Armies are mobilising against the coronavirus
Soldiers are patrolling streets, running hospitals—and cancelling drills
TWO
WEEKS ago Xi Jinping, China’s president, made a triumphal visit to
Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, ravaged by covid-19, to declare that
the virus had been “basically curbed”. His first stop was a hospital
built at breakneck speed and run by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Now armies across the world are temporarily putting down their guns and
playing a frontline role in the war against the virus. That will ease
the burden on overwhelmed civilians, but it may have far-reaching
implications for the forces’ military proficiency.
In
Italy and Spain, where death rates have spiralled upwards in recent
weeks, thousands of soldiers have been deployed to quarantined cities to
patrol the streets and enforce lockdowns. Turin “seems to have
conformed to the rules and camouflages”, noted La Stampa, an
Italian newspaper. In Bergamo rows of army trucks carried away bodies to
ease the load on overflowing crematoriums. Hungary, Lebanon, Malaysia
and Peru have all sent their armies to cajole recalcitrant citizens back
into the safety of their homes.
Many
countries are uncomfortable with state-mandated lockdowns, enforced by
gun-toting soldiers. But they have found other uses for their soldiers.
Armed forces are good at mounting big logistical operations at short
notice. They have lots of pliant manpower and heavy vehicles, and
expertise in moving large amounts of stuff from one place to another. In
an average week, the Pentagon’s Transportation Command conducts more
than 1,900 air missions and 10,000 ground shipments. “The military has
the capacity to plan while it is implementing in a way that most of the
civil service does not,” says Jack Watling of the Royal United Services
Institute, a think-tank in London.
On
March 19th Britain, which had thus far taken a laxer approach to the
enforcement of social distancing than Italy or France, announced a new
“COVID support force”, which will comprise over 20,000 personnel,
bolstered with reservists. Military planners will be deployed to
Regional Resilience Councils to identify and resolve bottlenecks in the
provision of medical care for the most vulnerable, says Mr Watling.
Other military personnel are being trained to drive oxygen tankers for
the National Health Service. Other countries are doing much the same. On
March 22nd National Guard (ie, reservist) units in three
states—California, New York and Washington—were deployed to perform
similar duties.
Armed forces are also
well placed to help out overloaded health-care systems. For one thing,
they often have large stockpiles of vital medical kit. The Pentagon has
promised to hand over 5m respirator masks and 2,000 ventilators to
civilian authorities. They tend to be good at rapid innovation, too.
Israel's military-intelligence technology unit is not only producing
low-tech masks, but also working on the conversion of simple
breathing-support devices into more advanced ventilators, according to
the Times of Israel. Britain’s Defence Science and Technology
Laboratory at Porton Down, which has expertise in biological threats, is
supporting the development and testing of vaccines, and the mapping of
covid-19 cases. The US Army alone is working on 24 vaccine candidates,
in collaboration with other agencies and companies.
Wartime
experience can also yield useful insights for civilian medicine. The
development of mechanical ventilators to ease Acute Respiratory Distress
Syndrome (ARDS)—a potentially fatal condition in which lungs cannot
provide vital organs with enough oxygen, common in patients who die of
covid-19—emerged from work during the second world war. In recent
decades military doctors have made important contributions to advances
in ventilation and intensive care.
Military
medics also train to operate amid chaos, with insufficient
infrastructure and resources. Since January 25th China has sent over
10,000 military personnel into Hubei. In Wuhan, control of medical and
essential supplies was handed entirely to the PLA. In Mulhouse in
eastern France, where local hospitals have been overwhelmed, army medics
are building a 30-bed field hospital for covid-19 cases. Mexico’s
president, who said last summer that he hoped to disband the army, has
given control of ten new hospitals to the army and navy.
Elsewhere
military doctors are taking on more routine cases to free up hospitals
for the flood of more serious ones. America is sending a pair of naval
hospital ships to Los Angeles and New York to release medical capacity
for covid-19 patients; the army is preparing two mobile hospital units.
Switzerland’s citizen army has sent one of its four 600-strong hospital
battalions to support civilian hospitals.
Military
medical aid can also be a tool of diplomacy. On March 22nd Russia’s
army, whose operatives are more accustomed to using toxic substances to
poison foes around Europe than cleaning them up, began sending nine
transport planes full of military disinfectant vehicles, eight brigades
of medics, about 100 virologists and epidemiologists, and testing kits
to the worst-affected parts of Italy. The lorries and planes bore the
slogan “From Russia with Love”, in Russian and Italian.
It
is understandable that overwhelmed states want to mobilise their armies
for policing, logistics and medicine. But armed forces are designed
first and foremost for killing people, rather than issuing fines on
street corners or delivering food to supermarkets. And covid-19 will
affect military preparedness, both directly and indirectly.
Military
personnel are typically young and fit—a group that has been better able
to shake off the effects of the virus. But they are not immune. Over
half of coronavirus cases in New York state are aged 18 to 49. Troops
often live in close quarters, increasing the likelihood and pace of
transmission.
Iran’s Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country’s main armed force, is believed
to have been hit badly by the epidemic; a veteran general died on March
13th. The army chiefs of Italy and Poland have both tested positive for
covid-19. By March 23rd 133 American military personnel had been
infected by the virus. On March 22nd a Pentagon contractor became the
first American military fatality of the covid-19 pandemic. Many experts
ridicule China’s claim that not a single member of the PLA has been
infected.
But even if armies do shrug
off the immediate health effects of covid-19, the disruption to their
work will have longer-lasting consequences. Self-isolating officers
cannot gain access to classified networks from their homes, so many will
have their productivity drastically limited. Meia Nouwens, of the
International Institute for Strategic Studies, another think-tank in
London, says that the crisis has disrupted the supply chains for China’s
defence industry.
Social distancing is
also preventing armies from honing their fighting skills. Britain has
halted almost all its basic training for new recruits. On March 11th
Norway called off joint exercises with America and European allies in
the Arctic, shortly after 23 American soldiers were quarantined after
exposure to an infected Norwegian colleague. Two days later America
scaled down Defender 2020, an exercise that would have involved the
largest deployment of American troops to Europe since the cold war.
America’s top general in Europe was forced to self-isolate after
crossing paths with an infected Polish general at a planning meeting for
the exercise.
Other
European drills have been cancelled entirely; America and South Korea
have postponed their annual joint exercises. But armies that stop
exercising are liable to grow rusty. “The challenge is when you have the
next armoured battlegroup coming through and they haven’t done a stint
in BATUS [the British Army’s training area in Canada], for instance, do
they still have a certification to deploy into NATO?” asks Mr Watling.
On March 23rd Russia offered at least a little respite, saying that it
had called off war games on its western borders “as a sign of good
will”.
Yet as armies grapple with the
pandemic, geopolitical jostling goes on. On March 10th, as Mr Xi visited
Wuhan, America’s navy conducted a so-called freedom of navigation
operation near a Chinese-controlled island in the South China Sea. On
March 19th at least 29 Malian soldiers were killed by suspected
jihadists. A day later two Turkish soldiers were killed in a rocket
attack in Syria’s Idlib province, and two dozen policemen and soldiers
were shot dead in Afghanistan. Troops may be distracted and diverted,
but war does not pause for viruses.
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