The future operating environment will be characterized by contested domains, denied communications, and constant surveillance. As the Department of War reprioritizes its Force development efforts to evolve with the trajectory of future warfare, human performance optimization (HPO) training must evolve alongside it, specifically to address the mental readiness requirements for future battlefields.
Historically, when leaders discuss performance training, the conversations generally revolve around physical fitness, using run times and fitness test scores as the primary metrics for judging the readiness of a Soldier. To meet the demands of future warfare, leaders and HPO personnel must pivot to a more holistic assessment of readiness. Leaders must shift from focusing on purely physical conditioning to prioritizing intentional programming that blends physical fitness with cognitive readiness, supported by nutritional, sleep, and spiritual foundations. Emerging threats, such as drone swarms, subterranean warfare, the lack of guaranteed air superiority, and the necessity of prolonged field care, will place unprecedented cognitive, psychological, and social burdens on the Warfighter.
Developing robust mental readiness provides leaders with a competitive edge that leads to dominance. Battlefield dominance is earned by the team that is trained to apply critical and creative thinking, sustain attention during operations, and rapidly consolidate gains in preparation for the next engagement. When deliberately trained, these foundational skills stack up to give leaders and units cognitive dominance over adversaries.
Mental Readiness Impacts of Emerging Threats
Surveillance and Drones. The war in Ukraine continues to demonstrate the lethal reality of a battlefield under constant surveillance. Both sides use integrated kill webs where commercial, off-the-shelf drones spot targets for immediate artillery strikes. Concurrently, pilots fly kamikaze drones to actively hunt individual Soldiers (Molloy, 2024). This creates a significant mental burden not only for Soldiers on the ground, but also for the pilots who process the vivid, first-person view of the destruction.
From an operational perspective, the battlefield is under constant observation. To survive, units must remain highly dispersed and operate in small, isolated nodes (Zaluzhnyi, 2023). From a human perspective, this Forces Soldiers into continuous hyper-vigilance, leading to rapid cognitive fatigue and degraded decision-making. Psychologically, the persistent threat from above induces profound dread, auditory paranoia, and chronic autonomic arousal. For drone pilots, the direct view of lethal strikes compounds this stress and can manifest as moral injury. Finally, team dynamics strain under dispersed positions, forcing Soldiers to rely heavily on adjacent peers rather than centralized command.
HPO Requirement: Training must build sensory processing, energy regulation, and effective communication capabilities. Warfighters need strong physiological regulation skills to filter environmental noise and prevent systemic collapse (Sipos et al., 2025). Interpersonally, teams must practice developing decentralized communication styles, social intelligence, motivational leadership skills, and psychological safety prior to deployment.
The Contested Sky and Prolonged Field Care. For decades, military operations relied on the psychological and tactical safety net of undisputed air supremacy. That era is over. Peer adversaries now possess highly effective air defense systems and electromagnetic warfare complexes (Department of the Army, 2022). This lack of air superiority creates severe challenges for both digital communications and physical medical evacuation (MEDEVAC).
Ground units will fight with limited overhead intelligence and minimal close air support. Consequently, the “Golden Hour” of MEDEVAC has been replaced by the reality of prolonged field care (Remley, Loos, & Reisenberg, 2023). Units will be Forced to hold, treat, and defend wounded personnel for days, and often while actively engaged in combat under strict emission control to avoid drawing enemy strikes.
The intersection of contested airspace and delayed medical logistics overlaps stressors across all human dimensions. Medics and junior leaders will face decision fatigue from managing complex triage with dwindling supplies while making strategic tactical decisions without higher command guidance. For the warfighter, the realization that no helicopter is coming shatters a generational psychological safety net. When a unit is pinned down, non-medical personnel must balance holding security with assisting in invasive medical care. Without strong interpersonal support mechanisms to process grief in real-time, unit cohesion will fracture under the shared distress.
HPO Requirement: Training must forge cognitive flexibility, allowing leaders to solve complex tactical and medical problems simultaneously while cut off from higher headquarters. Training must thread social intelligence concepts with effective communication strategies to maximize unit cohesion. Additionally, non-medical personnel must prioritize advanced medical training, including basic lifesaving and psychological first aid, such as the iCOVER technique recently standardized as a Soldier task for acute stress management (WRAIR, 2023).
Subterranean (SubT) Operations.
While the use of tunnels is an age-old concept in warfare, future conflicts will increasingly push operations into a convergence of urban and underground settings. This increases the complexity of war by placing combat in close proximity to dense civilian populations across larger vertical dimensions, including threats from above, on the ground, and underground (Richemond-Barak, 2018). SubT operations will employ labyrinthine existing infrastructure, from subways and utility tunnels to commercial underground complexes.
For the warfighter, subterranean environments are characterized by absolute darkness, acoustic distortion, and heavily degraded or denied communications (South, 2019). This sensory deprivation can trigger a claustrophobic response, disorienting Soldiers and overwhelming the senses in a way that degrades physical motor coordination, decision-making, and communication.
HPO Requirement: Training must incorporate realistic, enclosed threats to familiarize Soldiers with their tolerance for SubT spaces and teach them to overcome communication barriers. HPO strategies must include physiological regulation skills to maintain executive function when isolated and fatigued (Passi et al., 2022). This requires added complexity in target discrimination drills to manage the wide-narrow aspects of attention under acute stress.
Integrating HP Teams at the Brigade Level
HPO assets can no longer exist as an afterthought. Leaders must actively incorporate these teams to begin training for the future of warfare today. Similarly, HPO personnel must leave the comfort of the clinic and push into operational spaces for the planning and execution of training, especially since military HPO assets will deploy forward with their assigned units as command advisors and operational clinicians.
To operationalize these requirements, commanders must embed Holistic Health and Fitness (H2F) performance training directly into their brigade’s training cycles. While this can occur via standalone events, it is most effective when HPO concepts and performance expectations are threaded into all existing training efforts, such as having H2F observer controllers who can inject application of skills, requiring human performance analysis for the battlefield. Similarly, requiring performance training targeted at specific scenarios to challenge leaders, such as medical treatment and evacuation at platoon levels. This allows for thoughtful, specific programming focusing on cognitive performance, psychological skills, and interpersonal dynamics.
Creative, targeted training must educate Soldiers on the skill (The “What”), how it addresses the threat (The “Why”), and rehearse techniques in a safe environment (The “How”). Injecting scenarios that include emerging threats into field settings provides the necessary repetitions, such as persistent drone surveillance, 48-hour casualty holds, and long-duration communications blackouts. These sets and reps build the confidence and shared mental models required to execute the mission when the future of warfare becomes a reality.
Soldiers
The call to Soldiers is two-fold. First, recognize the types of emerging threats on future battlefields. Start talking to peers about how your section might manage these threats. Second, start keeping track of how your body and mind react in complex situations. Set a goal for how you want to respond and create drills or cues to improve your self-regulation to reach the goal.
HPTs
Future warfare scenarios require HPTs to intentionally program skills nested within future warfare threats. Give Soldiers the “why” in the training. Pair with staff sections, such as S2, to understand the threats thoroughly and consider how to nest a skill development series to build required skills for physiological regulation within future battlefields.
Commanders
Integrate H2F requirements into all planning for training exercises rather than treating them as an after though. Begin to “play” HPTs in the box during CTC rotations (instead of keeping them in white cell) to understand how H2F can support operations and maximize unit performance. Inject emerging threat scenarios (i.e., drone surveillance, comms blackouts) into training reps.
References
- Molloy, O. (2024). Drones in modern warfare: Lessons Learnt from the War in Ukraine. (Occasional Paper No. 17). Australian Army Research Centre. https://researchcentre.army.gov.au/library/occasional-papers/drones-modern-warfare
- Passi, T., Lukander, K., Laarni, J., Närväinen, J., Rissanen, J., Vaara, J. P., Pihlainen, K., Kallinen, K., Ojanen, T., Mauno, S., & Pakarinen, S. (2022). Effects of overnight military training and acute battle stress on the cognitive performance of Soldiers in simulated urban combat. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 925157. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.925157
- Sipos, D., Vészi, K., Bogár,B., Peto, D., Füredi, G., Betlehem, J.,Pandur, A.A. (2025) Physiological State Monitoring in Advanced Soldiers: Precision Health Strategies for Modern Military Operations. Sci 2025, (7)137, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.3390/sci7040137
- Richemond-Barak, D. (2018). Underground warfare. Oxford University Press.
- Department of the Army. (2022). Field Manual (FM) 3-0: Operations. Headquarters, Department of the Army.
- South, T. (2019, February 26). The subterranean battlefield: Warfare is going underground into dark, tight spaces. Military Times. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/02/26/the-subterranean-battlefield-warfare-is-going-underground-into-dark-tight-spaces/
- Remley, M., Loos, P., Reisenberg, J. (2023, June). Prolonged Casualty Care Guidelines (CPG ID 91). Joint Trauma System Clinical Practice Guidelines. https://jts.health.mil/ assets/docs/cpgs/Prolonged_Casualty_Care_Guidelines_21_Dec_2021_ID91.pdf
- Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. (2023, June 5). iCover: Stand-alone training (Version 3) [Fact sheet]. U.S. Department of Defense. https://wrair.health.mil/News-Media/Investigators-Dispatch-Fact-Sheets/Display-Factsheet/Article/3414354/icover-stand-alone-training/
- Zaluzhnyi, V. (2023, November 1). The commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed Forces on how to win the war. The Economist. https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2023/11/01/the-commander-in-chief-of-ukraines-armed-Forces-on-how-to-win-the-war
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