Originally Posted by The Reaper
I was talking to SUT students several years ago.
They were commiserating about how early in the training, what a bunch of assholes they thought the SUT cadre were and how they really weren't anything special either.
Then, on a training event, a charge went off early and some people got hurt.
They said that the biggest cadre asshole of all happened to be an 18D and when the shit hit the fan, he grabbed a bag and went to work treating, stabilizing, triaging, etc. He was a completely different person.
The students said that they all wanted to be like him after seeing him doing his medic magic, and maybe the cadre weren't really as bad as they had thought.
Look up Special Forces and neuropeptide Y.
Neuropeptide Y is a stress buffer that allows people to better deal with stressful situations with less physical and mental performance degradation.
They studied some SERE classes and found that you could pick out the SF students over the others by their NPY responses to extreme stress, like interrogations. It was a nearly complete correlation. The psychs said that they could take the results of the NPY measurements, and make a stack of the highest performers, and the lowest, and the SF students were all in the high-performance stack, and none of the other branches or services were, to include Rangers and 160th.
Basically, as one of the psychs explained it to me, SF guys underperform in no to low-stress situations, and overperform in high-stress situations that would cause normal people to shut down. He drew a little graph that depicted SF performance across a stress event. SF guys tend to be pretty casual and maybe even lazy until the excitement starts, and then their performance goes off the top of the chart while others curl up into a little ball and quit.
Our selection and assessment process somehow found those people with an extreme degree of predictabilitly.
He said that they weren't sure how we did it, but the SFAS program for that time was optimized beyond their improvement for selecting the SF soldiers we wanted.
I guess the point of this is that you can't really judge SF until you are one, and even then, maybe not until you see them in action on a high stress event.
The Psyches at SFAS still use the same profile to select and I can tell you being a Cadre 2X that they are being gamed. I remember the study and the study does not address the discipline issues we have in today's force that is reflected in a lack of professionalism.
We don't select everyone, and that is good thing for the Regiment, and for the non-selects.
TR
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