OPINION:
America has been caught unprepared for most of the wars it has been forced to fight. Until Vietnam, we were militarily unprepared; and we were not prepared to fight the type of complex, hybrid combination of insurgency and conventional aggression of the Vietnamese conflict. Since then, we have become better ready to fight wars against human foes.
In 2020, we were not ready to fight a pandemic. That is now water under the bridge. All Americans want to avoid another biological Pearl Harbor. The operative question is how?
When I ran wargaming for the Marine Corps on the 1990s, we conducted several war games based on a potential biological attack capable of causing a pandemic and explored things the country might do to mitigate such an eventuality. The results were that developing readiness would be expensive. At the time, we were still basking in the supposed peace dividend enabled by the end of the Cold War and our reports were buried in a safe somewhere. Based on events of the last few months, those projected costs seem like chump change today.
One of the recommended precautions was to stockpile massive quantities of personal protective equipment (PPE) — masks, gowns, goggles — as well as decontamination supplies such as bleach and disinfectant wipes. Quite frankly, respirators were not on the list. We were thinking of something like Ebola or smallpox at the time. Nonetheless, this kind of strategic reserve will be a sure thing in the future.
However, some of the other recommendations were considered to be “outside the box” at the time; but they may well be more realistic as we try to learn lessons from the COVID-19 experience. At the time, big data was still developmental, but only considered a few computer generations — or several decades away. The players in the games suggested a worldwide early warning system that could detect and outbreak early and isolate it.
Today, systems like Blue Dot developed in Canada have made that a real possibility. Creating an international early warning organization that is interconnected with national and local officials to enable early mitigation is a logical step toward increased preparedness.
The World Health Organization (WHO) would have been the natural candidate to run such a new system until it compromised its credibility during the current pandemic. Perhaps part of the reforms that President Trump will demand before restoring U.S. funding to WHO should be that future senior leaders of the organization not be from nations with major financial ties to China, and an American ombudsman as inspector general.
The idea that came out of the games that has the potential to be a game changer is the concept for creating a national clearinghouse for innovative ideas, vaccine concepts and testing that can be quickly vetted and funded if they prove to be promising. The National Institutes of Health and Center for Disease Control and Prevention are huge bureaucracies with ponderous peacetime procedures. They simply are not geared to make quick course changes except during times of extreme crisis. Both the Army and Marine Corps have developed rapid acquisition programs for contingency situations, and the public health system should learn from how they do it.
Despite the disinfectant imbroglio, President Trump has shown a willingness to embrace — or at least test — innovative and unconventional ideas and solutions sometimes not shared by the bureaucrats on his COVID-19 task force. It is very possible that there is a true game-changing vaccine idea out there that simply has no current rapid path to attention by decision makers.
Unfortunately, there is a complacency-panic-recriminations-complacency cycle to most national emergencies. As hospitalizations and deaths decrease, we appear to be transitioning from panic to recrimination. That may be inevitable; but if there is anything to be gained from this experience, it should a determination to act now to put in place the infrastructure in terms of stockpiles and procedures to prevent the next disease outbreak from becoming a pandemic, or at least better mitigating an outbreak early and effectively.
The president has shown a willingness to both stockpile and embrace innovative solutions to future medical emergencies and the Congress is unusually energized. The production line for ventilators and protective gear will probably reach its peak as the pandemic recedes, but those lines should be kept hot long enough to give us a robust strategic reserve. If WHO is not willing or able to reform, the United States should lead in creating early warning and rapid medical acquisition systems. The time to do so is now.
• Gary Anderson lectures on Alternative Analysis and wargaming at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.