What it isSleep disturbance that develops during or after military deployment, often combining insomnia, nightmares, sleep apnea, and circadian disruption from deployment stressors.

Why it mattersDeployment-related sleep disorders persist long after return and are major drivers of post-deployment psychiatric, cardiovascular, and quality-of-life consequences. They often mediate the link between deployment exposure and PTSD.

Think of it like thisDeployment is a sustained assault on sleep: irregular schedules, ambient threat, moral injury, physical injury, time-zone shifts, environmental noise. The resulting sleep disorder is the body’s record of all of those, often persisting decades later.

An umbrella term capturing the high prevalence of insomnia, obstructive sleep apnea, trauma-associated sleep disorder, nightmare disorder, and circadian rhythm disruption in service members during and after deployment, frequently comorbid with PTSD and traumatic brain injury.

MechanismDeployment imposes multiple sleep-disruptive exposures: operational schedules (shift work, sustained operations), environmental stressors (heat, cold, noise, ambient threat), physical demands and injury, psychological stressors (combat exposure, moral injury, separation), and pharmacological exposures. Post-deployment, conditioned hyperarousal and trauma-related sleep symptoms persist long after the exposures end.