The Army Sends Its Bug Officers to College Station and Gives Them Exactly Three Years

In the South Pacific during the Second World War, malaria removed more Americans from the fight than combat did. Insects, as a category, have out-killed enemy armies for centuries, and that arithmetic is the reason the U.S. military keeps entomologists on the payroll at all — the mosquito and pest-control units stood up during that war eventually became today's Armed Forces Pest Management Board.

The degrees behind that work, for more than seventy years, have frequently been earned in College Station.

Texas A&M's Department of Entomology runs a military medical entomology program that takes active-duty officers from the Army, Navy and Air Force and puts them through a doctoral course of study built to a deployment clock rather than an academic one. Four officers are enrolled right now, split between master's and doctoral work, according to an AgriLife Today feature published Nov. 9.

The mechanics are the interesting part. Students are stationed at Bryan-College Station as their assigned duty post, and the faculty members who chair their committees plan coursework and research backwards from the date the officer has to report to a next assignment. Three years, not the five or six a civilian doctorate often takes in entomology.

"These students are selected for advanced education programs administered by their branch of service based upon past performance and future expectations," said Pete Teel, a Regents Professor in the department who has sat on those committees for decades. "That path takes a commitment from the faculty, and it takes a commitment from the student. They're motivated, high performers who have to stay on task and on schedule."

What they do with the degree is not laboratory housekeeping. Maj. Paul Lenhart, an Army entomologist and program graduate, is shown in the release collecting camel ticks with a nomadic herdsman. Maj. Megan Heineman, one of the four current students, studies soft ticks from Uganda and Texas. The job description is to sample arthropods — ticks, biting flies, mosquitoes — screen them for the pathogens they carry, and then write the guidance that keeps a unit from sleeping in the wrong place.

The output of that pipeline is scattered across the military health system. Col. Hee Kim, who took his degrees at Texas A&M in 2002, 2004 and 2017, now directs occupational health sciences at the Defense Centers for Public Health in Aberdeen and serves as the medical entomology consultant to the Army Surgeon General, a post that amounts to managing the readiness of every Army entomology officer. Retired officers Anthony Schuster and Bill Miller came back to teach the next cohort at the U.S. Army Medical Center of Excellence in San Antonio. Others have gone on to Walter Reed and the Army War College.

The current students' committees are chaired by Gabriel Hamer, Aaron Tarone and Patricia Pietrantonio, all AgriLife Research entomologists, with Teel sitting on them as he has for officers going back decades.

The reason the Pentagon funds a three-year doctorate in bug identification is a number the World Health Organization keeps publishing: vector-borne diseases cause more than 700,000 deaths a year worldwide and account for over 17 percent of all infectious disease deaths. Most of that burden is malaria, dengue, and tick-borne illness in places with thin public health infrastructure — which is also where U.S. troops deploy, and where military entomologists get handed disaster response work when a hurricane or an earthquake takes out the local vector control program.

There is a Texas thread that does not require a deployment. The same department, and in some cases the same faculty, runs vector research that Texas public health agencies lean on for ticks and mosquitoes at home. Heineman's own project is the illustration: soft ticks collected in Texas and soft ticks collected in Uganda go through the same identification, in the same lab, by people who learned the method on a three-year clock.

Teel, who served in the military himself, frames the program as a handoff. "I see helping educate these folks over my career as being my way to pay it forward," he said. "I served in the military, and am proud of that service, but I am immensely proud of these students and what they do."

For students in entomology, biology or public health who never considered a military path, the release makes a point of saying the door is open. It is a rare route into a field where the work is unambiguous: find the arthropod, find the pathogen, keep people out of the way of both.