Warrior Toughness Requires Emotional Strength

Warrior Toughness training—introduced in 2018 to recruits at Great Lakes and officer candidates in Newport—teaches skills such as mindfulness, conscious breathing, and meditation to the Navy’s newest recruits and rising officers. It was designed to prepare new sailors mentally for the uncertainty and austerity of life at sea and the realities of the unpredictable, ever-changing battlespace in which they would operate. In 2020, the Navy saw battle rhythms and schedules upended by the increasing number of positive COVID-19 cases. Duty sections and watchbills shifted and sagged under the weight of immense manning issues. Sailors on long deployments went months without pulling into port. Warrior Toughness, it seems, would have been an effective coping strategy—except almost no one used it.

Teaching Toughness

I would know. Before reporting to my first Forward Deployed Naval Forces-Europe (FDNF-E) ship, I was fed a diet version of the nascent Warrior Toughness training at Officer Candidate School (OCS) in Newport, Rhode Island. According to the Naval Education and Training Command website, “Warrior Toughness is a holistic human performance skillset that enhances the toughness of our sailors with a focus on the pursuit of peak performance. The system emphasizes coequal development of toughness in the mind, body, and soul.”

At the time, Warrior Toughness was little more than a line on the plan of the day; as officer candidates, we were taught one breathing technique after dinner, then left to our own devices for the next nine weeks or so of training. At OCS, there were plenty of other challenges, scenarios, and drills designed to test our toughness and resilience, but the “warrior mindset” adapted by Navy SEALS and new Warrior Toughness techniques the Navy claimed would improve decision-making and response to disaster stirred my curiosity.

Once I commissioned, I did more research on the theory and application of these programs. I learned some breathing and meditation techniques that worked well for me and a few yoga poses meant to calm the mind and body. But many of my peers on my first ship balked at them: “If you have time to meditate,” they argued, “then you have time to do more work.” Some variation of this discouraging response was usually offered when I explained that the techniques required only 10 to 15 minutes a day of practice.

It is not surprising that Warrior Toughness training is viewed suspiciously by a generation of sailors reliant on nicotine and caffeinated beverages to stay focused, not meditation.¹ At the time, many of my colleagues were not ready or willing to accept untested and seemingly passive tactics. But Warrior Toughness is anything but passive—it is intentional; an actionable skill that can be learned, mastered, and used in high-stress situations to stay calm and mobile amid paralyzing chaos.

The challenge to using these research-proven tactics—a 2012 study funded by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health produced evidence that suggests meditation can alter neural activity in the amygdala, which is the region of the brain responsible for processing emotions—is getting the team to buy in.²

Building Emotional Strength

Warrior Toughness is, at its core, emotional intelligence. The difference is that the term Warrior Toughness is more palatable to a warfighting organization; it sounds less like “emotional” and more like “toughness.” But the two are not mutually exclusive. Real toughness requires a high level of intentional emotional regulation. It requires self-awareness, maturity, and reflection. Harvard Business School’s blog, Business Insights, defines emotional intelligence as “the ability to understand and manage your own emotions, as well as recognize and influence the emotions of those around you.”

Unlike the Navy’s Warrior Toughness program, emotional intelligence is not a new concept in the realm of applied leadership. It has become such a buzzword in the private sector that its use is almost trite. You could throw a dart in the offices of any Fortune 500 company and hit someone who has been hired based on his or her ability to self-regulate, work well with others, and meaningfully influence subordinates and peers. In the Sea Services, we refer to these character traits as discipline, selflessness, and command presence, all essential pillars of Warrior Toughness.

Practicing the Stockdale Paradox

Perhaps the most poignant exemplar of this skill set is the late Vice Admiral James Stockdale, president of the Naval War College and survivor of one of the most brutal Vietnamese POW camps. When his plane was shot down over a small Vietnamese village, Stockdale ejected from his A-4 Skyhawk and parachuted into the country, where he would face more than seven years of imprisonment, four of which he spent in solitary confinement.

Later, Stockdale and his wife, Sybil, would write In Love and War, a memoir about their experience of the Vietnam War. In it, he writes how his adaptation of Stoic philosophy—built on the virtues of courage, wisdom, temperance, and judgment—saw him and his fellow POWs through the worst of their imprisonment. Extremely malnourished, sleep deprived, beaten, and facing the possibility of sudden death every day for more than seven years, Stockdale should have given up. But he had something many men even of his caliber did not: the ability to recognize and label his feelings, recalibrate, keep his faith, and stay true to his beliefs and commitments. In short, he had the mindset of a warrior.

Warrior Toughness enabled Stockdale to deal with his horrific circumstances. He told author Jim Collins: “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”³ Collins named this the Stockdale Paradox.⁴

Stockdale’s paradox required a form of radical self-regulation, awareness, and discipline in line with what modern psychologists today would ascribe to emotional intelligence. Daniel Goleman, cochair of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations based at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology and father of the term emotional intelligence, told the Harvard Business Review:

The most effective leaders are all alike in one crucial way: They all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence. It’s not that IQ and technical skills are irrelevant. They do matter, but . . . they are the entry-level requirements for executive positions.⁵

If a slightly above average IQ and technical skill are “entry-level requirements” for leadership, the Navy must place much stock in them. For a military organization, it is difficult to sell emotional intelligence, as few metrics of its effectiveness exist, whereas conventional intelligence, or IQ, can be measured easily and so can technical proficiency.

Even though many studies demonstrate meditation’s ability to lower stress levels and improve concentration and resilience in its practitioners, it is difficult to say definitively what effects adopting a warrior mindset will have on our effectiveness as a fleet. Goleman, in his article, “Leading With Feeling,” had this to say about it:

You can be a successful leader without much emotional intelligence if you’re extremely lucky and you’ve got everything else going for you: booming markets, bumbling competitors, and clueless higher-ups. If you are incredibly smart, you can cover for an absence of emotional intelligence until things get tough for the business. But at that point, you will not have built up the social capital needed to pull the best out of people under tremendous pressure. The art of sustained leadership is getting others to produce superior work, and high IQ alone is insufficient to that task.⁶

In the same vein, it is possible to get through almost an entire naval career without Warrior Toughness. If you have the right billets, the right protections, and a few calm seasons, it might be a long time before you find yourself in a truly stressful situation that requires real toughness to overcome. You may never be faced with one. But the day you are, you must be ready. Our people must be ready, and the social bonds that hold the ship together will need to be water-tight. The Navy may not always have the material advantage over near-peer competitors, but it does have an edge to be envied: the strength and resolve of its people. Or, as Naval Education and Training Command’s 2021 Warrior Toughness instruction (NETCINST 1700.20) aptly puts it, “Sailors are the Navy’s asymmetric advantage in a complex and contested environment.”

Getting Beyond Boot Camp

Not everyone is an Admiral Stockdale and, thankfully, not every sailor or Marine will become a POW. But if the Navy’s goal is to cultivate and retain tough warriors capable of withstanding the stress of modern combat, it needs to implement the framework it created for its recruits outside of its training commands. As leaders, we cannot afford to wait for a formal curriculum to start training our people. Warrior Toughness, emotional intelligence—whatever you want to call it—needs to be integrated into the way we operate on an everyday basis. The onus is on us to demonstrate what Warrior Toughness looks like and mentor our people so they have the tools and support to use these techniques to their maximum effect.

Talking about Warrior Toughness is a great first step, but like any skill, it needs to be reiterated, refined, and perfected if it is to stand the test of battle with the Navy’s mightiest competitors. As junior officers especially, we have a responsibility to provide this training to the sailors in our divisions and share these mental toughness techniques with our peers. We all face the same mounting pressures to lead a more lethal, effective fleet of fighting ships that can stand the test of modern war. Instead of going to war with ourselves before we even make it to the battlefield, we must focus on fortifying our minds, bodies, and spirits for the challenges ahead.