Netherlands Armed Forces Research Articles

General Factors of Personality in Six Datasets and a Criterion-Related Validity Study at the Netherlands Armed Forces

Several papers showed that a general factor occupies the top of the hierarchical structure of personality, the so-called General Factor of Personality (GFP). The first question is whether the GFP behaves similar to the general factor of mental ability (g), in that GFP scores from different personality questionnaires correlate highly. The second question is whether the GFP is related to real-life outcomes. In six large datasets (total N=21,754) collected in the Netherlands armed forces, the GFPs extracted from six personality questionnaires generally showed high degrees of correlation suggesting they measure the same construct. Moreover, GFP was related to drop-out from military training. This evidence strengthens the view that the GFP is a substantive construct with practical relevance.

AMBITIONS AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR ASSESSING MILITARY PERFORMANCE IN CRISIS RESPONSE OPERATIONS

This paper addresses the issue of measuring armed forces’ performance in crisis response operations. By means of interviews (17 respondents) and a large scale survey (1,253 respondents) field and general officers of the Netherlands Armed Forces (NAF) have been questioned on perceived organisational success in crisis response operations. The Dutch officers assess the NAF's performance positively. A number of senior officers are hesitant about the usefulness of measuring the performance of crisis response operations. According to them the context in which the operations are being executed is too complex. Most interviewees, however, are convinced that measuring performance is useful and should be improved. These military leaders express a strong need for criteria to assess their performance on the job.

Tropical travel medicine

Jason Toth is an emergency medicine and urgent‐care physician at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, CA, USA. From time to time, Toth gives medication, vaccinations and advice to patients who intend to travel to exotic—and not‐so‐exotic—places around the world. Increasingly, however, he also finds himself treating patients who have contracted tropical diseases in the jungles of Africa, South America and Asia. “If you're a doctor in any large medical center ER department, such as Los Angeles or New York, especially those that are portside, in a given day you see people who speak a half dozen different languages from all parts of the globe,” he said. “They bring with them tropical and infectious diseases; dengue fever, malaria.” > …primary‐care physicians, not just infectious disease specialists, should sharpen their skills to identify tropical diseases… Toth' patients should actually consider themselves lucky that he is able to correctly diagnose and treat tropical diseases. Many others suffer unnecessarily, simply because their primary‐care physician has never seen a case of malaria or dengue and is unable to diagnose it. As Gerd‐Dieter Burchard, head of the clinical department and head of clinical research at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for tropical medicine in Hamburg, Germany, commented: “Although you would suspect that every physician in Germany now knows something about malaria, we still have patients who come too late to our hospital because the general physician has not thought of malaria as the reason for the fever as the patient has just come back from Africa. This still happens.” There is a growing awareness among health‐care professionals that, as people travel more frequently to remote places and as global commerce increases, more people will return home with infectious diseases that, so far, have only seriously plagued the developing world. European and American physicians, medical students and …

Experiences with frozen blood products in the Netherlands military

For peacekeeping and peace enforcing missions abroad the Netherlands Armed Forces decided to use universal donor frozen blood products in addition to liquid products. This article describes our experiences with the frozen blood inventory, with special attention to quality control. It is shown that all thawed (washed) blood products are in compliance with international regulations and guidelines. By means of the −80 °C frozen stock of red cells, plasma and platelets readily available after thaw (and wash), we can now safely reduce shipments and abandon the backup ‘walking’ blood bank, without compromising the availability of blood products in theatre.