How We’d Fix Military Human Performance
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If We Built It From Scratch — Drew and Alex Redesign Military Human Performance
No guest. No plan. Just Drew and Alex with keys to the kingdom. If you handed us the whole thing tomorrow, what would we actually change?
What we get into:
Coach pay comes first. The DOD is on track to become the largest employer of strength and conditioning professionals in the world, which means contracting companies will be too. The contracting model is a race to the bottom on price, with staff salaries absorbing the cuts. That has to change.
The five pillars get a rebrand — move, eat, think, recover, connect. Why dropping a dedicated spiritual pillar doesn't mean spirituality doesn't matter — it just means it's woven into everything else.
Branding and marketing are undervalued. Embedded human performance has to compete for attention in a way that S1 never does. Drew's pitch: hand the whole thing to a Madison Avenue agency and see what happens.
The personal services contract problem, explained plainly. Coaches meet every FAR criterion for personal services but get treated as non-personal services. Cleaning this up would mean better pay, better working conditions, and actually being able to choose who you hire.
GS billets for lead coaches — at minimum the lead strength coach and athletic trainer should be government employees with real career progression, same pay grade as the PT and dietitian.
The coach-NCO relationship. Coaches exist to transport people from A to B — that's literally where the word comes from: a 15th century Hungarian horse-drawn carriage. Some coaches are getting fired for leading PT sessions. That's insane.
Extender courses are teaching the wrong things. Periodization and physiology when people actually need interpersonal skills and session flow management.
Data — stop making it the mission. Just watch what happens to the numbers that justified these programs in the first place.
Wearables — a closet full of devices, service members pick what they like, a small subset of data flows to the HP team for trend monitoring and outlier detection, nobody touches a custom military interface.
Policy — the Randolph Shepherd Act of 1936 and military dining, credentialing through MTFs versus operational leadership, and why language in DODI 1308.3 may have killed the original ACFT.
Mentioned in this episode:
Ben Bergeron — move, eat, think, recover, connect framework
Kat Oswald — recent podcast guest, helped implement the five factors at Alex's day job
Rachel Chamberlain — community-based blueprinting, podcast appearance incoming
DODI 1308.3 — DOD physical fitness and body composition program instruction
Randolph Shepherd Act, 1936 — federal law governing vending and dining on government property
Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic
Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.
