10th Combat Aviation Brigade cut Air Assault School sling-load failures in half by treating composure as a trainable skill rather than a character trait.
The Problem
The Phase II sling-load hands-on examination at Air Assault School has a reputation, and the reputation is earned: first-time failure rates are high, and overall no-gos are high. The intuitive response to a high failure rate is more instruction, more repetitions on the load, more classes on identifying deficiencies, more time in the yard.
Course cadre at Fort Drum looked at the failures more carefully and reached a different diagnosis. Candidates were not failing because they could not identify deficiencies on a load. They were falling apart mentally, panicking, and losing composure during the examination itself (Rhoades 2026c). The knowledge was there. The retrieval of it, under an evaluator’s clipboard and a running clock, was not.
That distinction matters because it changes the intervention entirely. More instruction addresses a knowledge gap. It does nothing for a Soldier whose working memory has narrowed to a pinhole because a cadre member with a clipboard is standing over his shoulder.
What They Did
The brigade’s cognitive performance specialist built a workshop for Soldiers already slotted to attend Air Assault School. The content was mechanistic rather than motivational: what performance anxiety actually is, how it degrades performance, and how to counter it. Encouragement was not the product; a usable technique was.
The workshop was then followed by three deliberate practice sessions under conditions approximating the examination (Rhoades 2026c). This is the part that most units skip. Teaching a Soldier a breathing protocol in a classroom and then sending him to a high-stakes evaluation is teaching a skill in one physiological state and asking for it in another. Three rehearsals under representative pressure is what moves it from knowledge to reflex.
What Changed
Cadre observed a 50 percent reduction in the first-time failure rate on the Phase II examination, along with a noticeable decrease in candidate mental shutdowns during the process (Rhoades 2026c).
Blanton’s framing is the point of the whole case. Nothing about the sling-load yard is unique. His brigade’s mission, aviation operations demanding precision in unforgiving conditions, requires the same skill in the aircraft that the candidate needed in the yard, and his stated long-term goal is for every Soldier to carry that cognitive agility forward through a career (Rhoades 2026c).
Worth noting for anyone weighing this practice: the pass rate is scored by a school outside the brigade that ran the intervention. Among the practices in this series, that makes it the one with the least room for a unit to grade its own homework.
Why It Worked
Acute stress narrows attentional focus and degrades procedural recall under evaluative pressure. The performance deficit is not in the stored procedure; it is in the access to it while the sympathetic nervous system is running. Rehearsing the task in the arousal state in which it must be executed is the direct countermeasure, the same logic that underlies stress inoculation in selection courses and pre-performance routines in elite sport.
The Army has been explicit that this is now a warfighting competency rather than a wellness topic. Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Weimer describes his focus as preparing Soldiers to perform under cognitive load, regulate their own physiological arousal, and make data-informed decisions, and Brigadier General Deydre Teyhen characterizes lethality as a compound of physical supremacy, cognitive capacity, and resilience (Rhoades 2026a, 2026b). At the 2026 Symposium the Army placed mental readiness alongside physical readiness as a core competency, driven by a defining lesson from ongoing conflicts: Warfighters in large-scale combat operations must make rapid decisions and sustain cognitive stamina against a near-peer adversary (Rhoades 2026b).
The Army now teaches the down-regulation half of this skill institutionally. The Tactical Mobility Active Recovery and Mindfulness program combines active recovery, mobility work, and breathwork, and H2F is pilot testing a facilitator course pairing fourteen hours of distance learning with a week of resident instruction (Miller 2026). Major Stephanie Meno, former lead facilitator, describes the program’s purpose as “teaching Soldiers how to down-regulate” so they can manage stress in any situation.
Two adjacent findings belong in any cognitive readiness plan. Sleep debt degrades precisely the higher-order functions this kind of task demands, and sleep extension afterward does not restore them, it improves sustained attention and reaction time but not executive function, and the benefit fades within roughly five days (Yu et al. 2025). And caffeine self-dosing during sustained operations is not physiologically neutral; timing and dosage are planning factors (Erez et al. 2024). A cognitive performance program that ignores sleep and stimulant management is working against itself.
Replicate It
Most of what follows is a scheduling and leadership decision rather than a resourcing one.
Ask cadre why candidates fail, then believe the answer. The 10th CAB’s entire result rests on someone taking seriously an observation that did not fit the standard remedy.
Inventory every high-attrition pipeline your formation feeds. Air assault, airborne, ranger, sapper, marksmanship gates, and board appearances all impose evaluative pressure on a rehearsed skill.
Teach the mechanism, not the reassurance. Soldiers apply a technique they understand. They discard a pep talk.
Rehearse under representative load, three repetitions minimum. Classroom instruction alone teaches the skill in the wrong state.
Use TMAR-M resources and videos on H2F website, or request training from Proponent.
Track first-time pass rate. It is a clean, already-collected metric, and it is the one the school reports back to you.
Implement with or without an H2F Performance Team
Of all the practices in this series, this one loses the least when a formation has no performance team, because the core intervention is rehearsal design, and any leader can change rehearsal design.
Add the stressor to your existing rehearsals. A clock, a clipboard, an evaluator the Soldier does not know, and two people watching. That is most of what the examination environment does, and it costs nothing to reproduce during pre-course train-up.
Call the school and ask cadre what they see. The 10th CAB’s insight came from a conversation, not an assessment. A phone call to the course cadre will tell you whether your Soldiers are failing on knowledge or on composure.
Send a leader to the TMAR-M facilitator course. Fourteen hours of distance learning plus a resident week produces someone in your formation who can teach down-regulation to everyone else (Miller 2026).
Consider Integrating R2 Performance Teams to Educate and Coach. Arousal control, tactical breathing, imagery, and attention control are standard blocks of performance psychology instruction, delivered at no cost to the unit. R2 Teams have trainers available on demand at 32 global locations, and by MTT everywhere else.
Fix sleep before you buy anything. Sleep debt degrades exactly the functions a high-stakes evaluation demands, and no amount of mental skills training compensates for a formation running at five hours (Yu et al. 2025). Adjusting the PT start time is free.
Manage caffeine as a planning factor for the course, with a stated timing and dosage plan rather than just whatever the Soldier grabs at the shoppette (Erez et al. 2024).
References
- Erez, Daniel, Harris R. Lieberman, Itay Baum, Iris Ketko, and Daniel S. Moran. 2024. “Ad Libitum Caffeine Consumption, Cognitive Performance, and Sleep in Special Forces Soldiers during a 96-h Combat Exercise.” Frontiers in Neuroscience 18: 1419181.
- Miller, John. 2026. “Forging Resilient Warfighters: MCoE Empowers Leaders through TMAR-M Facilitator Course.” army.mil, March 8, 2026. https://www.army.mil/article/290917.
- Rhoades, Hunter. 2026a. “Experts in Human Performance Embark on H2F Symposium.” U.S. Army Center for Initial Military Training, May 13, 2026. Distributed via DVIDS. https://www.dvidshub.net/news/565211.
- Rhoades, Hunter. 2026b. “Warfighter Performance Experts Share Lessons Learned at H2F Symposium.” army.mil, May 14, 2026. https://www.army.mil/article/292501.
- Rhoades, Hunter. 2026c. “Human Performance Programs Recognized for Excellence at Symposium.” army.mil, May 18, 2026. https://www.army.mil/article/292580.
- Yu, Bryan K., Talia R. Barrow, Elaina J. DaLomba, Brian T. Gregg, Maria L. Barefield, and Carly R. Cooper. 2025. “Effects of Sleep Extension on Cognitive Performance in Military-Aged Adults: A Systematic Review.” Military Medicine 190 (Suppl. 2): 210–218.
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