Military-Civilian Partnerships Augment Civilian Disaster Response for the National Disaster Medical System

Introduction Military-Civilian Partnerships are a growing solution to both sustain military medical skills and share crisis response lessons learned. These partnerships often receive support from the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), which also oversees the National Disaster Medical System (NDMS). Given the unique austere medical training and geographic dispersion of military personnel across the country, these military-civilian partnerships hold potential untapped utility for the NDMS. The United States Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) and Advocate Health maintain a military civilian partnership (MCP) for the sustainment of mission critical wartime medical readiness skills. Materials and Methods The military civilian partnership utilized a developmental “crawl, walk, and run” approach through didactics, clinical integration, and joint training exercises in order to integrate military personnel into a real-world NDMS response. Results The United States Army Special Operations Command-Advocate Health military-civilian partnership demonstrated the inaugural utilization of an MCP during a domestic disaster response to Hurricane Helene in October 2024. The mobilized team included emergency medicine, nursing, anesthesia, and surgery while providing resuscitative and surgical support over 6 days. Conclusions Military personnel are uniquely trained in mass casualties, austere medicine, and medical operations planning that hold the potential to support the NDMS in a federal response to a homeland disaster. This pilot program suggests that there are robust future opportunities to improve resilience of the domestic disaster system. Ongoing efforts should be directed towards formalizing the processes to incorporate military-civilian partnerships in disaster response, scaling MCP disaster training nationally, and exercising the movement of combat casualties en masse to civilian trauma centers.