The "hurry up and wait" phenomenon in many military operations is
aptly called "hours of boredom," whereas the transition to meet
sudden task demands when combat breaks out is sometimes deemed to
consist of "moments of terror." Increasingly, other national
security and paramilitary force personnel (e.g., police forces,
border patrol, operational intelligence agents) also experience
long periods of boredom interspersed with all-out response efforts
when the going "gets hot." The authors examine resultant
psychological and behavioral implications for combatant and
security personnel performance as viewed through application of a
traditional human psychological stress model. Inadequate
recognition of the implications resulting from long lull periods,
combat pulses, and the need to recover from stress can lead to
dysfunctional soldiering as well as poor individual and small unit
performance. Accounting for such time-based transitions in the
psychological state of military combatants and security force
operators is important in configuring resilience training for small
group leaders, their personnel, and their organizational units. As
we seek to come to terms with the rapidly emerging challenges of
military and other national security operations in the new
millennium it is crucial to take a careful look at the fundamental
characteristics of some of the tasks our deployed personnel are now
being asked to perform. This assessment embraces a wide spectrum of
requirements, since many former military job elements are now
subject to outsourcing. Contemporary national security policies
witness deployments of large number of State Department,
international development agencies, and even Justice Department
employees, many of whom carry out a myriad of activities with some
of the same military characteristics and accompanying psychological
and physiological stressors. Our comments may pertain to other
national security forces as well, but here we exemplify our points
by referring mostly to the tasks and stresses of military
personnel. While not unique to the military, the ore security tasks
that remain for our professional military have evolved under the
driving force of a changing environment, including a broad
expansion of defense missions; for example, providing humanitarian
assistance, stability and security operations, implementation of
new technologies, and emerging forms of conflict such as engaging
in asymmetric warfare and counterinsurgency operations. Whereas
Krueger recently outlined an extensive listing of soldier stresses
that impact performance of military personnel on contemporary and
future battlefields, our central thesis here is that identifiable
constants remain in the missions that military and other security
force personnel are tasked to accomplish, especially in the
temporal rhythm of these assignments. Often characterized as "hurry
up and wait operations," we term these requirements as "hours of
boredom and moments of terror." It is these forms of demand and
their effect upon performance and health which form our primary
concern. These temporal rhythms are normal and expected in military
operations, and are becoming so in other security operations as
well. Understood in this light, this article asserts that leaders
should, in training, prepare their troops for high levels of
cognitive and physiological readiness; they need to anticipate
executing operational plans that often require patience and
apparent, sometime boring inactivity that will eventually be
followed by sustained maximum performance. This is, in turn,
followed by anticipation of the next activity cycle as pulses in
the normal sequence of boredom-terror-boredom - which is the
military way of things. Advances in anticipatory strategy can help
a variety of professional occupations (e.g., police, emergency
response, and other security force workers) whose central temporal
characteristics are highly similar to this military challenge.
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