Navy Medicine Shifts to Expeditionary Focus, Prepares for Future Fight

The order directs actions across the enterprise and with key stakeholders to ensure trained, equipped, certified, maintained, and sustained medical forces and units capable of supporting the Joint and Naval force.

The order states Navy medical forces must be ready to project medical power in support of the warfighter across the full range of military operations. As such, the order prioritizes support of distributed maritime operations, expeditionary advanced basing operations, and logistics operations in a contested environment.

"This order reflects a foundational change to how our entire enterprise operates as we transform to better meet combatant commander and component commander requirements for the warfighter; this is our North Star" said U.S. Navy Surgeon General, Rear Adm. Bruce Gillingham. "We are taking this urgent action because our Naval Forces are operating in contested battlespaces that are quickly growing in lethality, complexity, and scope - and we must be ready now for the next fight."

The campaign order follows several organizational changes already implemented at the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery and its subordinate commands, Navy Medical Forces Atlantic, Navy Medicine Pacific, and Navy Medical Forces Support Command. These changes include the establishment of a Maritime Headquarters (MHQ) and Maritime Operations Center (MOC) construct at each command.

"This change is designed to ensure that our organization is aligned to our key stakeholders and is postured with manned, trained, equipped and certified units to support the Fleet and Fleet Marine Force in the most austere maritime conditions we have seen since WWII," said Cmdr. Kathleen Dagher, deputy director of Naval Medicine's Operational Design Task Group.

Through coordinated, enterprise-wide efforts synchronized across the Navy and Marine Corps, Navy Medicine will focus on effectiveness in force development and force generation to assure readiness for strategic competition, crisis, and conflict.

"As the nature of potential future conflict evolves, Navy Medicine must evolve with it. Our ability to project medical power in support of Naval superiority requires everyone's best effort," said Gillingham. "I'm proud of what our people have accomplished, and I am fully confident that our highly-trained medical professionals will be ready for the future fight. On a Sailor or Marine's worst day, we have to be at our best."

Navy Medicine - comprised of approximately 54,000 highly-trained military and civilian health care professionals - provides enduring expeditionary medical support to the warfighter on, below, and above the sea, and ashore.