March 10, 2026 | By Robert Hammer, Defense Health Agency Communications
Declaring the Defense Health Agency is, in its entirety, a combat support agency singularly focused on generating and sustaining warfighter readiness, its new director, Vice Adm. Darin K. Via, laid out his strategic priorities to a gathering of military medical leaders and allied partners from around the world.
Speaking at the 2026 annual meeting of AMSUS, The Society for Federal Health Professionals, March 4, 2026, Via said current events bring the agency’s mission into even sharper focus.
“It could not be clearer in a week like this: When our nation calls, we don’t have time to get ready — we must already be ready,” Via said, referencing ongoing military operations in the Middle East. He stressed the need for timely information across the medical enterprise, and shared what DHA is doing to support the combatant commands in areas such as blood supply and medical logistics.
Via, who began his tenure as the agency’s fifth director Feb. 2, underscored the gravity of the mission. “The decisions we make every day have real-world implications for the men and women who selflessly accept the risk in service to the nation,” he said.
Reflecting a Department of War priority to restore the warrior ethos, Via, a trauma anesthesiologist, signaled his intent to drive improvements with urgency — a pace he referred to as "Via time."
His vision is structured around four interdependent lines of effort, which he described as the "roadmap to strengthening military medicine right now and well into the future" and include:
- Deliver Warfighter Medical Readiness: Via committed to aggressively reducing the time service members are nondeployable due to injury or illness. This focus is designed to keep service members healthy and lethal.
- Deliver Medical Warrior Currency: To ensure the medical force is as ready as the warfighters they treat, Via outlined initiatives to increase patient volume and complexity within military hospitals. A core group of 15 hospitals will spearhead this effort, leveraging partnerships with the Department of Veterans Affairs and civilian health systems to bring more complex cases into those facilities.
- Deliver Joint Warfighting Capabilities: Acknowledging any future fight will be joint and data-driven, Via committed to delivering integrated capabilities including unified trauma clinical care standards, reliable medical logistics for critical blood and supplies, and interoperable information technology systems to support warfighters from the point of injury through rehabilitation.
- Deliver the Health Care Enterprise Beneficiaries Deserve: The director affirmed providing timely, high-quality care to all beneficiaries is integral to the combat support mission. “Health care delivery is combat support,” Via stated. “We will honor the promise made to every beneficiary—past, present, and future,” emphasizing the need to sustain trust and reliability.
One of Via’s significant themes was a commitment to align the agency's resources and processes into a transparent, integrated system. He pledged to hold himself accountable by “dynamically allocating resources to our highest priorities and eliminating work that doesn’t drive the intended outcome.”
He highlighted the critical role of continuous innovation and technology insertion, particularly artificial intelligence, as critical to modernizing military medicine. The recent introduction of ambient listening tools at several DHA hospitals is a key step toward bringing more advanced technologies to military medicine, from the hospital or clinic to the battlefield.
Concluding his remarks, Via paid tribute to the military and federal partners, reinforcing a message of unity. “There’s nothing we accomplish alone; there’s nothing we can’t accomplish together,” he said.
