (present). In either
case, we must try to anticipate accurately the resulting needs for continued

positive development and maintenance of an effective military force and for
adequate support and service to its members.
Some policy makers and military planners believe that it is only a mat-
ter of time before China emerges as a global economic and regional military
competitor to the United States. If this scenario dominates the thinking of
defense planners, the likely result is that the U.S. military will once again be
transformed as a technologically updated version of the pre–Iraq War mili-
tary (Hammes, 2004). Such a force would likely be designed and employed to
engage in infrequent, high-intensity, and short-duration combat. Th e initial
few weeks of the Iraq War might be seen as a useful model for the employ-
ment of such a force. In such a scenario, the stress associated with military
service would resemble that experienced by the service members during the
Cold War era, that is, periods of combat would be limited in scope and dura-
tion only as needed to prevent a much larger catastrophic confl ict. Ironically,

during the Cold War, military conflicts and resulting stressors were limited
by the need to avoid mishaps, misunderstandings, or escalation that might
raise the threat of global annihilation.
An alternative vision of future conflict emphasizes stability and support

operations of the sort that are now intended in Iraq. Although this scenario

clearly is not the sort of conflict we might prefer as a nation, some (e.g.,
Hammes, 2004) have argued that this may very well be the sort of ongoing
struggle that is forced upon us. This scenario implies persistent endurance of

current conditions, which include repetitive and lengthy deployments and
ongoing exposure of nearly all deployed service members to intense combat-
related stress. Any considerable reduction of stress and its eff ects would require
that our current military force be redesigned or reorganized in ways that
better support such ongoing operations with less strain on service members
(Ullman, 2004).
Although the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union no longer
provides a damper to limit military conflict, the overwhelming military

superiority of the United States exerts essentially the same dampening eff ect
on the willingness of other nations to engage in conventional warfare against
American military forces. Although it is true that the expanding economy and

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