As you might expect, the military has a strong interest in the development and maintenance of courage. The United States Army is formally of the opinion that courage can be instilled in recruits, and basic training is oriented largely around this problem.
The strategy for courage development used by the Army has three basic factors that stood out to me:
Social reinforcement: Messaging is clear: courage is the expectation; cowardice is evil. Further, cowardice is treachery; to be ruled by fear is to betray your brethren unto death. Finally, historically most casualties are among fleeing soldiers; the causal relationship is that cowardice makes it less likely you will survive.
Incremental challenges: The iconic item here is the obstacle course. The point of an obstacle course is not to test your physical fitness; rather it is to present you with novel physical challenge that you doubt you can do.[1] Then it presents you with another, slightly more intense novel challenge. By the time you’ve done the course, you have been proven wrong about your limits up to a dozen times. This reduces doubt for all future challenges.
Take the hit: Recruits get gassed. This entails standing in a small concrete building while it is filled with military tear gas, with your mask on. Then you have to take the mask off, and still stand there, breathing in the tear gas. Then they line you up, let everyone out in a flood, and you get to run around in a dirt circle while coughing, puking, crying and everything in your sinuses drain down your face.[2] The exercise has two purposes: one, trust the equipment; two, you will be okay.
In the same vein, there is the ever popular hand-to-hand training, called “combatives.” In basic training to reduce injury this must be done from the knees and there is no striking, so it is kind of a goofy grapple. There are always a handful of collegiate wrestlers or jiu-jitsu experts in every group, and further the physical fitness variance is pretty high, which means almost everyone spends some time getting pulverized by someone more skilled and powerful (I was no exception). At the end of the day, you wipe your nose off, and are okay.
The consequences usually aren’t as bad as you think they are; this makes them easier to accept up front.
It is worth mentioning that the real focus of military training is a different trick, which is to reduce the relevance of courage as much as possible. You can summarize this as Trigger Action Plans for violence; we spent a lot of time training about what to do in certain situations, so when that situation arises we just do whatever the training says. The result is that even in nominally scary situations fear is irrelevant because we aren’t thinking about things, just executing the first thing that comes to mind (which is always training). Even in combat there is virtually no opportunity for cowardice.
You might reasonably wonder what happens to the people who actually can’t do the obstacle. The trick is this: they still can, with a little help from their buddies. In every group there are a few who simply can’t make progress alone; after the rest of the group goes through, they cycle back to physically help the stragglers over whichever obstacle is stopping them (even if that is all of them). These are not formal instructions, but it always happens anyway.
As unpleasant as this sounds, it is usually one of the most fondly remembered events. The central reason for this is that when people from all over the country are subjected to close contact, sleep deprivation, high stress, and unhygienic conditions everyone gets sick—and nothing clears the sinuses like literally clearing all of your sinuses. The days after this event might be the first clear breath you got all month. Also your buddies running blindly into a tree is hilarious. There is always one just off-center of a straight line out the door. Do they do this on purpose? I believe it.
Courage can be viewed as a skill.
As you might expect, the military has a strong interest in the development and maintenance of courage. The United States Army is formally of the opinion that courage can be instilled in recruits, and basic training is oriented largely around this problem.
The strategy for courage development used by the Army has three basic factors that stood out to me:
Social reinforcement: Messaging is clear: courage is the expectation; cowardice is evil. Further, cowardice is treachery; to be ruled by fear is to betray your brethren unto death. Finally, historically most casualties are among fleeing soldiers; the causal relationship is that cowardice makes it less likely you will survive.
Incremental challenges: The iconic item here is the obstacle course. The point of an obstacle course is not to test your physical fitness; rather it is to present you with novel physical challenge that you doubt you can do.[1] Then it presents you with another, slightly more intense novel challenge. By the time you’ve done the course, you have been proven wrong about your limits up to a dozen times. This reduces doubt for all future challenges.
Take the hit: Recruits get gassed. This entails standing in a small concrete building while it is filled with military tear gas, with your mask on. Then you have to take the mask off, and still stand there, breathing in the tear gas. Then they line you up, let everyone out in a flood, and you get to run around in a dirt circle while coughing, puking, crying and everything in your sinuses drain down your face.[2] The exercise has two purposes: one, trust the equipment; two, you will be okay.
In the same vein, there is the ever popular hand-to-hand training, called “combatives.” In basic training to reduce injury this must be done from the knees and there is no striking, so it is kind of a goofy grapple. There are always a handful of collegiate wrestlers or jiu-jitsu experts in every group, and further the physical fitness variance is pretty high, which means almost everyone spends some time getting pulverized by someone more skilled and powerful (I was no exception). At the end of the day, you wipe your nose off, and are okay.
The consequences usually aren’t as bad as you think they are; this makes them easier to accept up front.
It is worth mentioning that the real focus of military training is a different trick, which is to reduce the relevance of courage as much as possible. You can summarize this as Trigger Action Plans for violence; we spent a lot of time training about what to do in certain situations, so when that situation arises we just do whatever the training says. The result is that even in nominally scary situations fear is irrelevant because we aren’t thinking about things, just executing the first thing that comes to mind (which is always training). Even in combat there is virtually no opportunity for cowardice.
You might reasonably wonder what happens to the people who actually can’t do the obstacle. The trick is this: they still can, with a little help from their buddies. In every group there are a few who simply can’t make progress alone; after the rest of the group goes through, they cycle back to physically help the stragglers over whichever obstacle is stopping them (even if that is all of them). These are not formal instructions, but it always happens anyway.
As unpleasant as this sounds, it is usually one of the most fondly remembered events. The central reason for this is that when people from all over the country are subjected to close contact, sleep deprivation, high stress, and unhygienic conditions everyone gets sick—and nothing clears the sinuses like literally clearing all of your sinuses. The days after this event might be the first clear breath you got all month. Also your buddies running blindly into a tree is hilarious. There is always one just off-center of a straight line out the door. Do they do this on purpose? I believe it.