The Military Health System (MHS) is the cornerstone of our military’s medical readiness, ensuring that our service members and their families receive the highest standard of care. In both war and peace, the MHS defends the nation against threats to our health, saves American lives, and restores our warfighters to duty – sometimes in the face of injuries that were once considered life-threatening or career-ending.
Many of our military’s medical facilities are world renowned, with care and medical research that rank among the best in the world. Recently, however, systemic challenges have emerged that threaten the effectiveness and reliability of the MHS.
I recently saw for myself the consequences of neglecting our medical infrastructure. In recent years, investments in the MHS went unfunded. The Obama and Biden administrations prioritized wokeness over readiness. This was done at the expense of our military families and combat readiness. I recently visited Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where aging infrastructure and deferred maintenance due to chronic underfunding led to flooding. I saw for myself that this incident disrupted services and challenged our ability to rapidly mobilize to receive combat casualties. While facility repairs continue, the incident highlights broader vulnerabilities within the MHS – we have too much deferred maintenance and not enough medical personnel to meet the health care demand. Sadly, with a maintenance backlog now exceeding $10 billion across the MHS, Walter Reed isn’t the only at-risk facility.
Thanks to the tireless work of leadership and frontline staff, Walter Reed is once again operating at full capacity. I also directed millions of dollars be urgently applied to address both immediate repairs and long-term investments in the hospital’s infrastructure. These funds will help ensure Walter Reed remains a premier medical institution for our Service members, veterans, and military families. At a recent Fireside Chat with the Walter Reed team, I thanked them for their dedication and took questions, many of which contemplated the future of their medical center and of the Military Health System.
Our team also directed a 30-day assessment to ensure quality and safety across the enterprise, and system-level actions are underway to remedy the recent neglect and prevent similar incidents. Plans are in place to prioritize funding for critical maintenance and modernization projects, ensuring that our medical centers are equipped to provide uninterrupted, high-quality care. However, this is just the beginning of what must be a broader effort to modernize and secure the future of military healthcare.
Our service members deserve the best, and we must act now to deliver on the promise of a health system worthy of their service and sacrifice. Our Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Airmen, and Guardians should not be waiting months for simple procedures. That takes them out of the fight. We have an obligation to provide them with world-class health care that is both convenient and accessible — keeping our fighting forces fit to deploy at a moment’s notice to defend our nation. Young men and women join the military and start military families because the Department of Defense promises to take care of them. Today, I’m sad to say, we have fallen short on that promise.
Recognizing the importance of the MHS to national security and the well-being of our Service members, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth initiated comprehensive reforms to modernize and restore confidence. In his recent Message to the Force, Secretary Hegseth underscored the importance of rapidly fielding emerging technologies and reforming processes to enhance military capabilities. His commitment to modernizing infrastructure and adopting advanced technologies aligns with efforts to improve medical capabilities, like an increased focus on flexible virtual care to support Service members and their families at home and abroad. We must look at ways to simplify the TRICARE beneficiary experience and ensure that our military hospitals are meeting the pace of private-sector care in terms of access, quality, and experience.
We are also taking a step back to assess our medical personnel. Do we have the right staff? Do we have enough people in uniform? Is everyone in the right place? Do we have the right partners?
When Walter Reed experienced flooding, our exceptional teams worked closely across medical facilities within the National Capital Region, with other federal partners like the Veterans Administration, National Institutes of Health, and with the private-sector network in the area to ensure no patients had significant disruptions in care. Integration and partnerships were key to their rapid response, but this is not yet the norm across the Military Health System, and other facilities would not have had the partners to react as swiftly. A renewed focus on partnerships and resource allocation will lead to some hard decisions about who we work with and where we place our people to maximize every dollar spent, but it will also increase our effectiveness and stretch our dollars further. Health care is expensive, and we need to be judicious in our choices and hold ourselves accountable to the taxpayer.
This is not about simply fixing buildings and recruiting more medics — it’s about keeping our promise to those who serve. When you join the military, we promise you community, a mission, a sense of purpose, and that you and your family will be taken care of. If we fail in our mission, how can we expect you to succeed?
The path to reinvesting in the MHS is complex, but with steadfast commitment and decisive action, we will ensure that military medicine remains a pillar of strength in the United States for generations to come. The stakes are too high to accept the status quo — we owe it to our men and women in uniform to get this right.
Darin Selnick is a retired Air Force officer and currently performing the duties of Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness at the Department of Defense.
