About Our Study | The ARMOR Project

Goals

The goal of the ARMOR Project is to advance our understanding of the processes contributing to warriors' resilience in order to develop more effective resilience-building strategies to promote the health and well-being of military service members and veterans.

The ARMOR Project aims to achieve the following objectives:

Characterize latent trajectories of adjustment among military recruits.
Identify promotive and protective predictors of resilient functioning in National Guard soldiers.
Investigate neurobehavioral markers of self-regulation predictive of resilience trajectories in military recruits.

History

The ARMOR Project is a prospective, longitudinal research study being conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota and Minneapolis Veterans Affairs (VA) Health Care System in collaboration with the Minnesota National Guard.

The ARMOR Project is led by principal investigators Dr. Melissa Polusny and Dr. Christopher Erbes, co-directors of the Readiness and Resilience in National Guard Soldiers (RINGS) Research Laboratory at the Minneapolis VA. The ARMOR Project is an extension of the on-going RINGS Study, which was one of the first prospective, longitudinal studies of military personnel ever conducted.

The RINGS Study began in 2006 as an effort to evaluate the longer-term health effects of deployment. More than 3,500 servicemen and servicewomen from the Minnesota and Iowa National Guards volunteered for the RINGS Study, generously sharing their time and commitment. With their help, the RING study has generated over 50 scientific papers and made major contributions to our understanding of the health and well-being of National Guard soldiers and their families following deployment.

In 2017, the ARMOR Study was launched to learn about how soldiers adjust to Basic Combat Training (BCT) experiences and the effects of military training experiences on the brain. An important goal of the ARMOR study is to understand how to better support soldiers’ resilience over their careers. Resilience is the capacity for positive adaptation in the context of significant stress or adversity. Findings from the ARMOR Project can be used to help develop new ways to enhance resilience in people who are at high risk for exposure to highly stressful experiences such as military service members or first responders.