See sooner
Move from reaction to anticipation.
Use responsible, unit-level evidence to help leaders recognize patterns they might otherwise miss.
An independent military prevention research collaborative.
Mission Prevent& Protect MP2
Better evidence. Earlier action. Stronger protection for servicemembers.
Harmful behaviors take lives, fracture families and teams, and erode military readiness. MP2 brings leaders, practitioners, and researchers together to understand risk, strengthen protective conditions, and help formations act before a crisis becomes a tragedy.
Unit-level insight · Human judgment · Preventive action
Protect people
Strengthen teams
Support leaders
Advance prevention
01 The mission
Protect servicemembers before harm escalates.
Military leaders are often asked to respond after a harmful event has already occurred. Prevention starts earlier: recognizing changing conditions inside units, listening closely, and connecting people to the right support at the right time.
Our purpose: connect military leaders, researchers, clinicians, prevention practitioners, and data experts to generate, test, preserve, and translate evidence that helps formations prevent suicide and other harmful behaviors before crises occur.
The technology can surface a signal. People must supply context, care, accountability, and judgment.
Act wisely
Turn warning into understanding.
Pair analysis with conversations, local knowledge, and professional expertise before choosing a response.
Learn continuously
Make prevention cumulative.
Study what helps, what does not, and what causes unintended harm—then share those lessons with the field.
02 How we work
Connect evidence to action.
MP2 is built to help a dispersed field work as a learning system—rigorous enough for researchers, practical enough for leaders, and accountable to the people it exists to protect.
01
Connect
Bring together military leaders, practitioners, researchers, clinicians, data stewards, and people with lived experience around shared prevention problems.
02
Study
Sponsor rigorous pilots, replications, and evaluations that examine outcomes, implementation, and unintended effects.
03
Preserve
Keep useful measures, methods, code, and findings accessible so hard-won learning survives turnover and can be tested again.
04
Equip
Translate credible research into decision briefs, convenings, and tools that help leaders focus attention and support responsibly.
03 Prevention in practice
A signal matters only when it leads to care.
MP2 grows from years of field research on harmful behaviors, organizational culture, readiness, and human performance. Across that work, one lesson is consistent: data should inform leadership, never replace it.
Unit-level warning signals can help leaders direct scarce time and attention. But a responsible prevention system also requires diagnosis, tailored support, follow-through, and honest evaluation.
- 1SeeUse minimum-necessary data to recognize changing unit conditions.
- 2UnderstandCombine evidence with leader sensing and local context.
- 3SupportFocus care and resources on the unit’s actual needs.
- 4LearnMeasure outcomes, burdens, uncertainty, and unintended effects.
04 Research principles
Protect people in the work—and through the work.
Credible prevention demands rigorous methods, explicit limits, careful stewardship, and respect for every person represented in the evidence.
Prevention, not prediction
Study modifiable organizational conditions and protective factors—not who an algorithm claims may cause harm.
Support, not surveillance
Use unit-level or deidentified information by default. Never build individual risk scores for adverse personnel action.
Minimum necessary data
Collect and retain only what a responsible research or prevention purpose truly requires.
Transparent evidence
Share uncertainty, null results, model drift, implementation failure, and credible alternative explanations.
Independent inquiry
Protect research questions and findings from sponsor, donor, vendor, or command pressure.
Human judgment
Put leaders, practitioners, and people with lived experience at the center of interpretation and action.
05 Selected research
The work behind the mission.
These public articles trace a practical research agenda: know the unit, find useful signals, strengthen protective conditions, and turn analysis into responsible leader action.
Protecting Soldiers, Preventing Harmful Behaviors, and Boosting Combat Readiness—with Data
The clearest statement of the prevention mission: use unit-level evidence to help leaders intervene earlier while preserving human judgment.
Read the articleCan We Predict Soldier Harmful Behaviors?
The predictive base model for understanding short-term unit-level incident patterns—not an individual risk score.
Read the paperTaking a Data-Centric Approach to Unit Readiness
A field-tested method for turning operational questions and messy data into decision-relevant insight.
Read the articleWhat Can We Learn from Measuring Unit Culture?
Evidence on how culture, inspiration, and leader behavior relate to cohesion, performance, and harmful behaviors.
Read the articleCan Biometric Data Make Units More Combat Ready?
A case for using human-performance data carefully to inform training, recovery, and leader decisions.
Read the article