Psychological Support for Military Personnel on Operations

To help, treat or understand combatants and provide them with a medical, psychological or spiritual support, various parties concur to the High Command's action.


The Health Support :

It surrounds the troops with efficiency. Here again, it is part of an old colonial tradition and of a legal and ethical choice: doctors, and not only nurses, remain close to the soldiers. Thus, there are one or two doctors per regiment and sometimes a military surgeon (captain) per company or for isolated platoons.

These doctors, who were appropriately trained for treating the soldiers on the front line, are an integral part of the troops. The soldiers personnel often confide in them, even if the military psychiatrists acknowledge the lack of training as far as psychological support is concerned.

The presence of military chaplains :

As numerous foreign units, France employs military chaplains to support its troops. Serving in uniform and often in a regiment or battalion service, they are well-received by the soldiers and officers. Their presence is usual and their action often takes a psychological, rather than spiritual, aspect.

Three religions are represented: the catholic chaplains, the Protestant clergymen and the rabbis.

Though Islam is the second religion in France, there is not any representative in the field. This is mainly due to the absence of official representative of the Muslim religion (no clergy).
Besides, there is no military Academy for chaplains in France, unlike in the USA.


The psychiatrists :

As the psychiatrists are not traditionally well represented in the field in France as well as in operations, their number have nevertheless been increased since the Lebanon, the Gulf War and the traumatizing events in Rwanda and particularly in Bosnia.

The role of the psychiatrists, who are in charge of mental health, has not always been fully acknowledged within the forces. Thus, the enlightenment of slight or deep psychic troubles during the last engagements accounts for a come-back and a dominant will for intervention as far as psychological support is concerned.

In this way, as they are doctors and specialists in mental care, psychiatrists fully claim that their presence on the operation scene is a priority, thus excluding any action from the psychologists out of the sphere of the army health service.

Their statement is clear: * compared to psychologists whose academic knowledge, according to them, cannot be but general, the psychiatrists action appear to be a real therapy insofar as their status and position give them the possibility to establish privileged relations with their patients.

They are thus fully integrated in the medical team as soon as the operation begins.

- On the front line : they are integrated into the health group which plays a central part in relation to the deployment of the various units. His role is to ensure the treatment of reactions after the fight.

- On the back line : they receive, treat in emergency and evacuate to France the psychiatric cases from the front line. Moreover, they take part in all the actions concerning mental health and command advice.

In order to keep the High Command informed of the problems which could affect the soldier's morale, another party has appeared in the field. It is the officers in charge of studies of the * Centre de Relations Humaines (CHR) + of the French Army.

At first, this Centre included psychologists and sociologists. However, no psychologist has worked or been assigned in this centre since 1983. But in our centre which is the Centre d'Etudes Sur la Selection de l'Armée de Terre.

This Human Relations Centre was first created to keep the Army staff commander informed of the apparition of psychological or sociological traumas within the forces. Once the psychologists were discharged, this mission has remained and it has become usual to call it * moral force + or simply * morale +. This conjuring trick has led to the eviction of the very few army psychologists from the psychological support action.

The officers in charge of studies of the Human Relations Centre get a one-year training in sociology pass a master's degree. They do not receive any training in clinical or social psychology though they often use the concepts of psychology.

Their role, while spending three weeks in the field, is to gather any information or clues that could affect the troop's morale. Their methodology assumes the concepts of sociology organisations, and especially the strategic analysis developed by Michel Crozier in France. It is based on a technique using interviews and questionnaires.

Their analysis, which are most of the time judicious and relevant, are based on a series of factors which international literature (Stouffer and Janowitz) studied a long time ago and corroborated in the field.

The morale evaluation of humane component can be described in six points :

-The unity cohesion

-The reliance on the chief
-Self-confidence/reliance
-The reliance on the means
-A feeling of justifiability of the action
-Personal situation

When informed, the command can take measures in order to maintain, correct or improve a unit's morale.

The last expected parties, the psychologists :

At the present time, no psychologists are dispatched on external operations. Our intervention in Bosnia (Colonel Y. Biville and Lieutenant Colonel Laffitan) in 1995-1996 was inscribed within a specific research contract conducted in collaboration with two researchers from the University of Aix-en-Provence on a Mountain Infantry Battalion based on the Ingman mountains over Sarajevo.

During that stay, we could compare the French and American action methods on psychological support with Major Paul Bartone as a liaison officer.

While most western countries employ front line psychologists on external operation scenes, France has not yet acknowledged the utility of psychologists in the field.

We will come back to that situation in a moment.