Seligman has equated his work for the Army to assisting the "second largest corporation in the world."
Multimillion-Dollar Contract
Seligman's biggest payday came last year, when the Positive Psychology Center received a three-year, $31 million, no-bid, sole-source Army contract to continue developing the program.
According to Defense Department documents, "the contract action was accomplished using other than competitive procedure because there is only one responsible source and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirement[s]. Services can only be provided from the original source as this is a follow-on requirement for the continued provision of highly specialized services."
In 2009, several months after receiving the green light from Casey to develop the CSF program, the Army paid Seligman's Positive Psychology Center $1 million to begin training hundreds of drill sergeants to become Master Resilience Trainers (MRTs), "certified experts who will advise commanders in the field and design and facilitate unit-level resilience training across the Army."
More than 2,000 MRTs have been trained since CSF was rolled out in October 2009. The Army intends to certify thousands more MRTs.
The Defense Department's justification for the no-bid contract said Seligman's program "possesses unique capabilities, in that, [it is] the only established, broadly effective, evidence-based, train the trainer program currently available which meets the Army's minimum needs."
Seligman's program was "explicitly designed to train trainers (teachers) in how to impart resiliency and whole life fitness skills to others (their students)," the contracting documents state. "Other existent programs are designed to simply teach resiliency directly to participants. The long-term outcomes of [Seligman's program] have been examined in over 15 well documented studies."
"Without the Army's Resiliency Master Trainer Program [as taught by Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania] the exacerbated effects of multiple wars and other stressors result in a weakened corps and this directly impacts the Army's readiness and ultimately compromises the national security of our nation ... This program is vitally important to our forces deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan."
The contracting documents go on to say that "market research ... mostly through a thorough web search and networking with subject matter experts both within the Army, across services and in [academia] into other "positive psychology" programs was conducted between August and October 2008 before the Army decided to award the contract to Seligman because his program met the Army's immediate needs.
Cornum said in July 2009 that similar resiliency tests used by the University of Pennsylvania for the general public would be "militarized" by the Army.
A Difficult Challenge
But according to Griffith, the atheist Army sergeant, the Army did not do enough to remove the religious connotatitions from the spiritual section of the test.
Even Seligman's colleagues acknowledge that attempting to separate spirituality from religion is a challenge.
"Mapping the conceptual distinctions between what we refer to as 'religion' and what we refer to as 'spirituality' can be difficult," wrote Ben Dean in an article published on the University of Pennsylvania's Authentic Happiness web site.
Griffith said there's a simple solution: "Scrap [the] spiritual aspect altogether."
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