ARMY WANTS “WISE” G.I.S

The Army insists it has noth­ing what­so­ever to do with Abu Ghraib. But U.S. mil­i­tary researchers are sud­denly inter­ested in fig­ur­ing out whether its sol­diers have the “wis­dom” and “emo­tional intel­li­gence” to han­dle the stresses of war.
In its lat­est call for research pro­pos­als from small busi­nesses (scroll way down), the Army Research Institute announced a pair of efforts to get a bet­ter sense of G.I.s’ souls.
Soldiers of today need to new “skill sets to func­tion effec­tively under high-​​stress and other emotionally-​​laden cir­cum­stances,” the Army says. “These con­di­tions are some­times asso­ci­ated with inter­per­sonal trans­ac­tions but may also emerge as reac­tions to fast-​​paced, high-​​demand events and sit­u­a­tions.“
The best way to deter­mine whether a grunt has these skill sets or not: gauge his “emo­tional intel­li­gence,” or EI. It’s made up of four abil­i­ties, accord­ing to the Army: “the per­cep­tion, man­age­ment, expres­sion, and uti­liza­tion of emo­tion.“
The mil­i­tary is ask­ing com­pa­nies for ideas on how to put together a new, “com­pre­hen­sive per­son­nel man­age­ment and train­ing sys­tem” that would assess and build “an indi­vid­u­als abil­ity to rec­og­nize, express, react and man­age emo­tions asso­ci­ated with these inter­per­sonal events and emotionally-​​laden cir­cum­stances.“
Similarly, the Army would like to find lead­ers “who pos­sess the wis­dom to extend their exper­tise and val­ues beyond ser­vice inter­ests.” But right now, it doesn’t have an effi­cient way to find out who’s wise and who’s not.
So the Army wants to use “auto­mated intel­li­gent agent tech­nolo­gies” smart soft­ware to “enable the wide­spread, dis­trib­uted self assess­ment of wis­dom. How would a G.I. know if he’s wise? The Army defines wis­dom in two ways: “expert level per­for­mance in the prag­mat­ics of life,” and “the appli­ca­tion of tacit knowl­edge medi­ated by val­ues through a bal­ance among per­sonal, inter­per­sonal, and extrap­er­sonal inter­ests.“
Some of these con­cepts espe­cially EI — have been float­ing around board­rooms and busi­ness book­shelves for years. And an Army researcher says that these sorts of stud­ies are a part of “long­stand­ing con­cerns, not in any way tied to recent events.“
But hav­ing wise and emo­tion­ally capa­ble sol­diers wouldn’t exactly hurt in places like Iraq, now would it?

June 1st, 2004 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.