When the helicopter is not coming, the plan has to change. MSG Anthony “Tony” Meza, a Special Forces medic who started as a Navy corpsman, tells WarDocs and OpMed TV what that means for surgical teams preparing for the next fight. He spoke with COL (Ret) Douglas W. Soderdahl, MD, at the Defense Strategies Institute Operational Medicine Symposium in San Antonio. From the Sea to Special Forces MSG Meza began as a Navy corpsman, deployed with the Marines as a Fleet Marine Force

CAPT Melissa Austin, MD, never planned to run the nation's flagship military hospital. She planned to be a doctor, and the Navy sent her to sea instead. That detour, and the ones that followed, produced the leader who walked into a quiet Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and set out to fill it again. An Army Father's Advice and a Navy Oiler CAPT Austin earned both Army and Navy ROTC scholarships at Vanderbilt. Her Army father told her she was the better fit for the

WarDocs was provided access to an extended interview with Dr. Johnson that was recorded by colleagues and friends close to the end of his battle with cancer. We honor and celebrate his legacy in this podcast that highlights his perspectives on life and the impact he made on others. From the trenches of West Point Military Academy to the world of ophthalmology and dermatology surgery, Dr. Anthony Johnson's journey is a testament to resilience, ingenuity, and unwavering ded

Military medicine has spent two decades getting very good at the individual patient. COL Donald J. Kosiak, MD, thinks that is exactly the problem. At the Defense Strategies Institute Operational Medicine Symposium in San Antonio, he put the question plainly: what does a physician do with six thousand burn patients? The Eaches Versus the Thousands COL Kosiak calls it the trap of the eaches. A panel will spend an hour on a cold weather injury, a complex burn, a patient who need

Norway fields a small military. It also flew more than 3,500 wounded patients out of Ukraine without losing one in the air. Brig. Gen. Petter Iversen, M.D., who runs that medical service, sat down with WarDocs at the Defense Strategies Institute Operational Medicine Symposium and made an argument the rest of the Alliance needs to hear. The Problem Is Capacity, Not Competence Brig. Gen. Iversen is Surgeon General of the Norwegian Armed Forces and chairs the NATO Committee

Retired Navy Captain Gerard CAPT(Ret) Cox, MD, held the black bag a few seconds from two presidents, ran medical support for the U.S. Fifth Fleet, and walked into the VA Office of the Medical Inspector three months after the worst scandal in that agency's modern history. Thirty years in uniform and nearly eleven more in senior VA leadership gave him an unusual vantage point, and his career argues that the hardest problems in military medicine are cultural, not clinical. An ac