Features of military personnel adaptation in modern conditions of army service

The paper reveals essential characteristics of military personnel adaptation to the conditions of service in the army. The author believes that to understand the essence of adaptation it is necessary to understand modified, stressful living conditions and activities causing the inclusion of physiological, psychological, and physical functional reserves of the organism, some problems of adaptation: the relationship between commanders and soldiers, the relationship between the older soldiers and recruits, the commanders of insubordination, aggressive behavior, defiant behavior and factors of maladjustment: the low stress resistance of the organism, physiological reserves, poor physical fitness, lack of personal and psychological potential, non-acceptance of new rules and conditions of life, low training and combat training, unformed value-semantic orientation. A sociological study revealed the following problems of socio-psychological adaptation: insufficient psycho-pedagogical competence of commanders in matters of socio-psychological adaptation; a lack of specialists of social work; a lack of individual psychological assistance to servicemen who have difficulties of adaptation; a lack of the programme of adaptation work; insufficient development of individual methods, techniques and technologies of work; a lack of analysis of work; insufficient work with the team. The author sees the prospect of the research in the development of methods and techniques that can help to successfully support military personnel during their adaptation.

Warren Lewis: The Soldier Sailor

In the years immediately after his retirement from the Royal Army Service Corps on 21 December 1932, Captain Warren ‘Warnie’ Lewis expended most of his energy compiling the Lewis Papers, an extensive family archive that, by almost any measure, is an exceptional accomplishment. Shortly after finishing this massive yet pleasurable undertaking, Warnie turned to an even more delightful activity: sailing the waterways in and around Oxford and Cambridge on the Bosphorus, a small cabin cruiser he had specially built, therein realizing a life-long passion for ships and boats and reaching back to the childhood worlds of Animal Land and Boxen (shared with his younger brother), upon whose waters the first Bosphorus sailed. From 1936 until the outbreak of World War II, Warnie spent many days on his second Bosphorus, enjoying countless hours of relative freedom and personal satisfaction. This essay explores Warnie's days aboard his ‘ditchcrawler’, primarily through the lens of the eight essays he published in The Motor Boat and Yachting magazine in the late 1930s.

Madness

In this chapter the complex relationship between hippies, the state, and the trope of madness is discussed. Hippies often feigned mental illness in order to escape army service—an action that was facilitated by the Soviet state’s usage of schizophrenia as a diagnosis for dissidents and other nonconformists. Excused from the army and armed with an official document certifying their ‘craziness’ hippies felt free from many of the demands of Soviet life and society. At the same time, the state used psychiatry to lock away unwanted social elements such as hippies, severely curtailing their general freedom, sometimes for years. The battlefield of insanity was hence an interface at which Soviet hippies and state competed for discursive and real power.

Training of Army Reserves in the Educational Structures of Military Settlements in the First Half of the 19th Century

Introduction. The article considers the development of military educational structures of the Russian military settlement organization at various stages of their activity. In the 1810s and 1850s, training battalions, squadrons, batteries, and combat reserve units trained children of Cantonese military settlers to serve in the army as Junior and non-commissioned officers. Specialized educational institutions taught topographers, builders, doctors, veterinarians, agronomists and other training specialists to serve in the settlement districts. Methods and materials. The author explores models of developing military educational institutions on the basis of materials of complexes of legislative, statistical and reporting documents applying methods of quantitative analysis (trend models, grouping method), comparative analysis using source-oriented, problem-oriented, and system-structural approaches. Analysis. All this made it possible to trace the evolution of government policy aimed at training army personnel and noncommissioned officers based on changing historical realities (the army’s needs for trained personnel, the reform of the military settlement organization), and the results of its implementation, as well as to show the numerical corps of graduates of training units of military settlements and its growth in time and space. Results. The main stages of the development of military educational structures of settlements and periods of their quantitative growth are also defined, which resulted in the multiplication of the number of graduates for the army service. The formation and expansion of the entire educational system of settlements was carried out as the need for special-profile personnel arose in the settled regiments. In the 1820s – 1850s, new special educational institutions were integrated into it, and primary education developed along a transformed vector.

Soviet foreign policy in 1937–1941: youth perception of the Tambov Region

This work is devoted to the study of the characteristics of the young generation’s perception of the foreign policy of the Soviet leadership in 1937–1941. The specificity of the development of the image of a foreign enemy in the minds of young people is shown. The main mechanisms of the development of patriotic sentiments of young people are investigated. As the survey of public attitudes has shown, the majority of young men and women, despite the changes in foreign policy, were preparing for war. As a result of the active work of propaganda structures, the prestige of the army service increased, and the day of conscription became one of the most long-awaited moments of adolescence. A sense of duty and personal responsibility for the future of their homeland contributed to the strengthening of the conscious patriotism of the younger generation, which testified to the high efficiency of the entire system of military and patriotic education on the eve of the Great Patriotic War.

Narrative Preludes: The Calends of Cairo and Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights

Mitchell’s early fiction writing is analysed as a modern take on Arabian Fantasy mixing realism and mysticism and forging a strong spirit of place from memories of his army service in the middle east, particularly his principal posting in post-war Cairo. Mitchell’s story-cycles appear stylistically dated, but his experimentation, particularly with first person narrative, anticipates several of the signature features of his mature fiction style. The social and political temper of this early work is also seen to be reflective of his mature humanitarianism, in the subtle denunciation of colonialism and in the socialist utopianism seen at play throughout the narrative.

Brig Professor Zafar Ahmed Malik

Zafar Ahmed Malik was born on 20th March, 1937, he spent his early years in Talagang, a small town near Rawalpindi. He completed his matriculation from Talagang High School and the interesting aspect was that all of his teachers were matric fail with the exception of one. He completed his MBBS from the University of Peshawar in 1962, and joined the army service. He qualified MCPS on 16th February 1968, and FCPS (Anesthesiology) on 9th February 1974. He then went to Ireland where he did his FFARCS(I) in 1976 from the Royal College of Surgeons. During his Army service he participated in the 1965 and 1971 wars with India; and was awarded with Tamgha-i-Jand and Sitara-i-Harb for his selfless and fearless services.

„In the army now”: Комічні тональності пам’яті про радянське минуле в книзі Кузьми Скрябіна „Я, Паштет і Армія”

The article deals with the peculiarities of the fiction memory reconstruction of Soviet Army service in the story Me, Pashtet, and the Army by Kuzma Scriabin. The author of the article explains the author-reader relation strategy, analyzes the comic mechanisms of past Soviet events and charactersʼ descriptions, and reveals the “personality — Soviet Army” opposition. Scriabin’s ability to describe life collisions of a witty and talented man, who perceives difficult situations with humor, is researched. The author of the article states that the individualization of the main character is achieved by portraying his behavior against the system that prevailed in the Soviet Army at that time. It is noted that Scriabin’s writing style and his ways of creating fictional figures correspond to his life philosophy, behavior, and aspirations.

Effects of Neurocognitive Temporal Training on Weapon Firing Performance

While marksmanship is a critical skill for military personnel, some service members experience difficulty in attaining and maintaining marksmanship qualifications. Temporal training may improve marksmanship performance, since rhythm and timing are critical for coordinated movement. In this study, we examined the effect of neurocognitive temporal training (NTT) on military personnel’s marksmanship performance. We randomly assigned 41 active duty U.S. Army service members with prior marksmanship training into an NTT group that received 12 NTT training sessions ( N = 18) and a Control group ( N = 23) that received no NTT training. We measured marksmanship at baseline (pretest) and following either NTT (posttest) or, for the Control group, a comparable time period. We quantified marksmanship during 2 tasks of firing 5 self-paced shots at stationary 175 m and 300 m targets (Task 1) and firing at 50 moving and stationary targets of varying distances (Task 2). We recorded three measures of accuracy and three measures of precision (including Total Path Length, a unique measure quantifying shot-to-shot variability) for the first task, and we recorded one accuracy measure for the second task. To determine group differences for pretest versus posttest, we used multivariate analysis of variances for Task 1 and a mixed-model analysis of variance for Task 2. Results revealed significantly reduced variability and improved precision when firing at the 175 m target for the NTT group compared with the Control group ( p < .05), but there were no significant group differences on other measures. While these results suggest the utility of neurocognitive timing and rhythm training for marksmanship precision, additional research is needed and should include varied training regimens, comparisons of expert versus novice shooters, additional outcome measures, and a larger participant sample.