The Defense Department will tell you this itself, in its own guidance, in plain language. Almost nobody reads that guidance at the time — you read it years later, when somebody asks for a record you don't have.
I want to start with a sentence the DoD published about its own records, because it's more candid than anything I could write:
If you moved from one duty station to another, and one military hospital or clinic used the TRICARE Online Patient Portal and the other used MHS GENESIS, your records in MHS GENESIS may have gaps.
Read that again with the PCS cycle in mind. Military families move every two or three years. The transition to MHS GENESIS rolled out across facilities over several years. So the guidance is effectively saying: if you were moved during the rollout — which is most of you — parts of your medical history may not have come with you.
The system that ordered the move did not carry your history along with it.
On 1 April 2025, the TRICARE Online Patient Portal was decommissioned. Before that date, beneficiaries were urged to download their legacy records, because those records would no longer be available online afterward.
A lot of people missed it. That's not a failure of attention — it's an announcement about a website competing with everything else in a military family's year.
Here's the part worth knowing, and it's better news than most people assume: the records were not destroyed. Copies are maintained at military health facilities and clinical providers still have access. They simply stopped being something you can get at yourself, from your couch, at eleven at night.
Which is the pattern I keep running into and wrote about a few days ago: records rarely get destroyed anymore. They get orphaned — still intact, still somewhere, just no longer reachable by the person they describe.
Most people don't feel a records gap while they're serving. They feel it years later, filing for disability, when the whole question is whether you can document that something happened to you while you were in.
Missing service treatment records are routine in that process — from repeated moves and unit changes, from inconsistent documentation, and for older veterans from the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center that destroyed millions of files.
The VA is required to help obtain relevant records. And when they can't be found, the VA accepts alternative evidence — including buddy statements, sworn accounts from people who served alongside you attesting to what happened.
Sit with that for a second. An entire formal evidence category exists because the records so frequently aren't there. The system has built a workaround into itself and normalized it. That's not a criticism of the VA — given the reality, accepting testimony is the humane and correct thing to do. But it's an institutional admission about the state of the records, and it's a clearer one than any statistic.
Spouses and children are treated at military facilities too, and their records sit in the same systems, moved through the same transitions, with the same gaps. A child born at one MTF and vaccinated at three others across two PCS moves has a medical history distributed across installations they may never return to.
And it's usually the spouse who notices — because in most military families the spouse is the one who registers the kids at a new school, finds a new pediatrician, and gets asked for an immunization record that's somewhere in Germany.
Two practical consequences. First, request records for every family member at each PCS, not just the service member — the dependants' records are the ones a civilian provider will ask for first. Second, a child's record follows them for life: the vaccination history assembled across four installations is the one they'll need for college, for a job, or for their own family. That file is worth assembling once, properly, while the facilities are still reachable.
UploMD requests your records from each facility you name — military and civilian — and keeps them in one place you control, including your actual MRI and CT images, viewable and shareable. It doesn't expire when a portal does, and it moves when you do.
Get started free How to request recordsThis article is general information, not medical, legal or benefits advice. Procedures for requesting military health records and filing VA claims change; confirm current steps with your military treatment facility, the VA, or an accredited Veterans Service Organization representative.
