The rapid, smaller-scale deployments characteristic of the 1980s exposed troops to a number of stressful occupational and environmental factors, including the lack of sleep and fatigue associated with long-distance air travel. WRAIR was an important element of the Army’s research into occupational and environmental stressors; its sleep and fatigue research, developed over the next few decades, would become world-renowned as researchers measured the performance effects of sustained or continuous operations and abrupt changes in sleep/rest cycles.

Meanwhile, the military’s neuropsychiatric casualty terminology continued to evolve. What had been known, at least in part, as “nostalgia” during the Civil War; “shell shock” in World War I, and “combat exhaustion” in World War II was known by the mid-1970s as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. WRAIR and its associates at USAMRU-E continued to work on ways to maximize post-traumatic growth through coping skills and unit cohesion as troops undertook their most significant post-Vietnam deployments: to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq to fight the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991.

The abrupt, dramatic, and relatively bloodless end to the Cold War resulted in a massive demobilization of resources that completely reoriented the missions of the DoD. The Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process launched in 1988 relocated several WRAIR research programs and resulted in the reorganization of the USAMRDC into the USAMRMC. By the mid-1990s, the command had shed about a third of its research programs.

BRAC, including the “Medical BRAC” of 2005, realigned and focused the work of WRAIR – but it remains the oldest, largest, and most diverse research program in the command, and the largest military medical laboratory in DoD.

 

A WRAIR for the 21st Century

As transformative as BRAC was for the Army’s military medical research, nothing would refocus the work of WRAIR as powerfully as the Global War on Terrorism that began on Sept. 11, 2001. America’s longest war has been, in the words of Smith, “a funny kind of war. There are no front lines – to a worse degree than Vietnam, where troops defined post-traumatic stress. We’ve had no choice but to recognize PTSD as a significant problem, now that we have an all-volunteer force who are worried about their careers, and we’re worried about their ability to continue working. We’re beginning to spend some real time and energy on these problems of traumatic stress and what we now call mild traumatic brain injury.”

In 2001, WRAIR left its 60-year-old home in Building 40 and moved to newly built quarters on the Forest Glen Annex of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center near Silver Spring, Md. The new building, named in honor of the late Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, is co-located with the Naval Medical Research Center.

As transformative as BRAC was for the Army’s military medical research, nothing would refocus the work of WRAIR as powerfully as the Global War on Terrorism that began on Sept. 11, 2001. America’s longest war has been, in the words of Smith, “a funny kind of war. There are no front lines – to a worse degree than Vietnam, where troops defined post-traumatic stress. We’ve had no choice but to recognize PTSD as a significant problem, now that we have an all-volunteer force who are worried about their careers, and we’re worried about their ability to continue working. We’re beginning to spend some real time and energy on these problems of traumatic stress and what we now call mild traumatic brain injury.”

The influences of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are evident in WRAIR’s current organizational structure: Its work is now focused in two new research centers: the Center for Infectious Disease Research (CIDR), which continues to pursue the prevention, diagnosis, care, and treatment of a variety of endemic diseases; and the Center for Military Psychiatry and Neuroscience (CMPN), whose research emphases are post-traumatic stress, sleep management/resilience, and brain injury and neuroprotection.