The Resilient Soldier
Resilience is a never-ending capability, and we’re all on the resilience journey. If you want to know what a resilient person looks like, take a look in the mirror. It’s a key component of people and our discipline.
The concept of resilience has many aspects ranging from knowledge and wisdom, through situation awareness, weak signals, affordances, constraints and margins of manoeuvre, to resource availability, access to those resources and the skills to make use of them. It includes communications, transport, energy and planning for the unexpected.
For soldiers, it also includes psychological fortitude and endurance over long periods, often in bad conditions. Altogether, it’s a complex, heavily inter-related capability, requiring careful orchestration. Success depends on our soldiers, but also on our industries and the support of our population.
Soldiers, when called into action, not necessarily for war, often find themselves in situations where it’s better not to be, and where most of the aspects above are involved. Furthermore, most soldiers are at the lower end of the age spectrum, where experience, knowledge and wisdom are not yet well-developed. Hence, there are issues for soldiers that need to be clarified and resolved.
In this meet-up, Murray Sinclair will give a talk beginning with a description of resilience at the level of the individual, before discussing what the war in Ukraine means for the resilience required of soldiers. Resilience will help to keep them alive, if not safe. Then we’ll move on to what the UK MoD is doing to instil resilience in its own soldiers, and how it intends to keep the enemy at bay, and preferably silenced, so that the survival chances for soldiers are improved. The rest of the session will contemplate these points, drawing on the experiences of the participants.
