National Security: A New Perspective

When Americans think of national security, they think with pride of our military.  We have the biggest and best Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine military force money can buy.  Hell, we even have a Space Force.  Who else has one of those?  This military force is overseen and given guidance by the finest group of politicians a boatload of special interest money can buy.  We, as a nation, are ready to face any threat to our security, or so we thought.

Declare War on Virus

We now face a daunting enemy, one who is very adept at stealth technology and camouflage.  This new enemy can’t be stopped by a border wall.  It can’t be shot down by a drone.  You can’t “send in the Marines.”  Even our elite Army Rangers, Green Berets, and Seal Teams are no match for this elite fighting force.  This newly identified terrorist group is called, COVID-19, aka SARS-CoV-2, aka Coronavirus.

Yes, a microscopic pathogen has brought our nation and the rest of the world to its knees.  In a matter of weeks, it has shut down commerce, grounded our passenger airlines, filled our hospitals to the breaking point, strained our supply chain, and sent Wall Street into a panic.

Wall Street Panic

You can’t blame this virus on President Trump.  You should never blame our president for something until you have walked a mile in his clown-shoes.  He didn’t invent this system of security priorities where we spend more of our GDP on our military than the next seven nations combined.  He perpetuated it but it was already in place from previous administrations.  We may, however, blame him for mismanagement of the current crisis and for placing his reelection goals ahead of the nation’s health; but he is not alone in this.  President Trump, members of Congress, and others before him, minimized the threat of what we now face.  We have collectively prioritized military might over our nation’s health.

Military Spending by Country in Billions

Running a country, any country, requires vision.  You can’t be blinded by nationalism to a point where the very continued existence of that nation is threatened.  We can surely blame this president for his perpetuation of an isolationist attitude that places us at odds with those who would be our friends.  He seems to be looking at the operation of our country like another real estate venture, and that has proved disastrous.  If you make a bad decision in real estate, you can file for bankruptcy.  If you make bad decisions running a country, people die.  Having vision means having your head on a swivel and seeing things from many perspectives.  Myopic leadership is dangerous, expensive, and deadly.

We should have taken what we learned from PDM09 (H1N1) and had plans in place.  That 2009 virus, infected 60.8 million Americans, required 274,304 hospitalizations and resulted in 12,469 deaths.  Global statistics were obviously much higher.  During that pandemic, 80% of the deaths were in people younger than 65 years of age.  President Obama’s transition team warned the incoming Trump team that it could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs, and other medical essentials.  They were told that having a coordinated, unified national response was “paramount.”  Such warnings now seem eerily prescient given our current pandemic.  Those warnings were dire and the result of a mock run-through of a pandemic response using the experiences of the swine flu pandemic.  Those warnings garnered a cold reception and two-thirds of the people who were present, are no longer part of “Team-Trump.”  I guess there is an “I” in team.

We see now that President Trump should never have shut down the White House National Security Council's entire global health security unit in 2018.  This unit would have developed plans for a pandemic.  He saved a few dollars.  The bill for this pandemic was able to outstrip those meager savings in a nanosecond.  We will never know how well that unit would have performed or prepared us for this eventuality, but it certainly couldn’t have done much worse.  We are now flying blind without enough test kits to know where the virus is and how best to manage its spread.  When testing kits eventually become a reality, we will have squandered valuable time that would have minimized the exponential spread of the pathogen.

The Enemy

We don’t currently have enough respirators, hospital beds, or personal protective gear necessary to manage this crisis.  We will be forced to make life and death decisions as to who will get treatment and who will be allowed to fend for themselves for lack of equipment and personnel.  Sarah Palin’s “death panels,” promoted during her fight against the Affordable Care Act may become a reality if we don’t move quickly.

Now it is time to get beyond the blame game and start looking at where we go from here.  We will plod along without a true leader and we will rely on the likes of immunologist, Anthony Fauci and Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo to get us through this mess.  We will be led out of this crisis by a hodgepodge of leaders forced into service.  We will come through this, but not without cost and consequence.  We need to plan for our future.

Anthony Fauci and Andrew Cuomo filling the vacuum

We will need to adjust our national security priorities so that they include health.  Perhaps instead of setting up a Space Force, we should have created a National Health Force (NHF).  It could even be run out of the Pentagon budget so it could be properly funded.  What politician in their right mind (this is rhetorical) would think of under-funding our “military.”

A National Health Force could plan for the next pandemic with lessons learned from this and previous ones.  Perhaps the Trump administration could find some of those discarded planning documents provided by the Obama administration.  I say that in jest knowing that Donald Trump has spent the better part of his presidency trying to dismantle everything with Obama’s name attached.

Ventilators, mobile hospitals, a reserve unit of active and retired medical professionals, all could be part of a national response plan.  We could also properly fund our Veterans Administration and expand its hospital facilities to have a certain capacity for national emergencies.  This would improve the care for our veterans and provide a civilian safety net.

Emergency Hospital at Miami-Dade County Fairgrounds

We can only hope that the passage of this crisis will not be replaced with even more chaos of some other threat to our nation.  We have paid a high price for this lesson.  We didn’t take the information gained from the last event to plan for this one but let’s hope that we have someone in office that will.  We should not take the easy political path of thinking we have better things to do.  I would hope that some future president would be able to repair the relationships with other nations that were broken with this administration.  We should be able to come to some international agreement that promotes a free exchange of information and a sharing of research.  We will survive this.  Let’s hope we learn from this.