The uncertainty of today's battlefield and austerity of the fiscal environment requires the military to maximize existing methods used to prepare Warfighters for combat. Currently, significant emphasis is being placed on actively fostering resilience to stress, a key part of which is the ability to adapt to uncertainty and unfamiliar situations and recover or bounce-back to pre-stress levels as quickly as possible. The related constructs of stress, resilience, adaptability, and bounce-back as well as the knowledge of how best to influence these through training have been the focus of research for decades and have resulted in a plethora of models, metrics and learning strategies. The results of such efforts provide a disjointed toolbox of potential training interventions, yet, it remains unclear how to seamlessly integrate these tools into a training regime easily accessible to instructors/unit leaders to support effective and efficient training. The lack of this knowledge makes it difficult to systematically develop decision makers that can adapt to uncertainty in the combat environment, and are resilient to stress.

This paper presents a framework for training adaptable, stress-resilient decision-making. Specifically, the objective of the framework is to guide transition of those who succumb or marginally survive under stress at the cost of decreased performance, into those who have the ability to quickly adapt and bounce-back to original performance levels and eventually thrive under stressful conditions. This framework aims to achieve these goals by 1) decreasing the initial impact of stressors on performance through stress inoculation training and exposure techniques to improve observation, orientation and decision selection skills by instilling adaptability, and 2) increasing the rate at which performance bounce-back occurs by focusing on biofeedback methods and other coping strategies to enhance response under stress. Combined, these goals will increase the final resilience level achieved after the stressor allowing performance levels to reach pre-stressor levels or greater. Key to this framework are the ability to monitor how quickly a trainee is adapting to a stressor, predict if the trainee is going to succumb versus recover, and insert training interventions to optimize training opportunities.