A game theoretic approach to threat intent inference In the adversarial military environment, it is important to efficiently and promptly predict the enemy’s tactical intent from the lower level spatial and temporal information. In this paper, we propose a decentralized Markov game (MG) theoretic approach to estimate the belief of each possible enemy COA (ECOA), which is utilized to model the a...

OBJECTIVE To determine if premature discharge from the US Air Force was associated with the smoking status of recruits. DESIGN AND SETTING A total of 29 044 US Air Force personnel recruited from August 1995 to August 1996 were administered baseline behavioural risk assessment surveys during basic military training. They were tracked over a 12 month period to determine those who were premature...

OBJECT Penetrating spinal injury (PSI), although an infrequent injury in the civilian population, is not an infrequent injury in military conflicts. Throughout military history, the role of surgery in the treatment of PSI has been controversial. The US is currently involved in 2 military campaigns, the hallmark of both being the widespread use of various explosive devices. The authors reviewed ...

BACKGROUND Stress fractures are overuse injuries that historically afflict a large number of military recruits, likely because of the sudden increase of high-intensity activity, such as running and marching. CASE A 23-year-old male U.S. Air Force recruit presented with hip pain during his second week of basic training and was diagnosed with bilateral femoral neck stress fractures, grade 4 on ...

But most of us don’t realize that despite a 36 percent drop in total DOD energy use during 1990–99, chiefly due to force reduction, around $5+ billion of the military budget buys energy. Most of DOD’s five billion gallons of annual petroleum use fuels weapons platforms—land, sea, and air— that are manifestly inefficient. To add a little irony, much of the fuel used by the military is exhausted ...

More than 50,000 active-duty U.S. Air Force (USAF) service members, retirees, and family members with diabetes receive care at more than 50 military treatment facilities (MTFs) throughout the continental United States.1 Although many of these patients are referred to civilian network diabetes specialists because of a scarcity of military endocrinologists, most are managed by USAF primary care p...

This paper examines the relationship, often claimed as beneficial, between war and advances in medicine and surgery. Some of the conflicting opinions that have been expressed are discussed. Military medicine in general is conservative and non-innovative. Some medical advances have indeed originated in war, but many other efforts were failures and are forgotten. The application of others is limi...

Heat illness is a major source of injury for military populations in both deployed and training settings. Developing tools to help leaders enhance unit performance while reducing the risk of injury is of paramount importance to the military. Here, we review our recent systems biology approaches to heat stress in order to develop a 3-dimensional (3D) realistic thermoregulation model, identify th...

This final overarching study in a series documents research and recommendations RAND offered to the Air Force to help strengthen the development of a new office responsible for monitoring and promoting resilience among Air Force Airmen, civilian employees, and Air Force families. Efforts to boost resilience have become an important military response to suicide and other markers of distress and ...

BACKGROUND The US military is currently involved in large, lengthy, and complex combat operations around the world. Effective military operations require optimal health of deployed service members, and both mental and physical health can be affected by military operations. METHODS Baseline data were collected from 77,047 US service members during 2001-2003 as part of a large, longitudinal, po...