The military is increasingly relying on robots and drones and AI on the battlefield. But it's also focusing on a simpler way to boost its performance: more sleep for the troops.
The Government Accountability Office released a study earlier this year that said most troops report getting six hours of sleep or less each day, despite Pentagon guidelines calling for at least seven.
But the GAO report also noted that the military has done a lot recently to reduce fatigue, including new training and awareness campaigns, updated policies and guidelines, and more than 100 fatigue-related research projects.
The 18th Airborne Corps, which is based at Fort Liberty, N.C. and is an umbrella command for a substantial part of the nation’s infantry troops, is now mandating sleep time for soldiers working the “staff duty” shifts that are manned around the clock.
That idea came from a young major named David Nixon, a fitness enthusiast, who has been studying the performance aspects of sleep for years.
The Corps has long encouraged innovation — it holds regular Shark Tank-like contests to find new ideas — and Nixon took advantage of that and pushed a memo up to the Corps’ leaders, who approved it.
“If we have a bad night of sleep, we come into the office and we snap at a co-worker,” Nixon said. "But we don't take into account that every other body process is also affected by that bad night of sleep. So if you took metabolic function, how you digest food, your mental health — all of those things are affected by sleep.”
He says the idea may not be huge — typically the staff duty shifts only have a handful of soldiers — but he hopes it will help build momentum for more ways to improve sleep across the Army.
Given the nature of military duty, he said the trick is to look for the right balance.
“When we answer the nation's call, that doesn't happen on an eight to five schedule, right?” he said. “So you have to balance that with the fact that if I'm teaching you a skill, especially a skill that you're not familiar with, and I want you to retain that information, the best thing would be adequate sleep before and adequate sleep after to help retain it.”
It’s particularly important for young soldiers, Nixon said, because it helps them retain the key skills they’re learning.
Nixon's idea has already spread to at least one other large unit at Fort Bliss, Texas.
It’s not that the military has been ignoring sleep. For example, troops have long been allowed to grab a few winks at downtime during long training exercises.
And on a recent practice jump, paratroopers of the 18th Airborne Corps were doing just that as they waited in bleachers and under pine trees for the transport plane.
“If it’s somewhere that you can take a nap, why not?” said Sgt. Kyrie Moore, just waking up from one of those naps. He had been snoozing while propped on the parachute strapped to his back.
Command Sgt. Major Bryan D. Barker, the top enlisted soldier in the 18th Airborne Corps, was propped on his own parachute under the trees.
He said naps on long training exercises are helpful, but the real key is ensuring soldiers get consistent, steady sleep overnight.
“We have to push them to be able to work in a deprived environment, but also balance that," he said. "You want to create those healthy habits too.”
He endorsed Nixon's proposal and said the data is clear that when soldiers don’t get enough sleep, their performance drops off.
“The cognition just isn't there, they don't have the capacity or the ability to really think through things, and so they're just kind of on autopilot,” he said.
“And so we try to force that as leaders, particularly as, 'Hey, how much sleep did you get last night? ... You got to go get some sleep, because I need you for tomorrow.' And so it's a lot more deliberate now than it used to be.”
One barrier the GEO report didn’t tackle is a modern one, which was apparent at the 18th Airborne Corps practice jump: Dozens of soldiers who might otherwise have been napping were instead bent over their smartphones.
Soldiers often wedge in bits of sleep when they can, and not only are their commanders okay with that, they are more systematically encouraging sleep as a performance enhancer.
More broadly, the Army is implementing a holistic health and fitness program that coaches troops on sleep, nutrition, physical fitness, mental health, and spirituality.
An Army spokesman says that program is about halfway toward its initial goal of putting 110 teams of trainers and fitness equipment into combat brigades.
Recently, the Army announced the program is getting such good results, it will expand to include all troops, not just those in combat units.
Barker said some of the units in the Corps have that program in place, and Corps leaders believe in it enough that they’re trying to help the remaining units with interim measures until they have it, too.
Fatigue in the military has been blamed for hundreds of accidents and deaths, including those of 17 Navy sailors killed in two 2017 collisions involving destroyers.
Diana Maurer, who oversaw the GAO report, said it found the Pentagon has put out good guidance about sleep, She said the Department of Defense is clearly serious about improving sleep, but more needs to be done.
“Something that I found both somewhat surprising and somewhat disturbing was the breadth and the persistence and the magnitude of the problem of lack of sleep and related fatigue across the services,” Maurer said.
A key recommendation from the report, she said, was ensuring there are commanders at the Defense Department level and each of the service branches who have direct responsibility for improving things.
“What we found is that there are different parts of the military that have some involvement in this issue," she said. “But there really weren't organizations or people directly tapped to being, 'Okay, you're the one to make sure that these things are happening.'"
Other issues, she says, include not having any office charged with coordinating the many research projects on sleep across the military so that research builds on itself, rather than duplicates previous studies.
Another ongoing problem, she said, is simply overcoming lagging cultural attitudes that being tired is just a normal part of military life.
The report said the Pentagon generally agreed with the recommendations.
This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans.
