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The book Relax and Win by Bud Winter (a track coach) claims to reveal relaxation techniques developed by him and others for the US military:

Based on mental and physical training methods used to prepare flyers for combat in World War II – techniques that were until recently locked under the heading “classified information” – this step-by-step relaxation program has had amazing results.

This is a mild version of what's claimed in the book, which essentially states that he developed a method to teach Navy pilots to fall asleep in 2-minutes flat, in any pose, while their position is being shelled.

The book itself is a waste of time and has two useful pages which describe the actual "techniques", as described in this article. (Tl;dr: "Relax your muscles and clear your mind."). Everything else is useless filler.

Is there any reason to believe that the army did develop a way to train soldiers to fall asleep in adverse conditions, and if so, was it ever classified?

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    Ww2 soldiers used drugs to fall asleep en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_88 sure try all the possible solutions but I will take the documented, proven method over the secret hippy conspiracy
    – daniel
    Commented Jun 20, 2018 at 8:56
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    Soldiers' ability to sleep has more to do with heavy physical exercise and stress than any magical 'techniques'.
    – BobT
    Commented Jun 20, 2018 at 15:09
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    Test before you dismiss, neh? Half of the described techniques are available for free at the given link, and take very little in the way of time or resources to attempt. I tried it momentarily and found it surprisingly effective. I'm not saying that it's true (that would take a lot more evidence than I have) but it's at least plausible.
    – Ben Barden
    Commented Jun 21, 2018 at 16:29
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    Further data: book was initially published in 1981, primarily leveraging the name of Bud Winter, who appears to have been a wildly successful sprinting coach. Poking around the internet (and judging by the man's age) it's highly likely that he served in some capacity in WWII, and it looks like he had a degree at the time (University of California) - something rare enough that he might well have been placed in the sort of position he described.
    – Ben Barden
    Commented Jun 21, 2018 at 16:50
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    I'd turn this all into an answer, except that unfortunately, I can't really nail down much in the way of super-reliable sources. It's also plausible that half of this was made up out of whole cloth by Bud Winter himself somewhere along the way to make himself look good and sell books. It's just that the original claim isn't exactly crazy. It could very well have worked out exactly like that.
    – Ben Barden
    Commented Jun 21, 2018 at 16:58

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