Human Performance: The Need to Modernize and the Challenges Ahead

Irreversible Momentum: Performance Data and Technology Aren’t Going Anywhere

Technology and data are advancing at an exponential rate. Performance-science technologies and approaches are growing too with the big data revolution. Everywhere we look, we encounter artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques and models. These methods process data and generate insights at a pace that can seem almost magical, influencing nearly every aspect of our lives. These emerging technologies and models promise automation, forecasting, risk classification, and insights capable of enabling unprecedented advancement. We are living in a revolutionary age, and the Army can’t afford to ignore this fast-paced new reality. However, the implementation of advanced technology can raise concerns with trust, governance, and culture. We need to be aware of these challenges and work to resolve them while also coming to terms with the fact that these are the very real facts of our reality and this technological momentum isn’t slowing down.

The field of human performance (HP) is not immune to these advancements, nor the pace of momentum created by these revolutionary approaches. The HP landscape is saturated with vendors offering a wide array of promising technologies. Exhibit halls and websites are filled with everything from wearables to management systems. The market is flooded with systems that measure velocity and hardware that assess training loads, recovery and sleep, kinematics and kinetics. These tools provide a cornucopia of options and an overwhelming host of measurable data features. Each system or widget promises to answer all of our performance problems. An entire ecosystem of technology-based solutions appears to be at our fingertips, poised with potential to answer all of our performance questions and provide the return on investment (ROI) of the future today.

Change is hard. Change within the operating culture of the military is even harder. Change is both necessary and inevitable; we must embrace it and shape it not hide from its challenges. The number of choices in this emerging industry is so vast that it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture when implementing performance technology and data automation/management. Modernization necessitates changing the processes of how we make decisions, and we must do so smartly.

It is easy to feel overwhelmed and succumb to paralysis by analysis. It’s too easy to ignore cultural constraints and obstacles to adoption. It’s far too easy to let these systems drive us into a mindless chase for metrics – “tyranny by numbers.” Instead, performance data should be used as a tool to generate clear, actionable insights and awareness that empowers warfighters, embedded performance teams, and commanders to make better decisions. It’s too easy to get lost in the sea of flashy disparate options that over-promise while ignoring the need for a universal solution that provides a common language and methodology across domains, that is cyber-secured, that is connected to other systems of records and is operationally aligned. It’s too easy to have the wrong strategy or no strategy at all when it comes to performance technology implementation. Sometimes it’s too easy to embrace the status quo and live the mindset of ‘this is the way we have always done things,’ while trying to ignore the need to modernize. Unfortunately, it is far too easy to accept excuses that facilitate failure in this space.

The Army and Holistic Health & Fitness (H2F) has made a choice. They have formalized and validated a requirement to use these emerging capabilities to modernize efforts to leverage technology and data to optimize performance, readiness, and lethality. The Holistic Health & Management System (H2FMS) aligns with the Army’s modernization guidance and national defense goals by supporting human performance optimization through advanced technology implementation management (Thompson et al., 2025).

The Army and H2F are not proceeding blindly with reckless abandon. The Army has learned from successes and failures in other previous efforts and have leveraged those insights ruthlessly to define a strategic approach for the way forward. The Army and H2F is embracing change, not because they want to change for the sake of change itself, but because there is a necessity to do so. Change is hard and there are numerous barriers and challenges ahead that the Army and H2F will need to navigate. Speed of implementation effort, culture, interoperability, and scale are principal concerns that are critical for the Army to overcome. The Force must ride the wave of modernization and embrace the momentum as we surge into the future, or risk descending into irrelevance.

Benefits to Performance Technology and Monitoring

Given the advancement of performance science, analytics, technology, and the capabilities these systems offer, it would be negligent to the warfighter to ignore the need to modernize. The Army and H2F need not shy away from this task just because it is difficult. Virtually every other professional field is fueled by applied analytics, data automation, and technology. Consider engineering, medical, financial, or industrial fields just to name a few. Every decision, every purchase, every milestone is guided and empowered by data and teams of systems and expert personnel. Reflect for a second on the field of high-performance sport. Most of these approaches, systems, and technologies have grown out of traditional sport science and are now common foundational bedrocks that provide a competitive advantage within sporting organizations. Organizations spend millions of dollars on this technology and support applied sport science staff expertise because of that gained advantage. Yet despite the rest of the world embracing these approaches in virtually every industry there is still hesitancy in the tactical HP arena at times.

Perhaps it’s a value proposition statement that will help improve the cultural appetite for the adoption of this technology in the Army? To maintain our competitive advantage, the Army is continuously optimizing Soldier performance, with a renewed focus on reducing musculoskeletal injuries (MSKI), refining physical and behavioral preparedness, and enhancing holistic health. This is no secret. This is why there is a need for a system like H2F. We have all seen the ROI data, H2F is empirically moving the needle, it is making a significant difference. However, H2F efforts are disparate, lack a common language, have no unified picture of readiness, and are often non-operationally aligned. We know that recovery, sleep, nutrition, and training loads directly impact readiness and injury risk, yet H2F currently lacks an enterprise solution to monitor these factors and guide targeted interventions. The Army and H2F have no enterprise system to leverage the advantages of applied performance analytics and technology. How can the Army and H2F expect to optimally deliver training load and manage recovery if we can’t quantify them at an enterprise level? Quite frankly, the current state is one in which each brigade and human performance team (HPT) develops its own disparate approach, and many do so remarkably well, but they all remain in silo reducing enterprise value across the lifecycle of the Solider.

What if the Army and H2F could do better though? What if the greater enterprise could leverage this wave of modernization to help automate data and optimize and standardize the use of HP technology and analytics across the Force? What if these systems could be aligned into a universal approach with eventual AI and ML models, predictive and prescriptive analytics, and automated insights to guide processes and empower decision making? What if the system could provide value to action data at the Soldier, HPT, and Leader/Commander levels so that each is informing the other with a unified operationally aligned approach, united by a common performance analytics language? Doing so would allow teams to dynamically adjust training and recovery in line with Commander intent, ultimately optimizing combat readiness. What if empowering Army & H2F culture by modernizing technology and data infrastructure enabled an even greater H2F ROI, reduced duplicative costs, and improved readiness and lethality? What if the Army and H2F enthusiastically embraced the challenge of change? Is that really such a radical idea? Our colleagues in the sports industry don’t think so, they have embraced it.

In sport science, data sourced from athlete monitoring is critical and operationally used to create awareness. Data is used to benchmark and profile and gain insight into training loads, recoverability, adaptability, readiness, and risk. To name a few use case scenarios, athlete monitoring can confirm or deny a coach’s own personal perspective, provide additional context, help connect and align interdisciplinary teams by improving communication with coaches, support staff, and players, and provide insight into phenomenon that would have remained otherwise unnoticed (Windt et al., 2020). The awareness generated from data is used to empower actionable decisions to help the team prepare to win. Simply put it provides a competitive advantage and an investment in protecting an organization’s athlete capital. Sport coaches generally believe that athlete monitoring is rapidly evolving, and a highly valuable tool. They expect it to proactively aid decision making, reducing injuries while simultaneously improving performance (Timmerman et al., 2024).As the Army and our military modernize to meet the threats of the future battlefield, H2F must embrace the value propositions and applicable best practices honed from our sport counterparts and other military efforts to leverage every advantage it has to ensure that the Force is ready and lethal. This is how we prepare to fight and win the battles of tomorrow.

Despite the momentum in this space, not all technology and data implementation efforts are successful. If only it was as easy as purchasing technology and throwing it at a problem or community. Too often this is what happens. Often no thought is given to what problems need to be solved, what strategy is appropriate, what data and network infrastructure is available, how the system will be governed, what cultural and cyber security realities exist, or if the effort is scalable to name just a few. Throwing resources and technology at a problem alone rarely succeeds, especially in an operationally demanding environment like the military.

Fortunately, there is a body of work to learn from in sports and multiple efforts that have occurred in the military and Army to date. The successful implementation of these technologies and data need to answer meaningful performance questions and improve decisions instead of creating unnecessary data (Windt et al., 2020). Coaches and support staff need actionable information and there needs to be athlete and support staff buy-in keeping everyone in the loop (Timmerman et al., 2024) Sport lessons learned stress that there are three fundamental principles for technology and data implementation that includes proactivity, critical thinking, and collaboration amongst stakeholders from the initiation of technology efforts (Windt et al., 2020) Common barriers to adoption include a lack of data-literacy expertise across stakeholders, lack of time, and a lack of resources, all of which can hinder the successful implementation of performance technology (Timmerman et al., 2024).

If HPTs and Leaders and Commanders can’t speak and understand a common statistical language of data that is specific to HP and H2F, how can they expect to leverage insight from performance analytics or dashboards with confidence? If HPTs and Soldiers aren’t allotted the time to use the technology in their processes, how can they be accountable to learn to leverage the advantages the systems provide? If the appropriate connectivity, authentication, and support resources aren’t in place, frustration can hamper adoption and scalability. If Leaders and Commanders don’t prioritize the alignment of HP data and work with HPTs to use data and apply it to operational training processes, how can Soldiers see the value of continuing to enter data and being purposely compliant without being policed?

Army culture and operational necessity will dictate what is possible. Ultimately, successful technology adaption depends on building Soldier trust; troops must know their data is being used by Leaders, and HPTs to optimize training and recovery, not to penalize them punitively or administratively. Leaders and HPTs must learn to speak a common language across performance analytics and statistics building the vernacular foundations of data-literacy within H2F and the Army. Compliance from Soldiers will falter unless they know their data is being actively used to make decisions in their units. This will require changes to how Army units operate, train, and make decisions. It will alter how they interact with HPT stakeholders. Technology user interface and user experience (UI/UX) must be seamless, visually intuitive, and simplified. Dashboards must automatically adapt to the user’s role to drive maximum efficiency. While ROI refinement and back-end research for programmatic optimization are critical strategic goals, any technology must first and foremost provide applied value in the trenches where the work is done.

These are just some of the lessons learned from sport and the military that H2F is addressing in its H2FMS implementation strategy. The Army and H2F must address these barriers and actively implement lessons learned from past mistakes. Ignoring them will derail technology adoption and cripple data-informed optimization, ultimately degrading the ability to prepare warfighters for the next generation of conflict.

Given the momentum, the barriers, the opportunities, and the requirement to meet the demand, how do the Army and H2F win in the battle to modernize its HP approach? The current state of HP technology in H2F is disparate, manual, reactive, and often unsecured. H2FMS will present a universal, operationally aligned, cyber, and PII/PHI-secured, enterprise approach to Soldier management. H2FMS enables decision making that will provide transformational impact as the H2F system of record (SOR) (Fig. 9). Its capabilities will unify enterprise systems, technologies, and approaches for Solders, HPTs, and Commander/Leaders. The Army will further benefit from embedded research, return on investment (ROI) refinement, and programmatic optimization. H2FMS will provide universal H2F domain features to monitor, intervene and inform decision support to meet readiness objectives (Thompson et al., 2025). As the Army moves forward with H2FMS and embedding advanced analytics with data automation, a human must remain in the loop to ensure transparency and trust, serving to empower human decision making, not replace it.

H2FMS provides each level of stakeholder unique capabilities and insights (Fig. 10). The Soldier, HPT, and Leader/Commander roles work together in an operationally aligned trifecta empowering data informed decision making. For the first time the Soldier will experience their data across the life cycle of their career. Through the mobile application, the Soldier can see how their performance, recovery, nutrition, and sleep data compares to their anonymized peers (i.e. two-mile run, AFT trends, macros, PT plan, etc.). HPTs benefit from viewing aggregate squad to brigade data generating awareness of training loads and recovery, profiles and interventions, and providing other domain features and trends (i.e. PT & nutrition planers, sleep monitoring, messaging, scheduling, etc.). Leaders & Commanders can benchmark performance against other units, and view unified fields of readiness (i.e. profiles, MSKI, deployability trends, physical training compliance, etc.). H2FMS will connect to Army Vantage to integrate SOR data into informative dashboards providing a holistic and operationally aligned perspective of readiness and lethality.

The H2FMS journey began in 2025 with the Army formally validating the requirement and senior leaders directing its development. Decision point one involved a government evaluation team comprised of SME’s (SMEs) evaluating early prototype capabilities and concluded with guidance from Army senior leaders to proceed. Leveraging lessons learned from early collaboration, proactivity, and user buy-in in phase 1 & 2, continued H2FMS prototyping and refinement will begin at the Maneuver Center of Excellence Battle Lab (MCoE BL) focused on cyber compliance while improving user interface/experience and domain features (Fig. 11). Decision point two will select prototypes that will proceed to phase three, where prototypes will go onboard to operational brigades in the 101st Airborne Division for field testing and user role(s) refinement. Decision point three will down-select to a single prototype then scale for division-level testing. Decision point four will direct the implementation of the selected solution for H2FMS across 117 brigades, the total Force, while undergoing continuous development beyond phase four. It’s important to be transparent and note that all timelines and waypoints are tentative, conditional, and subject to change based upon Army senior leader guidance.

Successfully modernizing by implementing technology and data automation to optimize H2F across the Army is anything but straightforward. It is a monumental task of unprecedented scale, complexity, and challenge. Despite the massive advantages these emerging technological and analytics capabilities provide; cultural adoption and applied value constraints will ultimately determine success or failure. The real challenge lies not with the technology itself but with openly adopting new ways of thinking and decision making with HP technology and data and properly integrating these new processes into a complex operational and organizational culture that is historically resistant to change. The lessons and warnings surround this space. The requirements, opportunities, and urgency of mission are real and ever-present. Change is coming and is inevitable, and hopefully everyone can see the vision and potential of this journey. The only real question is despite the challenges, will the Army and H2F persist, exercise strategic patience, and embrace the change needed to modernize, or resist and perpetuate the status quo?

Mr. Denk serves as a research physiologist with the H2F Directorate.

Thompson, A. G., Rinaldi, N. A., Smith, C. L., Bigelman, K. A., et al. (2025). The Holistic Health and Fitness Management System (H2FMS): A modernized software capability for optimizing Soldier readiness and performance. BMJ Military Health, 1–9.

Windt, J., MacDonald, K., Taylor, D., Zumbo, B. D., Sporer, B. C., & Martin, D. T. (2020). “To Tech or Not to Tech?” A critical decision-making framework for implementing technology in sport. Journal of Athletic Training, 55(9), 902–910.

Timmerman, W. P., Abbiss, C. R., Lawler, N. G., Stanley, M., & Raynor, A. J. (2024). Athlete monitoring perspectives of sports coaches and support staff: A scoping review. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 19(4), 1813–1832.