250 Years of Military Medicine: How USU Helps Carry a Shared Mission Forward

As the Military Health System marks 250 years of military medicine, the Uniformed Services University educates and equips the force.

June 25, 2026 by Zachary Willis

American military medicine has never been the work of one place. It began on July 27, 1775, when the Continental Congress created a medical department for the new Continental Army and named Dr. Benjamin Church its first director. The resolution built a system rather than a single hospital, meant to keep an army of roughly 20,000 in the field. Two hundred fifty years later, the Military Health System (MHS) is marking that anniversary as the country nears its own 250th on July 4, 2026.

Today the MHS is a global network of more than 700 hospitals and clinics, staffed by more than 130,000 military and civilian professionals. The Uniformed Services University (USU) holds its place within that network, educating the uniformed health professionals the services need, and running the military-specific research required for force readiness. It was built to collaborate, placed on the grounds of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, across the street from the National Institutes of Health and minutes from the Army's and Navy's research laboratories. For 250 years, military medicine has moved forward as a team effort. USU is central to that team.

Built Among Partners

The university grew out of a shortage. After World War II, military physicians returned to civilian practice and the career medical corps thinned. Louisiana Congressman F. Edward Hébert spent more than three decades pressing for what he called a "West Point for doctors," a steady supply of physicians who would wear the uniform for a career rather than a single tour. Congress answered with the Uniformed Services Health Professions Revitalization Act, and President Richard Nixon signed it into law on September 21, 1972, directing the creation of a medical school within 25 miles of Washington, D.C., for what is now the Department of War (DoW).

The site was chosen for the company it kept. A board of regents selected 100 wooded acres in Bethesda, next door to the Navy's medical center, a short drive from the Army's research institutes, and across the street from the National Institutes of Health. Students and faculty could work alongside the clinicians and scientists in the country's leading military and federal laboratories. The first class numbered 32 students, who began coursework in 1976 at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology on the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., while the campus was still under construction. The buildings were finished in 1978, classes moved to the new location, and in 1980 the F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine graduated its first 29 physicians. A year before that first commencement, the charter class ran a three-day field exercise at Camp Bullis, Texas, rotating through the roles of field medic, aid-station physician, and mass-casualty provider. That exercise became Operation Bushmaster, still the capstone of a USU medical education today. From 32 students, the university has grown into four schools and more than 15,000 alumni serving across the services.

Those schools arrived as the military's needs widened. The School of Medicine came first, joined in 1993 by the Daniel K. Inouye Graduate School of Nursing, established as the country faced a shortage of advanced-practice nurses. The Postgraduate Dental College followed in 2010 at the request of the services, and the College of Allied Health Sciences was chartered in 2016 to educate, train, and credential the enlisted technicians and specialists the Military Health System relies on every day. Each school answers a different part of the same workforce challenge.

Research and teaching grew together from the start. In 1981, Stephen Huot became the first student to earn a doctorate from USU, an early sign that the university would produce scientists alongside clinicians. The two missions have reinforced each other ever since, with students learning from faculty whose laboratory work feeds straight back into the wards and the field.

Proof That the Model Worked

USU was built to do two things at once: teach military physicians and answer the science questions the force could not outsource. Both produced results early, and rarely alone.

In 1987, the university established its first research center, the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress (CSTS), to study the psychological cost of combat and catastrophe. A decade later, pediatrics faculty Dr. Val Hemming, later dean of the School of Medicine, and Dr. Gerald Fischer developed an antibody against respiratory syncytial virus, a serious lower-respiratory infection in infants. Licensed with support from the Henry Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine as the drug Synagis, it went on to protect premature babies worldwide. A military medical school had produced a therapy that changed civilian pediatrics.

USU's Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute (AFRRI) offered another kind of proof. After the anthrax-letter attacks in October 2001, AFRRI scientists helped determine the radiation doses needed to kill anthrax spores and make the U.S. mail safe. A decade later, during the 2011 response to the Fukushima Daiichi reactor accident, an AFRRI advisory team guided U.S. commanders in Japan on radiation safety for service members, their families, and civilians, working in coordination with the Government of Japan. When the worst happens, somebody has to know the numbers. USU helped make sure the military did.

The university's people answered the call directly, too. In the hours after the September 11, 2001 attacks, hundreds of USU graduates responded at the Pentagon, in New York, and at the Dover Port Mortuary, then helped manage the anthrax mailings that followed that fall. The classroom and the laboratory were never far from the field.

Science at the Speed of the Battlefield

The clearest measure of military medicine's progress is survival, and that gain has been a shared achievement. Today, wounded American service members survive their injuries at the highest rates in recorded history, due in part to work USU graduates and faculty helped pioneer, refine and teach. Retired Navy Capt. Dr. Frank Butler, who spearheaded the creation of Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC), reshaped how troops control bleeding in the first minutes after injury, standardizing the tourniquet use now credited with saving thousands of limbs and lives. Building on that foundation, USU alumnus Dr. Russ Kotwal demonstrated through his groundbreaking work with the 75th Ranger Regiment that disciplined application of evidence-based prehospital trauma care could drive preventable combat deaths toward zero, transforming battlefield medicine and influencing trauma systems worldwide. In 2025, Butler received the Presidential Citizens Medal, and that same year USU certified all of its military medical students to the highest tier of TCCC training.

Other wounds are harder to see, which is the point of current USU work on traumatic brain injury (TBI). Dr. Dan Perl, a professor of pathology and director of the Department of War/USU Brain Tissue Repository, has dedicated his work to understanding the long-term effects of TBI. Through the collaborative repository-the only one in the world exclusively dedicated to military personnel-researchers examine the physical evidence of blast injuries and conditions like chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Other USU researchers are using dynamic magnetic resonance imaging to study TBI in motion, looking for ways to make a hidden injury visible on a scan. The aim is a diagnosis a clinician can act on rather than infer.

The discovery work reaches well beyond the battlefield. A USU-developed monoclonal antibody, 1F5, was named a top global innovation by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations for its protection against the deadly Nipah and Hendra viruses, building on a long line of infectious disease research in the university's laboratories. In the operational domain, the Daniel K. Inouye Graduate School of Nursing introduced the first program of its kind to educate and train clinical nurse specialists for aeromedical evacuation, the intensive-care conditions of a moving aircraft. Moving critical patients in unpressurized or high-vibration cabins carries physiological risks a ground hospital never faces, and the program prepares nurses to manage them. The science follows the warfighter wherever the warfighter goes.

That responsiveness showed at scale in 2020. As COVID-19 spread, USU's medical and nursing students graduated a month early to reinforce military health care teams, while university researchers joined a multi-service study, known as EPICC, that tracked how the virus moved through the force. Their findings drew recognition at the Military Health System Research Symposium, the enterprise's main venue for sharing results across the services. A pandemic, like a battlefield, rewards a system that can move together.

Breadth is part of the design. Beyond combat casualty care, USU faculty study the long arc of military life. The Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress, the university's oldest research center, continues to shape how the force approaches trauma and suicide prevention, work that earned its longtime leader, Dr. Robert Ursano, a national lifetime service award in 2025.

Faculty cancer research drew recognition the same year, when Dr. Craig Shriver received the Carol Johns Medal. USU's cancer research portfolio extends significantly further through the Murtha Cancer Center Research Program (MCCRP). Established to study cancer across the military population, MCCRP played a prominent role in the White House Cancer Moonshot initiative to accelerate the pursuit of a cure. The center also leads the Applied Proteogenomics Organizational Learning and Outcomes (APOLLO) network, which collaborates with USU's Center for Military Precision Health (CMPH)-the university's genomics center-to pinpoint specific cancers and develop highly targeted treatments.

Much of this depends on the university's internal centers, such as the Infectious Disease Clinical Research Program, which connect USU laboratories to clinics and patient data across the services. This dedication to research excellence has earned USU seven consecutive Federal Laboratory Consortium awards for technology transfer.

A Force-Built Pipeline

USU's other product is people, and the university has invested in the expectation that some of its best physicians will come from inside the enlisted ranks. The Enlisted to Medical Degree Preparatory Program (EMDP2) gives promising enlisted members a path to medical school, and the results read like the force itself: a former street paramedic who decided saving lives was only the start, or an Army soldier who earned a doctorate in medical entomology and a commission to fight the insects that carry disease into deployed units. Combat experience is becoming a credential.

Based at a partner campus, George Mason University, the EMDP2 program reflects a wider bet the Military Health System has made on meritocracy: that judgment earned under pressure in the field translates into better medicine at the bedside. Each year it widens the path from the enlisted force into the officer corps of military medicine.

The MHS workforce pipeline now draws from programs ranked among the nation's best. In 2026, the Graduate School of Nursing's nurse anesthesia program was ranked first in the country for the third year running, and its Doctor of Nursing Practice program placed in the top five percent nationally with a perfect first-time board certification pass rate. In 2025, nearly 300 uniformed and civilian health professionals graduated, among them the university's first U.S. Coast Guard-sponsored medical graduate. Incoming students are training with new tools as well; the School of Medicine's Class of 2028 began folding artificial intelligence into its coursework under an ethical structure the university built to govern how the technology enters research and the classroom.

The people who come through these programs carry military medicine well beyond the clinic. USU alumna retired Navy Rear Adm. Eleanor "Connie" Mariano served as White House physician to three presidents. Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas Travis, a 1986 School of Medicine graduate, along with five other USU alumni, went on to serve as their service's surgeon general. Two more graduates became NASA astronauts: Army physician Frank Rubio, whose 371-day mission set the U.S. record for the longest single spaceflight, and Army physician Andrew Morgan who holds the U.S. record for the most spacewalks during a single spaceflight, totaling 45 hours and 48 minutes. The same university that staffs a forward aid station also reaches the White House and low Earth orbit.

Where USU Is Heading

USU's direction came into focus in May 2026, when the university merged three of its performance and rehabilitation programs into a single Center for Advanced Research for Military Optimization, Readiness, and Rehabilitation (ARMORR). Led by Dr. Paul Pasquina, ARMORR is designed to follow a service member across the whole span of care, from preventing injury, to diagnosing it accurately and early, to advanced treatment and recovery. The center was built for partnership, working with federal agencies, academic institutions, industry, and allied nations on shared health problems.

ARMORR draws on decades of work from its three founding programs. The Consortium for Health and Military Performance built its name on human performance, from nutrition and psychological resilience to preventing heat-related illness. The Center for Rehabilitation Sciences Research advanced severe-trauma care, including the prosthetics and amputee rehabilitation that have helped wounded service members regain their footing. Musculoskeletal Injury Rehabilitation Research for Operational Readiness concentrated on the injuries that remain a leading cause of lost duty days and medical non-deployability across the force. The university also led an international effort to standardize how those injuries are reported, producing a common standard now used well beyond the U.S. military.

Pasquina describes the merger as a way to move research faster while opening it to the next generation of providers.

"By bringing these teams together, we hope to foster collaboration and accelerate research to advance the health and readiness of service members, while also expanding our education efforts to future military medicine and science leaders," Pasquina said.

That collaborative model runs through the university's newest work. The National Institute for Defense Health Cooperation is concentrating USU's global health and disaster-response efforts, and the Val G. Hemming Institute will join clinical simulation with health-professions education, named for the same Dr. Val Hemming whose RSV antibody work reached families worldwide. At the cellular level, investigators are measuring the protein biomarkers released during a brain injury, the molecular evidence of a hit that a helmet camera would miss. The earliest work and the newest now point the same direction.

The promise is specific. It means a combat medic far from a hospital could one day confirm a brain injury from a drop of blood before a soldier ever reports symptoms, and a wounded service member could begin rehabilitation on a plan shaped by the lab down the hall.

When the Continental Congress started a military health system in 1775, it could not have pictured a brain injury found in a drop of blood, a nurse running an intensive-care unit at 20,000 feet, or an enlisted medic rising to physician-scientist. It set only the charge: keep the force healthy enough to fight, and bring its people home. Two hundred fifty years later, that charge still guides the Uniformed Services University and the Military Health System it serves. The mission has not changed. The tools have.

For a fuller history of the university itself, see USU News' 50th-anniversary timeline.