The Navy can increase the cognitive and behavioral lethality of its officer corps using breakthrough research in neuropsychology.
In the aftermath of the USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) and Fitzgerald (DDG-62) collisions, the Navy reevaluated its ship-driving training for junior officers. But as a recent Government Accountability Office report details, the service still is missing the mark when it comes to junior officer development and retention.1 An increased emphasis on ship-driving fundamentals surely is needed, but the real focus should be on developing officers as expert tacticians, capable of analyzing their mental processes in real time to inform their decisions.
The military has a good record of investing in senior leader decision-making, which has become particularly important as cyber warfare has changed thinking on how leaders should respond in real time to a cyberattack.2 However, less effort has been directed toward junior officers, the ones who are driving the ships and leading units into combat. The Army developed the seven-step Military Decision-Making Process, but it is cumbersome at the unit level and not quite the one-size-fits-all formula the Army hoped it would be.3
Nobel Prize–winning economist Daniel Kahneman spearheaded research on decision-making fundamentals with his groundbreaking book Thinking, Fast and Slow, and his recent work on error analysis in judgments, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment.4 He explores judgment heuristics, cognitive biases, and automatic thinking versus controlled thinking—concepts that are applicable to naval officers in almost every aspect of their decision-making, across all billets and communities. The submarine force has been implementing some of his research in its Submerged Contact Management course at some waterfront training facilities.
Harvard psychologist Daniel Goleman has written extensively on the development of emotional intelligence and the effects it can have on individual performance, a framework that has been incorporated extensively in the private sector as a means of evaluating individual potential and performance.5
The Navy must add works such as Kahneman’s and Goleman’s to the literary canon of its officer corps. Too often officers are sent to their first assignments with little instruction in the area of introspection and self-awareness. Although many accession programs include courses on ethics and personal leadership, during which officer candidates take Meyers-Briggs personality tests and learn Aristotelean leadership values, few officers are ever exposed to modern research on decision-making and neuropsychology. For most, it is not until command courses or even post-command levels that they are exposed to higher-level research on decision-making.
But it is not only senior officers whose decision-making processes should be developed and evaluated. A junior officer’s decision-making processes can have a significant impact on the lethality and safety of the Navy.
Flow States
In 1990, Hungarian American sociologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi published Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, which defines a mental state of complete concentration and absorption in the task at hand. This is achieved when a person’s skill is perfectly matched with the level of challenge associated with the task.6Flow has spawned a wealth of research into the optimization of the work experience across all sectors.
There is immense potential within the Navy to increase quality of life and performance with flow. By incorporating flow-inducing techniques into the daily routines of officers, the service will not only foster higher levels of job satisfaction, but also likely will increase performance. Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal, founders of the Flow Genome Project, have worked with Navy SEALs on producing group flow, defining and exploiting the flow states achieved by small tactical units operating in unison during high stress situations.7 There also have been studies done on submarine piloting and navigation teams, in which researchers used electroencephalograms (EEGs) to derive models of the neurophysiological and cognition processes of officers and sailors undergoing complex piloting and navigation evolutions.8 This information could be useful in developing adaptive team training.
Mindfulness
In 2016, researchers at the University of Wisconsin used an EEG to study the brain oscillations of Tibetan yogi Mingyur Rinpoche and found that while meditating, his brain emitted gamma oscillations that were 700–800 times more active than his brain in a resting state.9 This study gained worldwide attention, and the benefits of mindfulness are now widely recognized. Breakrooms at many Fortune 500 companies have been turned into meditation rooms. Corporate retreats are becoming mindfulness outings.
Aside from recently adding mindfulness training at Officer Candidate School, the Navy has been slow to adopt this ideological shift.10 But as the service struggles with officer burnout from overwork, implementing mindfulness programs in the daily routines of officers could be key.11 Studies have shown that mindfulness, if made a regular part of one’s routine, can have lasting positive effects in stress management, sleep, mental alertness, and overall awareness.12
John Kabat-Zinn, founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, already has operationalized mindfulness for the Army.13 The Navy should incorporate mindfulness practices into the training and development of its officers.
Recommendations
• Direct commission restricted line officers as performance coaches. These officers should have strong backgrounds in organizational psychology and neurological studies. Implement these billets at the squadron/battalion level to develop mindfulness and decision-making development programs at the ship and company levels. These officers also should form self-assessment groups to continually evaluate and reassess the effectiveness of their programs at the unit level.
• Include related literature on reading lists such as the Chief of Naval Operations’ Professional Reading Program and the Commandant’s Professional Reading List and have regular commanding officer–led discussions with officers on the professional reading they are doing.
• Establish an independent commission of civilian psychologists and neurologists to evaluate the organizational psychology of naval units and the potential for creating flow-inducing experiences across all aspects of military life.
• Incorporate decision-making and organizational psychology studies into the training pipeline for prospective commanding officers.
As peer competition heats up, the Navy can maintain a strategic advantage by developing its human element. It is time to get on board with the neuropsychological revolution taking place. Combining decision-making instruction, flow-inducing states, and mindfulness techniques into the training and workup routines of all its units will help create lethal, master war-fighters capable of achieving overall force superiority.
1. Government Accountability Office, Navy Readiness: Actions Needed to Evaluate and Improve Surface Warfare Officer Career Path, GAO-21-168 (Washington, DC: Government Accountability Office, 2021).
2. Daryl Caudle, “Decision-Making Uncertainty and the Use of Force in Cyberspace: A Phenomenological Study of Military Officers,” doctoral dissertation, University of Phoenix, 2010.
3. Richard L. Wampler, James Centric, and Margaret S. Salter, The Military Decision-Making Process (MDMP): A Prototype Training Product, Research Product 98-33 (Fort Benning, GA: U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, January 1998).
4. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), and Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).
5. Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, 25th anniversary ed. (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020).
6. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008).
7. Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal, Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy Seals, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work (New York: Dey Street Books, 2018).
8. Ronald Stevens et al., “Modeling the Neurodynamic Complexity of Submarine Navigation Teams,” Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory 19, no. 3 (August 2012): 346–69.
9. Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body (New York: Avery, 2018).
10. MyNavyHR, Meditation Practice at OCS, Facebook post, 25 May 2021.
11. Government Accountability Office, Navy Readiness.
12. Goleman and Davidson, Altered Traits.
13. Tetsuo Nakahara, “Dr. Kabat-Zinn Talks about Mindfulness Program in Camp Zama,” Army.mil, 6 December 2012.