APRE

The Army Personnel Research Establishment (APRE) is the British Army's main human factors research unit, located at Farnborough in Hampshire. It became an independent organization in 1965, created by merging the human factors division of the Army Operational Research Establishment (AORE) at West Byfleet with the Clothing and Equipment Physiological Research Establishment (CEPRE). The two components were not fully integrated until August 1972.¹

Structure and Mandate

APRE's research program is determined by the Army Human Factors Research Committee and reviewed by a scientific advisory panel appointed by the Army Personnel Research Committee of the Medical Research Council. The organization is the sole British Army unit concerned with human factors research, with a staff of approximately seventy-five scientists, fifteen industrial staff, six military officers, and thirty other ranks.¹

Its five research sections cover manpower studies, experimental psychology, applied physiology and field trials, weapons and vehicle ergonomics, and a human factors unit. The annual budget was estimated at roughly £500,000, certainly less than £1 million, substantially smaller in scale than comparable American organizations like HumRRO and USARIBSS.¹

Research Priorities

British military psychology research under APRE's umbrella concentrated on four areas: the stress of working in hot, tropical climates, drawing on resources from the London School of Tropical and Hygienic Medicine; attrition and waste in an increasingly small professional army, with selection centralized at Sutton Coldfield; remote-controlled devices for future warfare; and ergonomics of vehicles for chemical or biological warfare conditions.¹

Additional work has been conducted on vigilance, isolation, discipline, and sleep deprivation. By the late 1970s APRE had not yet managed to get psychology recognized as a central element of weapons planning at the highest levels of the Ministry of Defence, though it had been integrated into lower-level hardware decisions since the merging of AORE and CEPRE.¹

Intelligence and Interrogation Connections

The psychiatrists working within the British Army establishment, rather than APRE's psychologists, carry out the more operationally sensitive functions. According to General McGhie, chief army psychiatrist, all British Army psychiatrists are cleared to top security levels and help screen for sensitive posts. They also advise the Special Air Service and other special forces on the effects of drugs, hypnosis, and isolation as used in interrogation, and they train soldiers in resistance to interrogation techniques.¹

The Naval Applied Psychology Unit at Teddington, Middlesex, operates in parallel. It is under a senior psychologist and carries out research on stress resistance using overload methods, as well as isolation studies in Polaris submarine environments. The Naval APU also conducts computer-assisted instruction research.¹