A Review of US Army Research Contributing to Cognitive Enhancement in Military Contexts

The US Department of Defense, including the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has engaged in cognitive enhancement research and development for over a century, exploring novel pharmaceutical, dietary, neuroscientific, instructional, technological, and sleep-related enhancement strategies. The overall objective of this work is to identify safe, reliable, and robust strategies and technologies to help military personnel achieve dominance through enhanced skill acquisition, vigilance and threat detection, situation awareness, decision-making, teamwork, and emotional control. The present review provides an introductory overview of recent and current US Army research examining several approaches to cognitive enhancement. These include approaches aimed at specifically targeting neural mechanisms and processes directly responsible for enhanced task performance and include transcranial electrical stimulation (tES), augmented reality (AR), and targeted skills training. Also considered are approaches targeting nth-order mechanisms and processes that relatively indirectly affect perception, cognition, and/or emotion and include nutritional and dietary intervention, resilience, cognitive and teamwork training, peripheral nerve stimulation, and sleep modification. We detail several promising approaches and provide an overview of forward-looking research objectives pursued by the US Army. Finally, we provide an overview of some of the ethical, regulatory, methodological, technological, doctrinal, and reliability challenges facing cognitive enhancement research and constraining its immediate application to military training and operations.