Page 151 - JSOM Winter 2018

An Ongoing Series

The Emergence and Evolution of the
Journal of Special Operations Medicine

An Interview With Publisher Michelle Landers

Interviewed by COL (Ret) Andre Pennardt, MD

What is your background, and how did you become to provide a commonality that has transcended the past six
involved with Special Operations? decades of SOF medicine.
My nursing background is in critical care,
ER, flight nursing, and legal nurse con- What were the biggest challenges in developing the
sulting. I started my military reserve ca- JSOM (besides keeping everyone on deadline)?
reer in 1987 at an Army combat support The biggest challenge was that I was a nurse, not an editor or
hospital. After 3 years of fun in the sum- publisher! I took several classes and learned how to publish
mer heat at Camp Shelby, I changed ser- a journal. The next biggest challenge was getting the JSOM
vices to the Air Force and went to Flight indexed in the US National Library of Medicine’s PubMed. It
Physiology School and became a C-130 took several years of adjusting the layout and further develop-
flight nurse. In 1998, I started work- ment to get it accepted in 2007.
Michelle Landers
ing at United States Special Opera tions
Command/Headquarters (USSOCOM-HQ) How has funding of the JSOM changed
in the Center for Force Structure, Resources, over time?
Requirements, and Strategic Assessments as
a joint processes action officer before going That has to have been the biggest challenge
to the Surgeon General’s Office to become since the JSOM became privately published.
the production manager for the JSOM in During its 10 years of being a military pub-
1999. I became an individual mobilization lication, it was funded through the military,
augmentee (IMA) attached to and on active to include my salary. When I retired in 2011,
orders with USSOCOM-HQ. After almost there were Department of Defense–wide
25 years, the last 12 of which were in the budget cuts, so, coupled with the realiza-
USSOCOM Surgeon General’s Office on ac- tion that the JSOM may cease to exist, the
tive duty orders, I retired in 2011. command surgeon, the late COL Tom Deal,
asked me to consider taking it on as a post-
retirement career in order to keep this valu-
Who had the idea to first create the
Journal of Special Operations Medicine? able tool in the hands of the SOF medical
community.
The idea to create the first publication in
2000, which would be a communication tool So I thought about this; I knew how to pro-
between HQ-USSOCOM-SG and the component commands, duce the journal, I had been doing it for 10 years, how hard
as well as a training and education tool for SOF medicine, was could it be to get funding? We went to the judge advocate
that of the late Don Shipman, PA-C. I came is as the publica- general’s office and made it official. I started Breakaway Me-
tion and production editor. When Don PCS’d 2 months later, dia, LLC and off I went. Funding now comes from product
I became the managing editor as well. The inaugural edition advertising and print, digital, and institutional subscriptions.
was published in December 2000. The journal developed as an
avenue to provide a venue for the component surgeons to ad- How was the relationship between the JSOM and
dress their physicians and medics and to provide a place where SOMA developed?
USSOCOM could learn and share experiences that required
critical medical skills. These experiences were shared through The JSOM has been a part of the Special Operations Medical
peer-reviewed articles in both research-based and vignette for- Association (SOMA) since day 1. In the early years, it was
mats. JSOM filled the need for SOF medics from all Services provided to SOMA membership from the USSOCOM-SG.

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