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Former DHA commander reflects on 36-year career as ‘a flight doc’

  • Published
  • By Health.mil Staff
  • Communications Division, Defense Health Agency
FALLS CHURCH, Va. --  Many times, we plan to take one path, but life sends us down another. That certainly was the case for the first director of the Defense Health Agency (DHA), Air Force Lt. Gen. Douglas Robb, who now heads off to retirement after a 36-year career in military medicine.

“I wanted to be a fighter pilot and major in engineering,” said Robb, discussing when he was first admitted to the Air Force Academy 40 years ago. “But my eyes went bad, and I wasn’t enjoying engineering. So I had to come up with a plan B,” he laughed.

That plan B took him down a path of medicine, admitting he never thought about being a doctor but liked biology in high school. “I thought, maybe I can be a flight surgeon and still fly in jets.”

After the academy, he attended medical school and eventually achieved his goal of becoming a flight surgeon. But he said that initial ambition to be a fighter pilot put him in a mindset to be mission and operationally focused. He still carries that mission focus with him.

“While my squadron mates were going off to be pilots, I’d get to be a flight doc who takes care of my buds,” he said. “When someone comes up to me and says, ‘You got me back on flying status,’ or, ‘My son’s alive today because you took care of our family,’ that’s something. I hope I’ve made a difference in my patients’ lives. And I hope I’ve helped our up-and-coming flight docs stay operationally focused so they can have the same experience I did.”

Robb pointed to several events in his life that reinforced the need to be operationally ready: heading off to a mass casualty exercise days into his first assignment at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada; being stationed at Osan Air Base, South Korea, during the 1988 Summer Olympics; and a fateful night in June 1996, in Saudi Arabia.

“I was the senior medical officer at Khobar Towers,” the night a terrorist blew up a military dormitory on the base, killing 19 and wounding more than 500,” said Robb. “I felt prepared to handle that, because the system had prepared me. Train for the way you fight. Train for the way you heal. I focused on what I needed to take care of and prioritized what needed to be prioritized, because that’s how I was mentored on the way up. The military puts an emphasis on training the way we’ll need to perform once in the field.”

Robb worked in Colorado and Mississippi finding ways to cooperate with local Veterans Affairs hospitals, and then served as CENTCOM surgeon for the U.S. Central Command during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While in these positions, he encountered more events that shaped another key point of his two years heading DHA: joint operations.

“Joint doesn’t mean necessarily Army, Navy and Air Force,” he said, adding it means working with coalition forces from other countries, other U.S. government agencies, and universities and research centers. “Nobody’s got a patent on right.”

Robb also pointed to the development of the Joint Trauma System, which has helped increase survivability rates from battle injuries to levels never seen before in warfare. “We had these silos of care [for each service], but it was when we started working across [services, commands and levels of care] that we started making a real difference. Unity of effort trumps unity of command every day.”

As far as the future goes, Robb is cautious in offering any advice to his successor, Navy Vice Adm. Raquel Bono, who he said will be successful because she has great people around her, just like he did. All she’ll have to do is “fly top cover” for them, borrowing one of his fighter pilot terms of long ago; in essence, making sure they have the command support they need.

Robb’s not exactly sure what he’ll do next, but he is sure it will be consistent with how he’s conducted himself as a physician during the past 36 years.

“Hopefully, I’m able to end up some place where I can make a difference,” as he adds with a smile, “At the end of the day, I’m still a flight doc.”