Every October, the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) holds a conference. It is quite the event. Especially if you like looking at the Big Toys being sold to the Army. The Washington DC Convention Center is filled to the brim with tanks and helicopters and everything else you can think of.

Besides the various materiel, and social events, and athletic events (Army 10 Miler anyone?), there are also Professional Development Opportunities, full of panels on different Army-centric topics, and always with an impressive lineup of speakers. This past year, for the first time, I attended one of the Family Forums.

The panel included Secretary McHugh, just a few weeks before his retirement, GEN Milley, and SMA Dailey. The focus of the panel was Taking Care of Soldiers and Their Families. If you take care of your people, they’ll take care of the mission.

Very few 17-24 year old Americans are eligible to join the military, even using fairly low standards. Obesity and academic performance (graduating from high school and obtaining a minimum score on the ASVAB) are two of the key reasons.

But even once they’re in the Army, many young people do not succeed in boot camp and in their initial years in the Army. I’ve heard that 1/3 of recruits do not complete their initial term. That’s a huge number.

SMA Dailey opined that part of the reason for so many issues in boot camp is that recruits enter the Army having never failed at anything before. Their parents, school systems, even athletic organizations (participation trophies anyone?) protected them so much that many fail for the first time in boot camp. Here’s the thing: boot camp is designed so that everyone will fail. How can they build you up if you they don’t break you down first? (Also, there’s that thing about the enemy not caring if they hurt your feelings.)

So everyone fails at boot camp. Hopefully, everyone also recovers from that failure. That’s what resilience is all about. But many recruits, having had no experience in recovering, don’t know how.

Since October, I’ve been thinking a lot about resilience. Has our society become less resilient? Is the amount of PTSD more “proof” that soldiers today are weaker than soldiers of WWII? Or has it just become more acceptable to admit your weaknesses? Or, maybe, it’s both.

My contention is that there are two forms of non-resilience:

• Natural: those who just have fewer emotional reserves
• Learned: those who never had the opportunity to develop emotional reserves (because of a protected life) but, given the chance, has the ability to

A baby is born and, assuming all else is equal, will hit certain milestones within standard windows. A baby who tries to stand and falls down will, generally, try again. Some will take longer. Some will get frustrated. But they will (again, with all standard caveats), eventually, walk. But as children age, far too often, parents step in and help the child. So the child stops learning how to pick himself up and try again. This is learned non-resilience.

On the other hand, some children – some people – are just softer. They do not have the emotional reserves to try again. This could be because they never had them. This could be because they’ve already reached their emotional limits and have nothing else to give (either until they heal, or ever, depending on the depth of their scars). This is natural non-resilience.

It is pretty important for the Army to distinguish between these groups. But simply conducting resilience tests may not provide the necessary data. As I said: these distinctions are MY idea, and they are totally untested, and I’m unqualified, in a have-the-professional-background-to-prove-it kind of way, to know whether both groups would test the same way.

But I do know this: WMC (see last week’s post) has been correlated with resilience. Because it is not a direct test of resilience, I believe that it will show the individual’s ability to learn to be resilient.

If we know that the person can be resilient, boot camp becomes the perfect place to teach them. Preferably without breaking them.