[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 10]
[Senate]
[Page 14176]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     HUMAN PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION

  Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I am honored to represent over half of all 
U.S. Special Forces. I would like to address the topic of working to 
close a growing gap in understanding, assessment, and prediction 
between traditional and nontraditional strategies for human performance 
optimization as it relates to our military servicemembers and overall 
readiness.
  I support Department of Defense efforts designed to simultaneously 
improve the overall health and wellness of uniformed personnel and 
sustain the operational readiness levels of the respective military 
services. I am encouraged by efforts initiated at both Special 
Operations Command, SOCOM, and the respective SOCOM component commands 
and am requesting that these commands consider additional steps to 
incorporate new ideas for the troops.
  I would like to see the Department of Defense examine the impact of 
recent trends in the health and performance industry to emphasize 
greater reliance on natural movement, full-range body motion, 
nontraditional gravity-aided suspension exercises, and nontraditional 
resistance training for optimizing an individual's state of fitness, 
long-term durability, resilience, and overall wellness. It is important 
to note that such approaches can produce significant and measurable 
improvements in muscular strength, endurance, motor control, and the 
maximum cognitive and workload performance of individual military 
operators.
  The potential for an improvement in comprehensive readiness and 
lethality of Special Forces is significant. Efforts to improve muscular 
strength, endurance, and the workload performance for individuals under 
more natural and realistic training scenarios coupled with the 
establishment and documentation of optimum and minimum physical 
thresholds can improve overall unit readiness and sustainability among 
and throughout the ranks of special operations forces.
  Therefore, I would encourage the Department of Defense, and 
especially Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, MARSOC, to 
identify and describe common denominators with respect to key 
performance indicators, KPI, among MARSOC operators, develop 
algorithmic tools for predicting appropriate individual physical and 
cognitive loads, and examine the efficacy of potential intervention 
programs to minimize discriminatory KPI gaps among MARSOC personnel. 
Let's close the gap in understanding between traditional and emerging 
strategies for human performance optimization. I strongly believe it 
could have a positive impact on the readiness of our honorable men and 
women in uniform to win conflicts.

                          ____________________