Sea Power - June 2017

Combat Survival
in the Maritime Domain
NAVY’S SURGEON GENERAL SHIFTS FOCUS TO SAVING LIVES IN NAVAL COMBAT
What are Navy Medicine’s primary roles?

FAISON: We are coming out of the nation’s longest war and back to a world where we didn’t get a peace dividend. A large percentage of the Navy is forward deployed or stationed forward on any given day, on point to rapidly respond. The Navy is an expeditionary force for rapid response no matter where crises occurs in the world — whether political, humanitarian assistance or disaster relief.

My job is to do two things: No. 1, keep the Navy healthy and on the job and keep their families healthy, because you can’t worry about your job if you’re worried about your family. No. 2 is to keep the medical force ready to go forward tonight if called upon to save lives, to protect the force, keep them alive and, ultimately, return them home safely to their families.

What are your top strategic priorities?

FAISON: The first is readiness, which has two components. The first is the readiness of the force. Our Navy today is the most highly trained, specialized, educated Navy our nation has ever had. When I was a lieutenant, there might have been 10-15 guys on my ship who could do a particular job. Today, because of specialization in the systems on ships, and the length of our training pipelines, there might be two or three. Every Sailor is important to the mission.

The second component is to keep the medical force ready. We have the highest combat survival in history. If you had a survivable injury on the battlefield in OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom] and OEF [Operation Enduring Freedom], toward the end of that conflict, you had well over a 90 percent chance of survival. That’s unprecedented in the history of military medicine.

If you look at the causes of that, there were three. The first was the amazing, heroic performance of our young corpsmen who went forward under fire at great personal peril to themselves to stabilize and resuscitate casualties and rapidly evacuate

As surgeon general of the Navy and chief of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, VICE ADM. FORREST FAISON

is responsible for keeping the Navy and Marine Corps and their families healthy, and the Navy’s medical force ready to deploy forward to save lives.

With a specialty in neurodevelopmental pediatrics, he has acquired a broad range of experience in hospitals and other medical facilities — with the Fleet Marine Force, with telemedicine, on a cruiser and with an amphibious group.

He has commanded the Naval Hospital at Camp Pendleton, Calif.; the U.S. Expeditionary Medical Facility and U.S. Medical Task Force, Kuwait; and Navy Medicine West and the Naval Medical Center San Diego. He coordinated the Navy’s medical response to the 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster in Japan as part of Operation Tomodachi.

From 2013 to 2015, Faison served as the deputy surgeon general of the Navy and deputy chief, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. He assumed duty as the 38th surgeon general of the Navy on Dec. 15, 2015. His priorities are readiness of the medical force, maintain-ing the health of Sailors, Marines and their families, and expanding partnerships with government agencies and academia to tackle tough medical challenges.