- Peacetime is making US military doctors grossly unprepared for war, a retired Air Force colonel said.
- Col. Jeremy Cannon warned that trauma surgeons aren’t getting enough cases to make them combat-ready.
- There’s been growing concern that only 10% of US military doctors are ready for a peer conflict.
The US military’s surgeons aren’t getting nearly enough experience with trauma patients to be ready for a major war, a former Air Force surgeon warned Congress on Tuesday.
“We’re actively falling into the trap of the peacetime effect,” Ret. Col. Jeremy Cannon said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the state of medical care in the military.
Cannon, who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as a trauma surgeon, warned in his accompanying statement to Congress of a “systematic erosion” of medical readiness while US adversaries grow stronger.
“What is the cost of this erosion? It can be measured in lives lost: one in four battlefield deaths are potentially survivable,” wrote Cannon, who was director of the Defense Department’s sole trauma center for the most severe, or Level One, injuries.
He and other participants at the hearing repeatedly referenced an analysis from Harvard, Rutgers, Deloitte, and military researchers, which found that only 10% of military surgeons were ready for war in 2019 — down from 17% in 2015.
“Projections estimate that a peer conflict could produce as many as 1,000 casualties per day for 100 days straight or more, a scale not seen since World War II,” Cannon said.
“Neither the current MHS nor the civilian sector can absorb this impact,” he added, referring to the Military Health System.
In his testimony, he spoke of a US Army sergeant in Afghanistan who was hit in the chest by a sniper bullet in 2010 but survived after receiving a lung and heart bypass in the field.
Cannon said that with today’s standards, he feared the sergeant would have died instead.
“In Iraq and Afghanistan, it took us three to four years to develop a trauma system in theater and another five to six years to achieve the medical supremacy that allowed us to save Sgt Ramirez,” he wrote in his statement.
“We will not have 10 years in the next war,” he added.
Military doctors are ‘scrounging’ for cases
Cannon urged the US to designate five or six trauma facilities dedicated to severe cases, which would be staffed with military doctors. By funneling more civilian and troop cases to those centers — instead of spreading them across the national system — those surgeons will get regular exposure to treating such injuries, he said.
But meanwhile, many military surgeons are “scrounging around” for enough trauma cases to get experience, he said.
The two other witnesses at the hearing — Ret. Maj. Gen. Paul Friedrichs and Ret. Lt. Gen. Douglas Robb — expressed similar concerns.
“We’ve descoped our facilities to the point where they take care of low-acuity community hospital patients, not trauma patients,” said Friedrichs, who was command surgeon of the Joint Staff in the Pentagon.
All three witnesses called for the US government to see funding for casualty care as an investment for future wars, and not a burdensome expense.
“We must address the elephant in the room, and that’s resourcing,” Friedrichs said.
“The medical inflation rate, on average, since 1938, is 5.1% per year, and the military has seen a net 12% reduction in funding,” he added. “There is no way to fix these problems if the military health system is seen as a bill-payer.”
Friedrichs also warned of vulnerabilities in the US civilian healthcare system, saying that it’s projected to be short of 300,000 nurses and 130,000 doctors by 2035.
“We need to put our foot on the gas,” Cannon said, concurring with Friedrichs. “We don’t have five years, 10 years, 20 years. We need the solution now.”
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