Building Physical and Mental Endurance for Battle at Sea

Less than an hour ago, a missile struck the starboard quarter—the second missile-hit since the fight began—and the repair locker parties are rapidly controlling the fires and flooding and evacuating casualties. In the engine room, engineers are quickly restoring systems to keep the ship in the fight. In the Combat Information Center (CIC), the missile system supervisor has been at his console for 17 of the last 24 hours, and yet he’s still sharp and clear-headed as he prioritizes his targets.

In an extended war in the Pacific, sailor fitness won’t be defined by whether the men and women aboard a Navy ship are ready for the first hour, but whether they have the capacity to keep going strong for days at a time with minimal sleep and rest. Such a capacity, however, may be difficult to achieve with conventional Navy fitness efforts, which often do not provide sailors with consistent and sustainable ways of developing the necessary fitness.

Fortunately, recent advances in military fitness can help sailors not just to get in better shape, but to develop the capacity—both physical and mental—for the rigors of prolonged sea combat.

This can be achieved with an approach that brings together three key elements, or pillars: the expertise of human-performance specialists, a more modern use of occupation-based fitness metrics, and emerging technologies. Each pillar incorporates recent advances in sailor fitness—human-performance specialists who are military-oriented rather than merely sports experts, occupation-based fitness metrics that are closely tailored to each community, and an increasing use of AI.

But just as important, the three pillars would be fused to provide a comprehensive, enterprise approach that works toward the ultimate goals of physical and mental resilience and endurance.

Preparing physically and mentally for extended combat at sea can be thought of as a science. This is where human-performance specialists come in. They take a scientific, data-based approach to improving an individual’s performance, bringing together multiple disciplines, such as kinesiology, psychology and injury recovery.

In the past, such experts were largely from the sports world, and it wasn’t always easy to translate tennis performance, for example, to driving a submarine. However, an increasing number of human-performance experts are attuned to military fitness requirements. They have a better understanding of what sailors need to do to achieve their missions, including under the most difficult conditions.

Starting with bootcamp, these performance experts can help sailors develop and maintain customized fitness programs. And they can be particularly valuable in helping sailors maintain their daily fitness regimens throughout their careers. Once sailors are deployed on ships, they can continue to interact with performance experts ashore through cloud-based, edge communications.

In developing standards for physical and mental endurance, it is also critical to consider sailors’ specific jobs. This is the role of occupation-based fitness metrics. Human-performance and operational experts work together to identify the physical, psychological and operational demands of roles in each community.

This approach essentially asks questions such as, “What abilities are needed to fight a fire on a ship? What abilities are needed to quickly and safely transfer ordnance from the hangar bay to the flight deck to load a jet?”

Performance and operational experts use direct observation, subject-matter expert interviews, task simulations and other methods to answer these kinds of questions. For example, firefighting requires strong aerobic capacity, grip strength and core stability, in addition to maintaining decision-making agility despite extreme physical fatigue. Performance experts can establish metrics for each of these requirements, and then build daily workout programs to achieve those metrics with specific exercises and drills.

Once community fitness standards are set, performance experts can bring in AI to continually improve the fitness programs, to make sailors stronger and more resilient.

Rapid advances in technology can give sailors a much greater ability to develop both their physical and mental endurance. While modern fitness wearables have been around for more than a decade, sensors are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and can now measure things like resilience to fatigue, decision-making ability, and danger of burnout.

By using AI to analyze the data, sailors can see whether they’re getting the right amount and kinds of exercise, nutrition and sleep—three key factors for physical and mental resilience. They can interact with this information through AI chatbots, which can serve as personalized fitness coaches. Based on an individual’s ongoing biometrics, the chatbots can develop a personalized program, and then help the sailor stick with it.

Chatbots can show where a sailor stands with physical and mental endurance at any given time, and suggest the exercise, nutrition and sleep he or she needs to improve. Just as important, the AI would allow commanders to fully comprehend sailor-readiness data, helping them to build effective watch, combat and other teams.

A key to the success of this approach is that the three pillars—human-performance specialists, occupation-based fitness metrics and new technologies—all work together as a whole.

In a sense, this is simply the modernization of sailor fitness, to help Navy personnel develop the physical and mental endurance they will need for a long, difficult conflict. Virtually every aspect of the Navy has been modernized in recent years. Sailor fitness can now take its turn.