Health security

Pentagon Plans Massive Reorganization of Military Medicine

MILITARY SURGEONS WHO have criticized the Pentagon for failing to deploy them in busy settings where they can maintain their readiness to care for injured troops, say the Department of Defense is instead planning to cut their jobs.

The proposed job cuts are part of a massive reorganization of military medicine that will, for the first time, wrest control of military hospitals and clinics from the Surgeons General of the Army, Navy and Air Force and consolidate them under the command of the Defense Health Agency, created in 2013 to better coordinate military medical care. The handover of military hospitals and clinics is set to begin in October.
The Surgeons General will retain control only over field hospitals and deployed medical personnel — and they are scrambling to justify the need to retain those units. Surgeons, for their part, are furiously trying to demonstrate their value in forward combat units and other deployed settings.

"Understand that a lot of people we work with are going to be frustrated and possibly without jobs in the near future," one surgeon briefed on the plan wrote in an unclassified briefing memo obtained by U.S. News.