Dereliction

BOOK DESCRIPTION

DERELICTION: A Global History of Military Trauma Treatment Failures, Scandals, and Institutional Resistance to Reform

Every decade, a scandal erupts. Moldy barracks at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Veterans dying on secret wait lists at Phoenix VA hospitals. Soldiers executed for ＂cowardice＂ later recognized as combat trauma. The headlines change, but the pattern remains: nations ask their soldiers to endure unimaginable trauma, then systematically fail to provide the care they were promised.

Dereliction is the first comprehensive global history to examine this recurring institutional failure across nations and centuries. Drawing on declassified military records, investigative journalism archives, veterans’ oral histories, and parliamentary inquiries from multiple countries, Dr. Naim Tahir Baig reveals how military institutions worldwide have developed remarkably similar mechanisms for denying, minimizing, and abandoning their wounded.

From Florence Nightingale’s exposé of British military hospitals during the Crimean War to the 2014 VA wait-list scandal that left at least forty veterans dead in Phoenix, this meticulously researched work traces a disturbing architecture of neglect. The book documents how lessons learned in blood during World War I were deliberately discarded by the 1930s, how Vietnam veterans had to create their own treatment infrastructure when the Pentagon refused to acknowledge ＂delayed stress reactions,＂ and how the 2007 Walter Reed scandal-with its rats, mold, and bureaucratic abandonment-replicated failures exposed decades earlier.

But Dereliction goes beyond American borders. It examines France’s decades of silence about Algerian War veterans tortured by their own military, Russia’s ideological denial of PTSD among Afghan War veterans, Britain’s systematic underinvestment leaving Falklands veterans without care, and how colonial and postcolonial militaries inherited Western neglect without Western resources. The book reveals how even nations with progressive welfare states consistently fail their military personnel when it comes to mental health.

Through eighteen carefully researched chapters, Dr. Baig exposes the mechanisms that perpetuate these failures: bureaucracies designed to minimize payouts, military cultures that stigmatize psychological injury, privatization schemes that substitute profit for care, and political systems where scandal leads to commissions that lead to reports that lead to minimal change-and then amnesia. He shows how the same institutional patterns recur with depressing regularity: veteran activism as the only driver of reform, knowledge deliberately suppressed between conflicts, and technology investments that distract from the human infrastructure actually needed.

Dereliction arrives at a critical moment. As Ukraine produces a new generation of traumatized veterans, as post-9/11 American veterans face suicide rates far exceeding combat deaths, and as nations worldwide continue to deploy military force while cutting veteran care budgets, this book asks the fundamental question: Why do we keep being surprised by the same failures? And what would it actually take to honor the promise we make to those who serve?

Written with the analytical rigor of academic scholarship and the moral urgency of investigative journalism, this is essential reading for military historians, policymakers, veterans’ advocates, medical professionals, and anyone who has ever wondered why ＂support the troops＂ rhetoric so consistently masks institutional abandonment. It is a devastating indictment of how nations treat their wounded-and a blueprint for genuine accountability.