It’s a hot summer afternoon on the Fort Leonard Wood Army base, and in a large bunker about half a dozen new recruits are watching a video teaching them about an exercise they’re about to begin.
The recruits click mouses and puzzle over what looks like a computer game - but these games have a purpose: They’re testing memory, reaction time and thinking ability. It’s all to establish intellectual benchmarks which the Army will use to track their brain function throughout their service.
The recruits and all other personnel will be reassessed on a five-year basis. It’s part of the Warfighter Brain Health Initiative - a Department of Defense program to study and support the brain health of soldiers.
Major Brandon Stanley is the deputy chief of the Army Brain Health Program. He says personnel can’t fail the test – the point is to compare their baseline now with later results, and try to determine if problems, such as traumatic brain injuries, or TBIs, have developed.
“So if a person cannot achieve a 56 percent or better on a module after two attempts, that is a trigger that tells us, hey, that's an invalid assessment. The other thing is if they have any current active TBI symptoms that is another reason that it would not be a valid measure,” Stanley said.
Mild TBIs are common in the military – and not necessarily as a result of enemy action. They often happen when shockwaves enter the brain as a result of operating certain larger weapons such as mortars, howitzers or shoulder-mounted weapons.
Kathy Lee is the program director of the Warfighter Brain Health Initiative, which the Department of Defense created after wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to counter and research TBIs.
She says in addition to the cognitive tests, the Army is trying to make weapons safer to fire, so TBIs are reduced.
“And we believe that this initiative is actually going to help us with combat readiness and fighting our wars.”
Still, no officials interviewed for this story could say how the results of the cognitive tests would be connected to other data points – just that they’d be used on a soldier-by-soldier basis.
Dustin Cook comes from a military family and began his Army service in 2005. He was medically discharged in 2014 - but his military family lineage dates back to the Spanish American War.
Today, he works as a vocational rehab specialist at Columbia’s Truman Veterans Hospital and spends a lot of time with veterans impacted by TBIs. He’d like to know more about how the data from the brain tests will be used.
“Once they have that information in hand it could yield some sort of information that might make it easier to predict or to establish some sort of across the board expectation that - do veterans experience cognitive decline as a result of just serving, yes, no, if the answer is yes - how do we mitigate that as a risk factor,” Cook said.
Cook also wants to know whether the cognitive testing program will show evidence of decline in those who don’t experience a TBI.
Army officials estimate they’ll have tested approximately 52,000 recruits by the end of 2024. Active duty, reserve, and national guard personnel with higher risk positions are next, with approximately 1.3 million servicemembers taking the test by the end of 2026.