MILITARIZED

IT begs to ask why government authorities had to conduct a reconnaissance flight over Cebu City in connection with the alarming spread of the virus there. If the purpose was to have an appreciation of the urban landscape with its densely packed human settlements, then all it had to do was to look at the various resources in the City Planning Office, which would have included an urban settlement map. Government didn’t have to waste precious resources to fly a military helicopter.

And then you realize that this is actually just a mere window to the overall demeanor of our government in approaching this deadly disease, which is a mere extension of how our President looks at the challenge of governance. He sees it mostly in the context of war, and therefore as a ground for retired generals to apply what they have learned in battling enemies of the state.

President Rodrigo Duterte has assigned the task to govern our local governments, the environment, even the promotion of our social development, to retired military generals. He appointed them as secretaries to head government departments. And we also see a good number of retired military and police officials occupying top or key positions at all levels in many government agencies.

It is, therefore, not surprising that government efforts to address the coronavirus disease of 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic have also now practically turned into a military, and not a public health, operation. The Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases ( IATF- EID), a body created by former president Benigno Aquino 3rd in 2014, is headed by the Department of Health, which is headed by Secretary Francisco Duque 3rd who is a medical doctor, and is dominated by civilian Cabinet secretaries.

However, instead of appointing people with public health or socioeconomic planning expertise, key operations on the ground to address Covid-19 is coordinated by the National Task Force on Covid-19 (NTF) led by retired military generals in Duterte’s Cabinet. To address the alarming spike of cases in Cebu City, he appointed Roy Cimatu, another retired general and currently secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, to oversee the operations. Thus, while Duque is the chairman of IATF-EID, the optics that the government efforts on the ground creates is one that is predominantly militarized.

This is not in any way to diminish the capacity of retired uniformed personnel or to begrudge them rendering service to the country. What they offer to us is the valuable skill of discipline and their ability to uphold a chain of command. But it is also with this advantage that the efforts to address the very complicated problem of a viral pandemic could also suffer some drawbacks. Rigid and regimented approaches may not necessarily work when the enemy to be fought is an unknown virus that threatens a complex socioeconomic, cultural and political landscape. A militaristic approach of ordering uniformed personnel bearing long arms to patrol communities, and of ordering tanks to roll down main streets, or of police generals doing air reconnaissance helicopter rides, may evince a state appearing to be in control, but it cannot fully address the broad range of complexity that this pandemic has brought.

For example, faced with the challenge of containing the virus, the President opted to place large swaths of the country under lockdown, regardless of actual prevalence of cases. While this may have helped contain the virus, it also inflicted heavy damage on the economy as it indiscriminately halted economic activity even in those areas where a more regulated and less restricted policy would have been more appropriate.

Recently, Secretary Eduardo Año of the Department of the Interior and Local Government admitted that a more localized lockdown to surgically target areas where there is a concentration of positive and suspected cases might have been the best strategy. In fact, this is something that many have been saying from the beginning. Together with a more aggressive contact tracing and testing, while beefing up the capacity of the health system, this would have achieved a better result that would have contained the virus while minimizing the adverse fall-out on the economy, and the livelihoods of people. This is something that wouldn’t have required aerial reconnaissance of crowded settlements, but only of locating suspected and confirmed cases on the ground on a map and drawing containment lines to denote areas where specific lockdowns should have been imposed.

However, our decision-makers took the scorched- earth policy of massive containment, typical of military campaigns where the enemy is hidden and there is very little time to do detailed intelligence work. The tendency was to simplify the complex and contain as wide an area as possible. In other countries that successfully contained the spread of the virus with minimal incidence of infection and deaths, like Thailand and

Vietnam, the approach taken was the targeted lockdown that Año referred to, coupled with more vigorous contact tracing, testing, isolation and treatment, without imposing overly restrictive quarantine policies that effectively halted economic activity in large areas.

What is interesting to ponder is that Thailand and Vietnam both have governments that are more militarized. Yet, the fundamental difference is that in both countries, they allowed their public health systems to take the lead, and they enabled the ethos and discourse of science to take control and dominate their strategies. Unfortunately, that is not how we do it. Science and public health take a back seat to the ethos of war to be fought by deploying uniformed and heavily armed military and police personnel and tanks on the ground, and sending military helicopters to conduct reconnaissance in the air. Our government approach is expressed in the NTF being led by retired generals in control of the ground operations. In the end, this may have led to a strategy that saw the people, and not the virus, as the enemies to be contained.