Less than 2% of roughly 142,000 soldiers who might have been exposed to dangerous blast waves had their exposure tracked by the end of fiscal year 2025. That is the Army, the service with the largest high-risk population, and the figure comes from a Government Accountability Office report that Business Insider covered in August.
The Pentagon has been trying to build a system that monitors troops’ brain health and records what their weapons do to them. Under the hood, it is not working yet.
What the rules ask for
In 2024 the Defense Department told the services to start logging service members’ potential exposure to blast overpressure, the forceful wave produced when certain weapons fire or explosives go off. It also set minimum distances for how far troops should stand from certain weapons. Artillery, infantry, explosive ordnance disposal and some aviation jobs sit among the higher-risk groups, the GAO said.
The department has also begun requiring cognitive assessments for new recruits and for active-duty personnel in high-risk jobs. The tests measure attention, memory and thinking speed. The idea is simple: record a baseline for each person, then compare later results against it to see what repeated exposure does over time.
The concern behind all this is familiar. Troops exposed to blast overpressure can report headaches, slower cognitive processing, trouble concentrating and memory problems. Repeated exposure can contribute to traumatic brain injury, which can last a lifetime.
The GAO collected some blunt descriptions from service members. After an exercise with breaching weapons, designed to punch a hole in an enemy’s defences, one said they felt “rattled, dizzy, and were throwing up.” Another, who had fired a rocket launcher, compared it to “taking a hit from a [football player] going 150 miles per hour.”
Short of people and kit
The watchdog found the services lack the staff, equipment and other resources to finish all the required assessments. Army and Navy officials said they do not have enough industrial hygienists, the safety specialists who do this work. Navy officials added that their specialists were already spending up to 60% of their time on blast-overpressure hazards as of January.
A one-year pilot of a new cognitive assessment tool may ease the strain, the report said. The catch is that the Pentagon had not documented how it would judge the tool’s effect on those resource needs.
The problem is not confined to the traditional high-risk trades. Drones and missiles now expose people in logistics and medical roles to blasts from attacks, and traumatic brain injuries have been a common injury in the war with Iran. The Office of the Secretary of Defense did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment on the findings.
