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| As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1992, General Colin Powell wrote the following in his introduction to The National Military Strategy of the United States. |
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The community of nations has entered into an exciting and promising new era. Global war is now less likely and the US national security strategy reflects that fact. The National Military Strategy reflects this new world and guides US military planning . . . . For most of the past 45 years the primary focus of our national military strategy has been containment of the Soviet Union and its communist ideology . . . [however, now] the Soviet Union has ceased to exist and communism has collapsed as an ideology and as a way of life. [Yet,] certain realities remain—the United States is looked to for world leadership, . . . and future threats to U.S. interests are inherent in the uncertainty and instability of a rapidly changing world. We can meet the challenges of the foreseeable future with a much smaller force than we have had in recent years. . . . A Total Force - A Joint Force. |
"So what?" a military medical practitioner or planner might ask. "What does this have to do with me?" Quite a bit actually. Our new strategic landscape has broadened the continuum within which U.S. military forces are now—and will continue to be—employed. Although U.S. forces will continue to be stationed throughout the world, troops deploying from the continental United States will cool most operational hot spots.. Just a few short years ago, who would have thought that despite a drastic reduction in personnel and equipment, U.S. forces would deploy to Iraq, much less Somalia, the Balkans, or Haiti? Clearly, U.S. forces are more likely to continue to serve and become casualties in a far wider range of locales than at almost any previous time. This increased activity with reduced forces demands that operations be conducted jointly to maximize our limited resources. It is increasingly likely that, with little notice, you and other relatively junior and inexperienced medical officers will be assigned as joint task force surgeons or as key members of joint task force medical staffs. As such your commander will expect you to understand not only the medical doctrine of your service but also those of your sister services as well. You will also be expected to understand medical regulating, casualty evacuation systems, and the overarching joint blood management program. The health and well-being of the force you deploy with will depend upon your knowledge of the joint medical system.Many of you may find yourselves in such positions with little training and minimal experience. Where can you turn? Certainly, doctrines, policies, and procedures exist in hundreds of manuals, pamphlets, instructions, regulations, and handbooks, and the Internet provides scores of sites that may or may not contain pertinent information. The unwieldy volume and uneven distribution of this data have resulted in a lack of readily accessible, concise, operational medical information. What you need is a survival guide to help ensure both your personal success as a medical staff officer and, more importantly, the optimum medical support for each and every U.S. military operation. And that is the intent of this document about our military medical system. It makes no claim to be the be all and end all of military medical planning, but it does provide the basic information you need to start the medical planning process. |
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