FBI Selects 2 USU Medical Students to Design and Lead Tactical Trauma Training for 50 Agents

Two Uniformed Services University medical students built a drone-era trauma course for the FBI, leading physicians and combat medics.

June 30, 2026 by Zachary Willis

This spring, two Uniformed Services University (USU) medical students, both seasoned prior-service members, led more than 50 FBI SWAT, operational medicine, and field agents through two days of tactical trauma training they had designed themselves. The FBI invited them as "genuine interagency partners rather than passive observers," and the course they built centered on a battlefield problem few American medical teams train for: caring for casualties when drones make evacuation nearly impossible.

The two students, Air Force 2nd Lt. Max Beerbaum, a third-year medical student, and Air Force 2nd Lt. Bryan Sundstrom, ran the event at the FBI's Chicago headquarters last month, directing an instructor cadre of physicians, military medics, and local paramedics. Neither was new to leading under pressure. Both came to USU after years of prior military service that put them in demanding operational settings well before medical school.

The whole thing started with a paper. Beerbaum had published a piece in the Winter 2025 Journal of Special Operations Medicine calling for changes to tourniquet-management guidelines in Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC), part of USU's wider work to improve combat trauma care. He sent a copy to a friend, an FBI agent in Chicago he had worked with while stationed at Fort Bragg. The agent shared it with the director of the FBI's operational medicine division, who asked Beerbaum to come brief it. Beerbaum told them the research grew out of recent casualty data from Ukraine, where drones have gutted the ability to evacuate the wounded. The FBI, already focused on the drone threat, asked whether he could build trauma lanes around it. Then it snowballed.

The University of Chicago's emergency medical services (EMS) fellowship asked to join, and the list of interagency partners kept growing. It was not USU's first work with the Bureau; nursing students trained at the FBI Academy in 2022. For Beerbaum, stepping in to lead federal agents and physicians felt less like a leap than a return to familiar ground.

Years of prior operational experience, he said, had made working alongside partners of that caliber routine, so leading planning meetings with agents and physicians did not feel out of place.

His task, he explained, was to make the event run, not to manage instruction; with a cadre that experienced, the smartest move was to handle logistics and let each expert teach.

"I was once told that leaders should spend 90% of their time doing the things only they can do, and I've tried to embody that for the past decade," Beerbaum said.

A gap the rest of the field has been slow to face

The bigger problem, Beerbaum said, is how limited training remains on operating in drone-contested environments where evacuation may be delayed or impossible. While training programs such as ASSET+ are helping address the challenge, he has interviewed soldiers fighting in Ukraine who say many military medical teams are still adapting to the realities of prolonged casualty care under constant drone surveillance. A MedGlobal report he cited ("New MedGlobal Report Warns Drone Warfare Demands New Models of Medical Response in Ukraine and Beyond," December 11, 2025) notes that surgeons rotating through Ukraine may see only one or two gunshot wounds in an entire rotation, because so much of the fighting is now done by drones. Yet almost no one is training for it. The lessons will not stay in Ukraine, he warns, pointing to reports that Mexican cartel members have traveled there to study drone tactics and that drone activity near the U.S. border is rising.

One Ukrainian soldier put the frustration to him directly.

"All we deal with is drones. And our allies seem to be training for Afghanistan again," the soldier told him.

That warning shaped the keynote Beerbaum delivered on drone warfare and medical adaptations. The single biggest change in a drone-contested fight, he said, is the loss of air superiority-and with it, the ability to evacuate casualties rapidly-which turns a "stabilize and transport" mindset into one built for prolonged casualty care (PCC). Although the injuries themselves are often similar to the complex blast injuries seen during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly dismounted improvised explosive device (IED) blasts, casualties may now remain in place for extended periods because persistent drone threats make movement too dangerous. That means providers must carry more bandages, more tourniquets, more medication, and a plan to sustain patients for hours or even days.

"PCC should be the expectation, not the surprise," Beerbaum said.

He grounds that point in cases that are hard to forget. In a forthcoming Journal of Special Operations Medicine article, he describes a single drone strike on a trench-defense operation that produced five casualties-one of whom needed 18 bandages to control bleeding from shrapnel wounds across his body. The injuries resembled those long associated with complex blast trauma, but the inability to evacuate quickly fundamentally changed how the casualties had to be managed. Afterward, the unit required every soldier to carry two medical kits, each several times the size of a standard military aid kit.

The drone scenario also let the cadre stress a real difference between the two communities they were training. Military medical teams near the point of injury work in non-permissive environments where evacuation may be impossible, while domestic law enforcement teams in a major city can usually count on local EMS and rapid transport. By building an active drone threat into the exercise, the students put FBI teams in conditions they rarely face and gave them a way to plan for prolonged care. Sundstrom, who had developed and run similar field exercises during his prior service, described the divide in terms of environment rather than capability.

"Military medicine teams operating at or near the point-of-injury are in an inherently non-permissive environment," he said. "Therefore, their tactics must adapt to the specific situations they face."

A pediatric casualty, and a culminating test

The course ended with a simulated mass casualty (MASCAL) exercise that added a pediatric patient to a drone-monitored scenario. Pediatric trauma is trained less often than adult trauma, Beerbaum noted, and most tactical loadouts carry no child-sized equipment, which raises stress for even experienced providers. To keep two teams moving through parallel lanes, the cadre leaned on constant communication and the after-action reviews military training does well.

"USUHS and the military are exceptionally good at debriefing to wring value out of every training iteration," Beerbaum said.

For Sundstrom, the larger payoff is joint readiness: getting medical and non-medical personnel training together before the next fight rather than during it.

"Ultimately, in wartime, our role as medical personnel is to limit loss of life and optimize casualty outcomes," he said.

Both students credited the institutional trust behind the trip. They thanked Special Agent Tim Williamson, director of the FBI's operational medicine division, and Special Agent Ian Ankney of the Chicago FBI for the invitation and logistics, along with Dr. Katie Tataris, program director of the University of Chicago's EMS fellowship, and instructors Arthur Ang, a University of Chicago emergency department clinician who also trains military teams, and Harry Miller, a veteran Army medic who trains law enforcement agencies and helped bridge military and law enforcement tactics. At USU, they pointed to the USU Brigade commander, Army Col. Albert Kinkead, who backed sending two students to Chicago, and Dr. Jon Henderson of the Department of Military and Emergency Medicine, who let them plan and run the event end to end.

"I don't know of any other medical school that would place that amount of institutional support and trust in their medical students without hesitation," Beerbaum said.

The FBI has already asked the two to run the course again next year. The trust was rewarded.

What the students built will outlast the two days in Chicago. The skills came from the field exercises and TCCC and PCC instruction at the heart of the USU curriculum, and both men plan to carry the approach into residency and the teams they will one day lead. Somewhere in a future fight, a medic kneeling over a drone-struck casualty with no evacuation coming will need exactly what this course was built to teach.