In this article, we provide an overview of key international guidelines governing the supply of pharmaceuticals during disasters and complex emergencies. We review the World Health Organization's guidelines on pharmaceutical supply chain management and highlight their relevance for military humanitarian assistance missions. Given the important role of pharmaceuticals in addressing population he...

There is growing evidence that modern missions have added stresses and ethical complexities not seen in previous military operations and that there are links between battlefield stressors and ethical lapses. Military ethicists have concluded that the ethical challenges of modern missions are not well addressed by current military ethics educational programs. Integrating the extant research in t...

The military has always been a very heavy user and innovative developer of modeling techniques and technologies. The nature of military missions requires that they rehearse missions in order to better understand their complex interactions and to estimate outcomes. This need has led them to apply modeling and simulation to a number of different activities over the last 300 years. In this chapter...

During the past decade, the United States military has supported continuous deployments of forces around the world, often on very short notice and for prolonged duration, to meet the needs of a wide range of peacekeeping and humanitarian missions or major contingency operations. These deployments have come from a smaller force based closer to home. The pattern of varied and fast-breaking region...

Robots are used increasingly to execute dangerous tasks and military missions. Autonomous robots are the warriors of the future, executing missions without requiring continuous supervision. Multimodal interfaces are the interfaces of the future in which speech, gestures, gaze, and other modalities are combined to provide a natural way for humans to communicate with machines. In this thesis I pr...

Defence organizations have to meet the challenge of a changed focus in military missions towards asymmetric and irregular warfare and Stability, Security, Transition and Reconstruction (SSTR) operations. A range of operations (e.g., psychological operations, humanitarian missions) are performed in a large variety of locations and cultures (e.g., Africa, Asia). In this type of mission, influenci...

The US military conducts missions that range from major ground combat operations to disaster and humanitarian relief efforts. A primary goal of military medical professionals is disease prevention, which can be made more difficult in the context of short preparation times and prolonged deployment duration. The military uses a 6-component approach to deployment medicine, emphasizing preparation,...