The Military Health System must remain focused on its core purpose: ensuring warfighters are ready, lethal, and supported by a highly effective medical system.
Speaking at the 2026 MHS Conference in Dallas May 27, Keith Bass, the assistant secretary of war for health affairs, outlined his priorities to the capacity crowd of 2,600. While acknowledging that the MHS is one of the nation’s largest and most complex healthcare networks — serving 9.5 million beneficiaries on a $68 billion budget — Bass made it clear that clinical metrics are not the ultimate measure of success.
“Most people say our main mission is to provide high-quality healthcare — but our mission is readiness,” he emphasized.
Since taking the oath of office Jan. 12, 2026, he has toured military hospitals, walked clinic hallways, and listened directly to the line personnel, senior leaders, and policy advisors who keep the system running. The feedback has been invaluable, he said, with funding and staffing at the top of the list.
With the costs of pharmaceuticals, care delivery, and deployment operations climbing, Bass sees his role as a fierce advocate to protect the MHS budget.
“We know the cost of medical care in general is high,” he noted. “So how do we continue to sustain our current operations with our current funding?”
The answer, Bass said, is working with senior leaders across the enterprise and Congress to prioritize funding to meet warfighter needs and determine efforts to enhance operational readiness.
Staffing policies
With a worldwide workforce numbering about 130,000, staffing shortages rank high on his list, with the enterprise currently short about 28,000 personnel worldwide.
“We must bring the right people into the right jobs at the right time,” Bass stressed, noting the enterprise must contend more effectively with nonmilitary healthcare institutions — which can hire quickly and offer higher pay.
To help fix this, Bass called on leaders to change outdated policies, where possible, that stretch the onboarding process over months, causing the MHS to lose top-tier clinicians while they wait for paperwork to clear. He also emphasized while recruiting matters, retention is just as important. Ensuring competitive pay, robust training, and a high quality of life are non-negotiable if the MHS expects to keep its world-class doctors, nurses, and medics, he said.
Facility upkeep
The MHS currently manages over 3,000 buildings spanning 84 million square feet. With an aging infrastructure and a $17 billion backlog in deferred maintenance, physical plants are becoming operational liabilities. Bass noted that when he visits military hospitals and clinics, he has no interest in seeing freshly painted administrative spaces or prepped tour routes.
“Tell me what’s broke,” Bass said candidly. “What’s not working that we need to look at.”
He’ll push for a plan to improve infrastructure. “We owe it to our patients, and we owe it to our staff,” he said.
Partnerships and future readiness
To keep military medical skills sharp between conflicts, Bass highlighted the critical role of civilian-military partnerships. He pointed to successful initiatives like the collaboration between Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and Kaiser Permanente, which allows military neurosurgeons to maintain high-repetition, complex skills by treating civilian patients in the Bethesda, Maryland, center.
“You don’t fight the next war like you fight the last war,” Bass said. “We have to adapt. We have to make sure we’re ready, we’re prepared, and it should be a steady state of readiness.”
By driving strategic investments into combat support assets — including the blood program, the joint trauma system, and medical logistics — Bass said the No. 1 focus is ensuring the medical enterprise directly enhances the lethality of the joint force.
“You cannot separate lethality and medical capability from medical readiness,” he emphasized. “You have to have medical readiness to support lethality and military capability.”