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Seminar will prepare senior medical leaders for joint operations

The Senior Medical Leader Seminar, a week-long course conducted by USJFCOM's Command Surgeon's Office, began Aug. 9. This year's iteration incorporates major changes to make the instruction more operationally relevant.

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By Jacob Boyer
USJFCOM Public Affairs

(SUFFOLK, Va. - Aug. 9, 2010) -- Medical leadership from the services and coalition and multinational partners will learn the essentials of coordinating medical operations for a joint task force (JTF) during a week-long U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) seminar here this week.

The JTF Senior Medical Leader Seminar, conducted by USJFCOM's Command Surgeon's Office with support from the Joint Training Directorate/Joint Warfighting Center (J7), will familiarize senior medical leaders with joint operations and give them tools to enable medical operations for JTFs, said Navy Rear Adm. Michael H. Mittelman, USJFCOM command surgeon.

"We bring them to USJFCOM and teach them how to interact in a joint task force that goes forward," Mittelman said. "What are you supposed to do? What questions are you supposed to ask when you are part of a joint task force that goes to Haiti or someplace else and you're the doctor?"

Mittelman likened the seminar to the National Defense University's Capstone course for flag and general officers slated to lead JTFs and said his directorate made changes to this year's iteration to make it more relevant for its students. In the past, the seminar consisted largely of lectures.

"Last year was my first SMLS," Mittelman said. "It was death by Powerpoint. They got a lot of substantive information, but adult learners don't learn well that way. [They] need to interact and need to touch. My model for the changes was Capstone. In that class, we broke out in small working groups and did scenario-based training. So this year I directed the staff to break what we had and rebuild it."

One major piece of that rebuilding was adding support from J7. Mittelman said he felt the seminar was not harnessing the support - specifically in the areas of modeling and simulation and mission rehearsal exercises - available to it within USJFCOM. This year, after a couple days of lecture on fundamentals students will work in a simulated JTF.

"We weren't using all of the great assets we have here at this command," Mittelman said. "Look at the Suffolk campus and what we have there. We weren't using it. I wanted to leverage all the modeling and simulations done in Suffolk and present this as an operationally relevant course.

"Officers from our command and others are going to role-play and make it just like a mission rehearsal exercise," he added. "I think people will come out of that with a lot more in their toolboxes."

The lectures will be relevant, though. Mittelman said in addition to the standard principles are taught to leaders preparing to operate in these environments, several high-level medical leaders will brief participants, including representation from the U.S. Surgeon General's Office.

Mittelman said gaining the joint perspective will be invaluable for medical leaders in a variety of environments.

"These are people who going to have to be able to coordinate and communicate all of medical in any given scenario," he said. "Wherever we go, we're not going to fight by ourselves; we're going to fight as a joint force and we're going to fight as a coalition force.

Medical is no different. If you look at what happened in Haiti, we had interagency, joint and coalition medical services. Our medical leadership absolutely has to understand how to work in these venues.

"One of the lessons learned from Haiti is the people who went down there - aside from the great job they did - needed a lot of help, because they didn't understand what they needed to do from that perspective," Mittelman continued. "If they'd had this course, especially the way we've designed it now, it would have been helpful. It's not the be-all, end-all, but it will certainly give them tools to use."