Commander's Blog

I'm sure many of us are hopeful that a new Defense budget will be passed later this month, so we may continue with our great USAMMDA mission of protecting and preserving the health of our Service Members throughout the world. Our work remains very important to our national defense, and our unique, dedicated team lies at the heart of this critical effort. I'm genuinely impressed with the amount of talented individuals we have on staff, and sometimes I feel it's not very fair to the other commands. Recently, I visited a session of our Emerging Leaders program, and I was awestruck by the level of enthusiasm and engagement I saw in the classroom. This type of passion makes it very easy for me to come to work each day, and I can't thank you enough for your amazing patriotism – it truly is contagious!

As I've often said, I always appreciate input, comments and suggestions from our team members, and this week I was pleased to receive some great questions from the staff. Although I can't answer all of them within the space of this blog, I encourage you to keep your questions coming, as we can also address these at our Town Hall meetings as well as in future blogs.

A number of questions I received were related to the Army's current efforts to speed up the acquisition process, and how this may affect the way we do business at USAMMDA, so I think we should hone in on this important topic. Well, the Army is certainly looking to streamline and compress the time it takes from requirement to delivery of product to our Warfighters. However, our command already tailors its programs to deliver capabilities as quickly as possible, and we always use the flexibility we're given to ensure we remain good stewards of government funds. To shed more light on this, we should consider our country's 2018 National Defense Strategy put forth by U.S. Secretary of Defense, James Mattis. Per this guide, General Mattis details the DOD's intent to "continue to leverage the scale of [its] operations to drive greater efficiency in procurement of materiel and services while pursuing opportunities to consolidate and streamline contracts in areas such as logistics, information technology, and support services." He further states that a "rapid, iterative approach to capability development will reduce costs, technological obsolescence, and acquisition risk."

Without question, some key terms in these statements refer directly to our USAMMDA mission, as well as those of Army Medicine and USAMRMC – and expediting the acquisition process is certainly a primary focus. Therefore, it's imperative that we continue to control the things placed in our scope of responsibility, which includes properly managing taxpayer dollars and producing safe, effective products as quickly as possible. While we may discover innovative ways to do these things, we also have to work with other agencies, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, so our timelines may be contingent on those of other groups. With regard to the FDA, although it is growing more supportive of the DOD's mission and looking to speed up some of its processes for us, we still can't rush our own advanced development process, because the safety and efficacy of our products will always remain paramount over anything else we do.

So, the bottom line is, we'll always strive for speed and efficiency throughout our programs, but safety trumps all, as the health and welfare of our Warfighters must come first. This is the way USAMMDA does business – now and always – and I think we've developed a solid reputation built on this enduring trait!

Finally, I would like to remind everyone that our "Spring Cleaning Day" will be held on March 22, so this is our opportunity to throw out those old regulation books from 1985! Also, the Social Committee will offer a lunch option that we'll serve in-house, with the proceeds benefitting our Organizational Day this summer.

Let's always remember that we're saving lives with everything we do here at USAMMDA!

COL Ryan Bailey