Elite athletes have benefited from performance psychology for decades, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that the U.S. military started to realize that it could be used to enhance battlefield performance, too. That realization owes largely to the efforts of then-West Point psychology professor Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, whose theories on the psychology and physiology of deadly combat, explicated at length in his best-selling nonfiction books “On Combat” and “On Killing,” draw heavily from what he hyperbolically refers to as the “multi-trillion dollar field of sports psychology.”
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Adam Linehan is a senior staff writer for Task & Purpose. Between 2006-2012, he served as a combat medic in the U.S. Army, and is a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan.