B14 essay
kriegstheater
Afghanistan. At the same time, trainers must ensure that the exercise itself does not induce battle fatigue prior to deployment. But the exigencies of force-on-force combat and its physiological and psychological demands on the body require that soldiers experience intense, high-repetition training in order to, as combat psychologist Lt. Col. David Grossman puts it, sounding as though he were citing Stanislavski, “turn the skills that he needs to perform into ‘muscle memory’” (33). Indeed, the contemporary science that informed Stanislavski’s culminating life’s work on his method of physical actions produced a vocabulary of actor training that would not seem altogether foreign to Lt. Col. Grossman. This convergence in vocabulary points to compelling intersections between theories of actor training and Lt. Col. Crossman’s field of so-called “Warrior Science,” which studies the psychological and physiological behaviour of soldiers in the crucible of the battlefield in order to advance current military training methodologies. Stanislavski’s method of physical actions relied on the doctrine of reflex conditioning, most notoriously developed by turn-of-the-century Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. Through rehearsal and repetition, the actor’s work, for Stanislavski, becomes an accretion of actions, a physical score that becomes a “conscious…construction automized into his muscles and nerves”, which saves the actor from the “psychophysical paralysis” that often occurs with stage fright (Roach 213, 207). In Lt. Col. Grossman’s “Warrior Science,” this form of reflex conditioning through high-repetition training allows the soldier to act on muscle memory in the thick of high-intensity combat while maintaining a “freedom of mind,” which not only mitigates “psychophysical paralysis” in combat but also functions as a form of stress inoculation. In the field of “Warrior Science,” psychologists such as Grossman have conducted studies linking hormonal or fear-induced heart rate increases, resulting from sympathetic nervous system arousal, to task performance. Exercises are designed to train soldiers to perform tasks in what is called the “Condition Yellow” zone of arousal, where the soldier’s heart rate sits at between 80 and 100 bpm: a stage of “basic alertness and readiness, a place where you are psychologically
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