Canceled war games, one way that military guards against COVID-19
New York Times
WASHINGTON — At the Pentagon, figuring out how to respond to the coronavirus has been a stopand-go mission.
The Army recently suspended deployments for troops and their families into South Korea and Italy, two hard-hit countries. But deployments for Marines, Air Force and Navy personnel continued through the middle of last week, when top Defense Department officials announced that the other services would follow suit.
The United States and its military partners in South Korea and Europe have canceled planned exercises in the Arctic, the Middle East and South Korea. But troops who had already arrived for another large-scale exercise, in Eastern Europe along the border with Russia, will continue with the planned war games, albeit on a smaller scale.
Last week, officials working at the Defense Department began “social distancing” for meetings inside the Pentagon, spreading across multiple rooms while video conferencing, and sitting several feet apart when at the same table.
But uniformed troops were still conducting tours last week for visitors at the building, where groups clustered in front of paintings and points of interests.
The Pentagon, as it turns out, is a microcosm of the inherent contradictions in how companies, government agencies and people across the country are trying to battle the coronavirus.
The sprawling five-sided building is a workplace for close to 30,000 people, including civilian and military workers who parachute in from hot spots all over the world. It has its own bank, post office, dry cleaners, “clothier,” drugstore, food courts, restaurants, gymnasium, auditorium and clinic.
Its labyrinthine corridors are filled with people, most of them strangers to one another. And it is responsible for keeping healthy more than 1 million active-duty service members around the world, including the ones overseas and in the United States where the coronavirus has taken hold.
And like companies across the
country, the Defense Department is grappling with just how draconian it should get in its guidelines for how to respond to, and contain, the virus. The contradictions abound.
At the heavily trafficked subway entrance to the building early last week, a stand of hand sanitizer appeared. But putting such stands throughout the building, with its miles of corridors, has yet to become standard practice.
The mixed nature of the Defense Department’s response is mirrored around Washington. On Capitol Hill, where many congressional members are in the older cohort most endangered by the virus, some representatives were observing hand-washing and no-touching protocols (a lot of the first, not much of the last) while others were not. In Alexandria, Va., two local health workers who had just insisted that they were observing notouching protocols before seeing elderly patients then went on to hug a colleague they had not seen in some time.
“All of this emanates from the fact that we haven’t shifted into full redzone mode yet,” said Stephen Morrison, the director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We’re still in a kind of amber light or yellow zone. So you have people choosing, electing one path or another. There’s a lot of variance.”
Part of that variance stems from the fact that the slow pace of testing for the virus in the United States has meant that Americans are not aware of the extent of contagion here. In fact, the Pentagon acknowledged Tuesday that the military’s official tally of service members and Defense Department civilians who had been infected probably undercounts the total.
“I think that it is likely, given what we are seeing around the world, and the fact that we have people all over the world, that there are more,” Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs, the joint staff surgeon, said during a news briefing. That is an important detail because the low average age and good health of U.S. troops means that they are better able to withstand the virus if they get it. But it also means that they are more likely to become carriers who do not show symptoms, yet may infect other people.
The Army was the first to order its troops to defer from deployment to Italy and South Korea. “Force health protection is the Army’s top priority,” the Army said in a statement. Referring to the disease caused by the new coronavirus, it continued, “Protecting the force includes mitigating the spread of the virus and ensuring personnel have the most up-to-date information on appropriate measures to prevent potential spread of COVID-19.”
The Navy, Marines and Air Force followed suit on Wednesday.
This means that troops changing their home station to anywhere in South Korea or Italy must now put their plans on hold. For those in transit, according to one Army officer, they are stuck in travel limbo, wedged between their last duty station and awaiting some sort of clarity on where to go next.
In Naples, Italy, where a sailor became the first American service member to test positive for the virus in Europe this month, the Navy base is on lockdown. Base gyms are closed indefinitely, according to a Navy official, and commanders are coordinating with Italian officials daily. According to the official, leaders at the base were caught off guard by the Italians severely restricting movement in the country and it took roughly a day for the U.S. military to institute new policies on the base.
On Okinawa, a Japanese island that is host to a sizable Marine base and acts as a hub for U.S. forces transiting the Pacific Ocean, Marines are growing increasingly concerned that there will be an outbreak.
This month, according to a person with knowledge of the situation, about 200 Marines were not stringently screened when they returned from a training exercise in South Korea. The person described tests being conducted by what seemed to be untrained medical personnel with masks. One Navy doctor was present, the person said. The group also had to sign paperwork saying they had been properly screened.
Some officials on Okinawa are pressuring Marine leaders to close the base, at least for now, because many of the Japanese residents around its periphery are elderly.
The rumor mill
One thing the Pentagon cannot control: rumors.
Known often as scuttlebutt, rumint (rumor intelligence), the lance corporal underground or the E-4 mafia, the chatter flows like a game of telephone from headquarters to the ranks, often serving as a nexus of information about possible troop deployments, extended weekends and palace intrigue.
But now, it is a conduit for different kinds of information, much like in offices and communities around the country, focusing on one question: Who might have been exposed to the coronavirus?
In the Pacific, sailors had heard that three people aboard the Germantown, a landing transport ship docked in Guam, had come down with pneumonia, which they heard as shorthand for the coronavirus, and that vessel might be taken out of action.
In reality, according to a Navy spokesman, the three had tested negative for the illness and the ship was already back at sea.