These Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL trainees are learning teamwork under pressure during Hell Week. SEAL training may appear brutish, but it frees students to explore creative ways of solving problems and to develop cognitive skills in teamwork, collaboration, and coping strategies—traits they will need in spades in combat.
The ocean swell heaved to nearly ten feet and broke just in front of the hapless rubber boat. The trainees leaned into the halting craft and braced for the crashing wave, but they had not paddled together, and their boat lacked adequate momentum. The wave tossed their boat mercilessly bow over stern. Rather than piercing through the upper lip of the wave, the boat and its crew fell victim to their uncoordinated effort. The flipping boat catapulted its crew into the surf zone, and they floundered in the foam and waves for several minutes before they righted the boat and climbed back into their paddling positions. Then they gave it another try while their instructors stood silent on the beach, watching them struggle.
"Not a lot of instructing going on here, is there?" commented one of the officers.
We were on the beach in Coronado, California, observing 15 boat crews undertaking surf passage, a cornerstone of Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training. Because SEALs must be experts in the surf when they operate in the fleet, trainees virtually live in the surf for the first phase of BUDS. The traditional teaching method has been a sink-or-swim approach. When students fail, instructors do not jump in and help. Students must call on their own devices to solve the problem. How could someone not see the training value of paddling rubber boats into large surf with little guidance?
In today's Navy, with its outboard motors, Zodiac inflatable boats, and advanced SCUBA equipment, why do trainees still paddle boats and practice breath-hold underwater swims? Is it relevant? Is Naval Special Warfare merely perpetuating traditions of toughness, or does Hell Week actually teach something?
BUDS curriculum states its students are learning teamwork. Others might say they are building character or developing mental toughness, but what does that mean in terms of education and training? To grasp the value of BUD/S training, one must understand some of the theories of education and social psychology, such as metacognition, self-regulation, and the effects of anxiety and arousal on thinking. Although there may appear to be little instruction at BUDS, a substantial amount of learning takes place during well-constructed, physically challenging exercises.
Procedural Knowledge
Many military training courses teach checklist approaches to problem solving. They teach students what to think, or declarative knowledge. Proscriptive doctrine; tactics, techniques, and procedures; and the military decision-making process are examples of step-by-step instructions for thinking through situations. Solving problems and developing courses of action with such explicit procedures involves more filling in the blanks and checking boxes than creative, heuristic thinking. Courses with explicit training objectives and detailed lesson plans seem clearly focused, but they lack the intellectual challenge of a well-crafted exercise. They merely are engaging their students in the most basic cognitive skill, the memorization of declarative knowledge.
In contrast, students develop more advanced cognitive skills in problem-based learning, where they must find a solution with little guidance, using only their own imaginations. If the problems are original, ambiguous, and unpredictable, students must stray from step-by-step approaches and create problem-unique solutions using schema (mental classifications of experience) from other situations that they make analogous to the problem at hand—the cognitive skill of analogical thinking. Well-crafted exercises prompt other metacognitive strategies such as backward thinking, shifting paradigms, and war gaming. In effect, these free-play exercises teach how to think, not what to think.
In the surf-passage training evolution, for example, students form seven-man boat crews with the coxswain in each crew acting as the leader. They receive a rubber boat, seven paddles, seven life jackets, and a simple task: paddle the boat out through the surf, dump the water out of the boat by turning it over, right it, and then paddle it back to the beach. Instructors coach the students in some of the basics of paddling and steering and give them some pointers on reading the surf. Then the crew members collaborate and develop a strategy to get them through the pounding waves.
Students decide within their groups who sits and paddles where, who sets the paddling cadence, and their strategy for negotiating the surf. The collaboration is crucial to success in this drill, and it is the BUDS students' first real exposure to Naval Special Warfare teamwork. The students also learn quickly to watch and learn from others. The boat crews who read the waves correctly, accelerate with synchronized strokes, and beat the other crews out and back stand out and serve as examples. During this simple exercise, the students immerse themselves in collaboration of ideas, coordination of effort, perception of the dynamic situation, synchronization of actions, and a host of other cognitive skills. They either create their own solutions or are immersed in the ocean. The fact that the instructors do not give explicit directions is precisely the value of the exercise. BUD/S graduates probably never will have to paddle a rubber boat in the fleet, but their knowledge of the intricacies of teamwork will transfer and apply to virtually every situation they will face.
Self-Regulation
Instructors lift an unconscious student out of the pool and lay him on the deck. The corpsman calmly assesses his condition, and within moments the student coughs up some water and begins breathing again. During the 50-meter underwater swim test, this student's mind ignored the urge to come to the surface and breathe. Instead, he coped with the stress and anxiety of air hunger and controlled his impulse to breathe. He remained focused on his task to swim underwater to the side of the pool. In this case, the student demonstrated cognitive control beyond the norm and ignored the signals from his body to the point that he experienced a shallow-water blackout.
Normally, students complete the underwater swim test with only a moderate battle between their minds and their bodies, but the battle is the test. The water is an outstanding environment for developing self-regulation, and the BUDS curriculum takes full advantage of it. Self-regulation is the mind's ability to override thoughts, feelings, and impulses that conflict with one's objective. A timed run on the beach might put students into a conflict between fatigue and passing the test. Push-ups might put them into a conflict between pain and passing. But the water puts students into a compelling and stressful conflict between living and passing. With tests like the 50-meter underwater swim, underwater knot tying, and drown-proofing (a swim test in which students complete a series of tasks with their hands and feet bound), the curriculum challenges students to override their bodies' powerful urge to breathe and stay focused on completing other tasks. Few other learning environments offer such a battle.
With these two-minute swim tests, BUDS instructors place students in a metacognitive dilemma. The student not only must complete basic skills, but also must deal with stress in a healthy manner as he balances his body's urge to breathe and his mind's will to succeed. He must formulate a strategy for overriding the urge to breathe by focusing on the tasks and distracting himself from the urge. He must keep his anxiety and arousal levels in check. Finally, he must execute the physical task. These swim tests might seem simple, but the metacognitive skills required to complete them are complex. Moreover, the self-regulation developed in these tests builds efficacy that may be transferred to other stressful environments, such as combat.
Episodic Memories
Do you remember where you were on 11 September 2001? When the space shuttle Challenger exploded? When John F. Kennedy was shot? These profound events in our lives create indelible memories. Education literature refers to them as episodic memories, and it recognizes them as the clearest memories. Significant actions in your life are easier to recall, and recollection normally is more detailed.
Memory is a key ingredient in learning. Learning first requires being able to hear, see, feel, smell, or taste a lesson and store it in short-term memory. It then requires understanding, which is attained by working with the knowledge in the short-term memory and categorizing it into schema. The categorized knowledge is then stored in a person's long-term memory. Finally, learning is demonstrated when someone recalls what is stored and uses the knowledge effectively, or remembers. Finding ways to make lessons memorable is one of the principal goals of educators.
One of the benefits of the stress, strain, and intensity of BUDS is that each lesson's extreme nature amounts to a hard-to-- forget episode in a trainee's life. With well-trained instructors and experienced medical observers supporting each evolution, students are able to push their bodies and minds well beyond their perceived limits and safely experience the boundaries of human ability. These first-ever experiences underwater, under a boat, or under sleep deprivation help to solidify the principles of teamwork and perseverance that BUDS is designed to inculcate. Few SEALs ever forget the bell ringing to secure Hell Week, a five-and-a-half-day, nonstop training evolution designed to test each student's resiliency and desire. With that episodic memory comes the lesson students teach themselves upon completion of the course: that they can succeed and persevere when extremely tested.
Training for Certainty
In the Athens-versus-Sparta training and education arena, BUDS sits squarely in the Spartan corner. That characterization does not imply it is void of intellectual challenges. Instead, its focus on fundamentals in the water and small-unit tactics on land allows its students to develop deep cognitive skills. The minimal level of declarative knowledge taught frees students to explore creative ways of solving problems and to develop a broad palette of procedural cognitive skills in teamwork, collaboration, and coping strategies for anxiety. The physical demands in the water and on land force students to self-regulate. Moreover, the extreme evolutions at BUDS etch indelible episodic memories in each student's psyche, and they inculcate the values of perseverance, teamwork, and mission success.
The BUDS curriculum and teaching methods hold educational value in other ways as well. The unpleasantness of the training adds urgency to each student's effort and challenges him to distinguish between pain and injury. The instructors ignore excuses, which teaches the students internal locus of control, or self-attribution. Students develop self-efficacy, collective efficacy, and an improved self-concept in addition to stronger muscles and a sound technical knowledge of weapons, explosives, and diving.
There is educational value to physically challenging and emotionally arousing training throughout the military. Boot Camp, Plebe Summer, The Crucible, The Dipsy Dunker—military training is replete with evolutions that test students' ability to control their anxiety, maintain composure, and perform. We need to recognize their value, preserve their intensity, and avoid watering them down.
Members of a platoon from SEAL Team Three recently returned from Afghanistan. During their 12-month training workup, they never expected they would operate 400 miles inland in the snow at high elevations. They were prepared for maritime interdictions and other missions along the coastline in the desert heat—but when directed inland, they adapted. They transferred their fundamental skills to the new situation, and they confidently executed seven successful missions. Their training did not tell them what to think. It taught them how to learn, how to think, and how to adapt. Their example demonstrates the educational value of a curriculum that demands creative problem solving and accepts no excuses.
Lieutenant Commander Hoffmann, a Naval Special Warfare officer, is director of Professional Military Education at the Naval Special Warfare Center. His previous assignments included the Special Operations Command, Pacific, Company Officer at the U.S. Naval Academy, and platoon assignments at SEAL Team Three and SEAL Team Five. He is currently pursuing his doctorate in education at the University of Southern California.