The military needs to make human-performance optimization part of daily ops

Ukraine’s fierce defense against Russia’s better-on-paper invasion force underscores—once again—how soldiers represent human weapons systems, bringing cognitive, physical, and tactical attributes to the mission in ways that technology still cannot replicate. But while the U.S. military has long valued physical fitness, it has been slow to pursue a fuller range of efforts to optimize human performance. Now Congress is getting involved, mulling a trio of legislative proposals, and the Pentagon should do more besides.

To be sure, the special operations community has long viewed operators as “tactical athletes,” and recent years have seen conventional forces join in; examples include the Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness program and the Air Force Research Lab’s human performance program.

But more can be done—and should be. A human performance optimization framework is essential for operation in the Pacific theater, particularly among ground operators. A conflict with the China would require small teams of stand-in forces to operate with a light footprint and signature to remain undetectable, requiring a certain level of self-reliance away from consistent logistics hubs, in a communications-degraded environment, and outside the reach of medical evacuation within the golden hour. Casualties in such environments not only put the lives of individual service members at risk; they put the entire joint force mission at risk. Under such conditions, it won’t be enough for the service members to be trained and equipped to avoid injury. The services will need to optimize the performance of every individual assigned to the theater.

DOD has traditionally been averse to experimentation with “human weapons systems”—and for good reason. Experimentation with machines typically follows a linear path: the introduction of a new material or parameter can be tested, and the decision to incorporate or reject such a change depends on performance in testing. But human beings are not machines, and the impact of interventions is more cyclical. Human beings require recovery periods and consistent monitoring. Most importantly, no service wants to learn about human performance at the cost of permanent injury or death.

Still, recent decades have brought advances in human performance optimization, most notably in elite athletics. Collegiate, Olympic, and professional sports programs have produced evidence-based approaches to superior human performance in cognition, nutrition, supplementation, physical training, rest and recovery, and the impact of hormonal cycles on training and performance for both men and women.

Now Congress is urging the Pentagon to do more, in three provisions in the draft House Armed Services Committee Fiscal Year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act.

One calls for a pilot program that would use sleep-tracking technology to collect data on service members with newborn and infant children. It’s a narrow scope, but it has implications for broader integration of sleep data, behavioral interventions, and military performance. The impact of sleep on military operations is well known—its lack contributed to the deadly 2017 collisions of two Navy destroyers—yet crew rest is largely only enforced among aviators. The pilot program would provide the services with natural experimental data among servicemembers with interrupted sleep patterns.

The second provision would urge the military to consider distributing creatine in Meals Ready to Eat. This would reflect a major shift from old understandings of the risks and rewards associated with creatine consumption—but it is also backed by a deep bench of medical and performance research across the civilian population. As late as 2007, DOD policy rendered creatine off-limits to service members. However, the medical community found that creatine in appropriate doses increases muscle recovery; it may also make the human brain more resilient against traumatic brain injury and increase cognitive processes in high-stress environments. The HASC’s recommendation may sound novel, but consider that MREs have long included powdered coffee and tea for caffeine and “sports drinks” for electrolytes, both intended to increase human performance. The Army’s Natick Soldier Systems Center has also experimented with creations such as caffeine-infused beef jerky to link caffeine and protein. The consideration of creatine in MREs can be viewed as an evolution of existing supplementation.

Most importantly, the draft legislation includes a provision that DOD should embrace state-of-the-art technology, techniques, and supplementation to drive resilience and performance across the force. Given the future operating environment, the military can no longer only view human performance through the lens of daily physical training requirements; the military must consider the role of nutrition, sleep, recovery, hormonal balance, stress, and temperature at the individual, unit, and force-wide levels of analysis.

These provisions are to be applauded—and the Pentagon must not stop there. The changing battlefield demands a change. The military must work to optimize human performance across the force for the long run, provide the resources to make it happen and enable the flexibility necessary to adopt best practices from elite athletics into the day-to-day management of its personnel.

Katherine Kuzminski is Deputy Director of Studies and Director of the Military, Veterans, and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security.