Once deployed, soldiers in the combat arms must be prepared to fight, those in the combat support arms ready to back them up. Soldiers in combat service support units must also often operate in harsh environments, working long hours for weeks on end in jobs where physical endurance is an important factor. Physical fitness is a minimum requirement for all these members of the Army team, from the most junior enlisted rank to the most senior leader.
Without question, being a soldier is a younger person's profession. One of the reasons the Army retires its top leaders in their early fifties—usually after a little over thirty years of service—is that soldiers need to maintain high levels of physical fitness and be ready to deploy to serve in the field. Army leaders must be at the top of their game, both physically and mentally.
In this regard, the service requirements under which we see three- and four-star generals retire in their early fifties—the equivalent of a huge corporation losing its most successful company presidents each year—is not really a waste of talent. This attrition opens the lower ranks to advancement, providing an incentive to those potential top leaders on their way up. The turnover of new leadership also permits younger officers to bring new ideas with them as they reach the top. Thus, even though the Army was shrinking in size in the 1990s, it could correctly claim to be a “growing organization” due to the new ideas it was welcoming.
To meet the challenges of the rapidly changing military threat our country must now face—terrorists and minor powers such as Serbia have replaced the Moscow-led Warsaw Pact—the Army's senior leadership needs to be at the peak of their mental fitness, but not yet past the top of their performance. This is one of the reasons our senior leaders do not retain their positions as long as their counterparts in the corporate world.
Certainly the Army's use of physical fitness as a tool for stress management has proved effective. This effort, begun in the 1980s, coincided with similar corporate programs emphasizing the mind-body connection, and the need for executives working under great stress to unwind on a regular basis before their mainsprings broke and the clock stopped. Since the 1980s, a variety of stress-busting relaxation techniques—ranging all the way from yoga to aromatherapy—have flourished. Basically, they all have the same goal: the creation of harmony and the elimination of inner turmoil.
I have to confess that I once took a twenty-minute yoga lesson, which proved to be the longest twenty minutes of my life. “Om” did not come naturally to my lips. Dynamic conflict is part of being a soldier. Like most Army officers, I thrive on action; it's part of our profession. We are trained to take on multiple tasks, to seek out and solve problems, not to avoid them. Army officers with a potential for senior leadership learn to harness the energy that can be unleashed from confronting stress. They embrace it because high-level jobs are inherently stressful. There's no such thing as a tranquil leadership position. If you seek senior leadership responsibility, accepting major accountability defines your authority and power. Every morning is going to bring new problems. We have to remain engaged in our missions and productive, not withdrawn, sheltered from the daily
Sturm und Drang.
Much of the popular stress-amelioration movement of the last few decades is based on unreasonable expectations about modern life. We often nostalgically wish to return to an ostensibly simpler and less stressful past, the good old days that never truly existed. In reality, the past was fraught with uncertainty and turmoil. Before antibiotics, fatal disease was rampant. Starvation and malnutrition were widespread. Wars lasted for decades, slavery for centuries.
Leaders should assess the source of stress in the workplace and determine what they can do to confine stress on their subordinates to a manageable level. One way to do this is to view the workplace as a system. Often sources of stress that are apparently unresolvable are actually linked to a part of the system that can be changed.
For example, when I took command of the recruiting battalion in San Antonio, one of the first things I noticed was how stressed the recruiters were. This was due to demanding missions that included deadline pressure and long hours six or seven days a week, for eight or nine months with no break at all. I could not do much to reduce my battalion's mission to more manageable levels. But I could add leave time—days off—to their work schedule. This gave the overworked recruiters the certainty that they could count on their vacation.
Part of any successful stress management effort should involve connecting physical and mental fitness. Anyone who has ever practiced an aerobic exercise such as running can attest that the activity clears the mind. Researchers have confirmed that this description is valid. Exercise triggers the release of endorphins in the brain, the “runner's high” that athletes experience during sustained effort. But this change in brain chemistry involves more than pleasure. Running, swimming, or a brisk workout on exercise equipment helps purge a person's mind of anxiety and negative repetitive thoughts. In short, staying physically fit through regular exercise allows a leader to keep her mind focused on the larger task at hand.
As recent research has also confirmed, people with stressful lives are at greater risk of physical illness if they do not develop means of relieving what Pamela Peeke, M.D., of the University of Maryland, has called “toxic stress.” In her recent book
Fight Fat Over Forty,
Dr. Peeke shows that women are especially prone to linked emotional and physical afflictions triggered by overproduction of stress hormones, particularly cortisol. This often leads to overeating and buildup of lower-body fat, which in turn disrupts the body's complex hormonal balance. This might account for the recent surge in diabetes and cardiovascular disease among women.
Harold G. Koenig, M.D., a noted Duke University researcher on the mind-body connection, has also shown that “the stresses of hectic daily life” can produce an unhealthy cascade of stress hormones that weaken the immune system and increase risk of cardiovascular disease.
Significantly, regular physical exercise is one of the few proven techniques that can break the connection between the inevitable stress we all face each day and the emotionally crippling and physically debilitating effect that stress has on too many people.
For me, running also provided a connection to nature, shifting into a meditative state, as I moved steadily along trails beneath trees and across fields. I literally felt the burden of negative thoughts fall away. There have been times when I've been especially caught up in my work or gnawing on a problem that I have found myself running for long periods, my mind absorbed in the beauty of the river and the sky above. At the end of these runs, the problems always seemed much less significant.
For soldiers, formation runs take on another dimension. The vital element of unit cohesion is strengthened through running in formation, whether the unit is a basic training platoon, or part of an elite intelligence brigade. For this reason, formation runs have become almost universal in the Army.
Competitive sports offer another means of combining physical fitness and organizational cohesion. The Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, follows the old service tradition of making team sports mandatory for the seminars into which the field-grade officers are divided.
When I entered the War College in August 1990, there was a sense of missing “the Big One” among my colleagues because the Gulf War was underway, and here we were idling in classrooms in the hilly Pennsylvania countryside. The battalions that many of my seminar colleagues had trained to peak fighting efficiency had gone off to war without them. It wasn't so much that these officers wanted to taste combat—many already had as lieutenants in Vietnam—but they felt a deep loyalty to the people they had just commanded who were now in harm's way.
As the academic year got underway, the distraction of Desert Shield grew. But the commandant of the War College, Major General Paul Cerjan, told us in one of our weekly meetings that we might as well stop calling our assignment officers. We would not be released for assignment to the Persian Gulf. At Christmas, in a personal trip to London, I sought out my Navy intelligence friends and encouraged them to ask for me by name in preparation for the ground war. The ground war ended in just one hundred hours, and I remained at Carlisle.
The first mandatory sport, softball, seemed frivolous. I was physically exhausted from the last four years of battalion command. I certainly knew nothing about the game, and the last thing I wanted to do was show up each week at the ball field to make a fool of myself among a bunch of competitive ballplayers. But in our first team-planning session, the sixteen members of my seminar took the team's organizational problems quite seriously.
First we had to give the team a name, which would symbolize our “tactical” approach. Some favored the gutsy old World War II favorite “Go for Broke!”, by which only the best players would compete while the rest of us warmed the bench, cheering them on as they tried to trounce the other seminars. The other tactic would be to name the team after the Army recruiting slogan, “Be All You Can Be,” which would allow everyone (even me, the seminar's only woman) the chance to play regularly.
We opted for the bona fide team endeavor. When Seminar 8's Be All You Can Be softball team trotted onto the diamond, I played right field. One day when we didn't have enough players, the coach acted in true desperation and gave me second base. It seemed only logical that the person in this position should stand on the base bag. But in a stage whisper, Lieutenant Colonel Dick Crampton said, “Claudia, I know you realize this. The second baseman usually stands over there.” He pointed between first and second base. “Sure,” I responded, following his direction.
In a different game, Colonel Mark Walsh, one of the faculty advisors, coached me. “If you can't catch the ball,” he advised, “just throw your body in front of it.”
I never became a real softball player. But the games became one of the high points of the week. We got to know one another in a way that would have been impossible in any other form of activity. I discovered that I needed this kind of mindless fun after so many years of intense work. But I never would have availed myself of a team sport had it not been mandatory. Although I couldn't throw very far, I was fast and could run well if I ever got a hit. And it was exciting to watch our teammate Colonel Shami Mehta of the Indian Army at bat. He was a veteran cricket player, and the relatively huge ball made this game child's play for him.
All in all, Be All You Can Be didn't do badly and we developed a camaraderie that transcended our divergent back-grounds.
Even though the War College is considered by many the military equivalent of a Ph.D. program, it also has aspects of a sabbatical. Most of us had come from command responsibility and many would probably return to the greater challenge of brigade command. Our year at Carlisle gave us a chance to step back from the unending daily demands of being a commander and to broaden our intellectual horizons. This was a great luxury. The standing joke at the War College was, “The reading is only hard if you do it.”
Although we weren't always the most diligent students at Carlisle, we all acquired new perspectives that helped sharpen our mental fitness, a key attribute of senior Army leaders. For the first time, many of us were reading in disciplines outside our own demanding specialties. Our class studied strategic leadership, economic philosophy, international security policy, and joint operations. Much of our initial classroom discussion noted that this was a transitional year for us as leaders. In the past, our problems had been concrete. In the future our work would be in an environment described as “volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.” This formed so much of the intellectual dialogue that we started calling the War College “VUCA U.”
Part of our Carlisle experience was regaining balance in our lives. General Paul Cerjan spoke to us about restoring family relationships and the need to create and meet fitness goals on all three fronts: physical, mental, and spiritual.
Teaching us to transcend our own practical nature—deeply ingrained by years of Army service—was one of the primary goals of the War College faculty. They wanted us to be more thoughtful and reflective. I could see their reasoning, but, again, I did not concede that a stress-free existence would be my best preparation for future command. In trying to teach us strategic leadership and vision, the faculty put us through a health risk assessment to examine our physical and mental fitness to cope with stress. As expected, they nailed me as a classic Type A personality, someone who finished other people's sentences and couldn't abide standing in line.
One of the fitness counselors found me at soda machine, getting a caffeine fix, and wanted to discuss this issue. He wanted me to take a Type A class to modify my attitude and behavior.
But I would have none of it. “I don't like Type Bs,” I told him flatly. “I don't want to be a Type B. And I don't have time for the class. I've just got way too much to do.”
The officer looked grave, unaware that I was spoofing the Type A diagnosis, but too determined to demonstrate the benefits of Type B behavior to interrupt his pitch.
“… and besides,” I continued, “I've already had a Type A class at the Pentagon. It didn't do any good.”
I had my own relaxation program. When I had read enough weighty strategic study material each night, I'd plop the book on my bedside table and turn to my perennial favorites, Agatha Christie or Jane Austen (currently Mary Wesley fills this important role).
I also expanded my reading to more challenging periodicals such as
The Economist
and
Foreign Affairs.
The Army wants senior leaders with broad international perspectives, conversant in global problems. The Army expects its leaders who advance to the highest ranks to understand complex foreign cultures, to have lived abroad for years at a time, and to take a much wider view than their often less-traveled civilian corporate counterparts.