Human Performance Optimization
Floor Speech
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Mr. President, I am honored to represent over half of all U.S. Special Forces. I would like to address the topic of working to close a growing gap in understanding, assessment, and prediction between traditional and nontraditional strategies for human performance optimization as it relates to our military servicemembers and overall readiness.
I support Department of Defense efforts designed to simultaneously improve the overall health and wellness of uniformed personnel and sustain the operational readiness levels of the respective military services. I am encouraged by efforts initiated at both Special Operations Command, SOCOM, and the respective SOCOM component commands and am requesting that these commands consider additional steps to incorporate new ideas for the troops.
I would like to see the Department of Defense examine the impact of recent trends in the health and performance industry to emphasize greater reliance on natural movement, full-range body motion, nontraditional gravity-aided suspension exercises, and nontraditional resistance training for optimizing an individual's state of fitness, long-term durability, resilience, and overall wellness. It is important to note that such approaches can produce significant and measurable improvements in muscular strength, endurance, motor control, and the maximum cognitive and workload performance of individual military operators.
The potential for an improvement in comprehensive readiness and lethality of Special Forces is significant. Efforts to improve muscular strength, endurance, and the workload performance for individuals under more natural and realistic training scenarios coupled with the establishment and documentation of optimum and minimum physical thresholds can improve overall unit readiness and sustainability among and throughout the ranks of special operations forces.
Therefore, I would encourage the Department of Defense, and especially Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, MARSOC, to identify and describe common denominators with respect to key performance indicators, KPI, among MARSOC operators, develop algorithmic tools for predicting appropriate individual physical and cognitive loads, and examine the efficacy of potential intervention programs to minimize discriminatory KPI gaps among MARSOC personnel.
Let's close the gap in understanding between traditional and emerging strategies for human performance optimization. I strongly believe it could have a positive impact on the readiness of our honorable men and women in uniform to win conflicts.
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