U.S. Military Missing in Action in the War Against the Coronavirus Pandemic

This is the 12^th   in a series of blog posts beginning on February 4, 2020 focused on justice systems’ responses to the coronavirus pandemic -- SARS-CoV-2 is its technical name and Covid-19 is the disease it causes --and the justice systems’ active participation in a whole-of-society-approach (WOSA) to national security and safety threats such as Covid-19. Updated April 4.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “missing in action” literally as “missing and unable to be confirmed as captured or killed following military action.” The term is used figuratively, as I use it in the title of this post, for “someone or something notably or unexpectedly missing, absent, or inactive.” The titles of two blogs written here over the last two weeks tell the story:

•  Absence of the U.S. Military in the Fight to Mitigate the Covid-19 Pandemic (March 23)
•  Other Countries Are Mobilizing Militaries Against the Coronavirus Epidemic: The United States Is Not (March 26)

When I wrote the last blog on March 26th, the United States had passed the grim milestone of 1,000 deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic. I noted that the United States armed forces in a whole-of-society-approach (WOSA) were conspicuously absent from the fight. The existential threat posed by the pandemic  cries out not only for an immediate,  clear, and coordinated response by the White House, but the deployment of all five branches of the U.S. military -- the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard.
Just eight days later, with deaths in New York City alone approaching 3,000, words like “grim,” “frightening, “unprecedented,” and certainly “extremely upsetting,”  are totally inadequate  to describe the crisis which New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio likened to an attack on this country by a foreign adversary, and others have compared to a Pearl Harbor moment . On the morning of March 26th, he again called for a national enlistment of doctors and nurses to battle an expected surge of Covid-19 cases in his city and around the country. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe“ he said that “unless the military is fully mobilized and we create something we’ve never had before, which is some kind of national enlistment of medical personnel moved to the most urgent needs in the country constantly, if we don’t have that we’re going to see hospitals simply unable to handle so many people who could be saved.” He declared that the country should be on a wartime footing to meet the coronavirus threat. “We’re fighting a war against an invisible enemy that is increasingly taking the lives of Americans in vast numbers,” he said on CNN.


Grisly Scenes in New York City


The Washington Post reported grisly scenes of covered bodies lying in the streets of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city and epicenter of the coronavirus in Latin America.  As hospitals filled up, local news accounts, videos shared on social media and telephone interviews, officials, and aid workers in Guayaquil are reporting the dead accumulate in morgues, family homes and the streets. In Italy, the army has mobilized to haul cadavers out of Bergamo after the crematorium could not handle them. In Spain, the military discovered elderly patients dead and abandoned in their beds in care homes. Authorities in Iran have dug mass graves. Mayor de Blasio’s description of  what might happen in New York City as early as next week without help of a national enlistment of the military did not specifically warn of dead bodies in the streets of the city as the health system collapses, but many listeners may have received that  warning, as they heard news reports of crematories in his city working 16-hour shifts and handling triple the number of bodies they would on a typical day and saw pictures of a refrigerator truck being used as a makeshift morgue outside of Brooklyn  Hospital Center in New York City. 


We Need Military Help

In an editorial in the April 6-13 issue of  Time, “We Need Military Help,” James Stavridis, retired United States Navy admiral and former 16th Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, explained what the 1.2 million active-duty troops and 800,000 National Guard and reserves can do in addition to the massive U.S. Navy hospital ships already deployed to the West Coast and to New York City, including:

• ·       Civil support to populations including delivering food and water to nonmobile part of the population, conducting drive-through testing, and preparing sites for hospital-overflow, something that Stavridis calls a “classic and well-practiced function of the National Guard.”
• ·       Industrial capability. The Defense Production Act, invoked by President Trump last week, taps 300,000 businesses working with the Department of Defense in the Defense Industrial Base. 
• ·       Logistics and critical infrastructure including Air Force flying medical supplies, the Army medical overflow support, and other capabilities such as sanitation, electrical generation, water purification, and information technology. 
• ·       Medical research and development including military expertise and protective gear. 
• ·       Information operations. The military can monitor a wide variety of operations and can gather, process, and analyze intelligence in the pandemic.
• ·       Law enforcement and control of civil populations including enforcing curfews, quarantines, and ensuring the safety of critical supply chains.

In his Time editorial Stavridis declared that the “military – for which Americans collectively pay $700 billion annually – can be a significant part of the fight against this ‘invisible army.’” As I noted in the March 23rd blog, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 -- in concert with the Insurrection Act of 1807 -- generally prohibits the federal government from using the U.S. armed forces to enforce domestic policies within the U.S.  However, Congress enacted exceptions that allow domestic use of the military to enforce federal laws. The absence of the U.S. military from the war against the coronavirus is today simply inexplicable, indefensible, and inexcusable.


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