How Coronavirus Could Permanently Transform The U.S. Military

When I first got into the defense business 30 years ago, I would often hail a taxi on the streets of Washington, ride it into the bowels of the Pentagon, and then walk into the building unchallenged. No badge required.

The rise of global terrorism changed all that. After 9/11, the Pentagon became an armed fortress—which it remains today. If I tried to enter the building today the way I did in the old days, I would be gunned down by guards wielding automatic weapons.

Although terrorism now seems to be in retreat around the world, chances are that strangers will never again be able to walk into the Pentagon unchallenged—or any other federal building for that matter.

When it comes to building security, there is a new normal.

The coronavirus crisis may be another one of those national traumas that permanently transforms how our military and the rest of society does business. The default setting of many people today, including President Trump, is that we will work our way through the crisis and then get back to what used to be called “normal.”

But maybe there will never be a vaccine. There is no vaccination for the common cold, which can also be spread by a type of coronavirus. Or maybe the vaccine we find will be no more reliable than the ones we get for seasonal flu, which are hard pressed to keep up with continual mutations in the relevant family of viruses.

In the meantime, we will have to make do with makeshifts like distancing and protective devices, hoping that the pandemic gradually burns out. South Korea has demonstrated what can be achieved in the absence of a vaccine if a country is willing to take draconian steps to prevent infection from spreading.

But America is not Korea.

Pandemics like the 1918 Spanish influenza outbreak typically take 2-3 years to play out, the infections come in successive waves, and during that time society can be profoundly changed.

So perhaps policymakers and pundits should begin thinking in terms other than a simple return to normalcy. “Normalcy” was what Warren Harding offered a war-weary nation in the 1920 election, and it proved highly popular with voters. But the Roaring Twenties that followed would not have qualified as normal by any of the standards prevailing in pre-war America.

Sometimes there is no going back.

Consider how the advent of atomic weapons transformed the international system. Recourse to war among the great powers became unthinkable, because it would have been tantamount to suicide. So leading nations learned to manage their relations without the resort to war that had so frequently characterized Western history in the past.

We didn’t abolish nuclear weapons, we learned to live with them. Maybe coronavirus will be the same—not because we will be stuck in the same rut forever, but because the prospect of future pandemics will have been indelibly impressed on this generation’s collective imagination.

It’s easy to say, “We haven’t seen anything like this in a hundred years, so how likely is it to happen again?” But that overlooks a key change in the technological landscape during the intervening years. Today, our enemies can fashion lethal, virulent microbes in a laboratory fairly easily. And judging from the experience with coronavirus, we would be nearly powerless to prevent the introduction of such pathogens into our society.

The specter of the world’s most powerful nation crippled by a mere microbe inevitably alerts countries like North Korea and Iran to new possibilities for furthering their influence. U.S. troops are already inoculated against diseases like smallpox before deploying to South Korea since Pyongyang is known to have an extensive biowar program, but synthetic biology provides the option of fashioning diseases that are far harder to counter.

Like a zero-day cyberattack utilizing novel malware, the sudden appearance of a new pathogen could wreak havoc with our economy and military preparations. And now we have demonstrated that fact to every bad actor in the world.

Even if this scenario, like the possibility of nuclear war, remains a hypothetical, we will have to take it into account in our security plans. This will be a bonanza for some medical supply companies and for research centers like Johns Hopkins and Battelle Institute that have extensive credentials in combatting pathogens.

For the rest of us, though, it will be another burden to be worked through. For instance, the military has long followed a practice of clustering warfighters in heavily protected spaces to defend them from enemy fire. But practices like “hot bunking” on warships or crowding soldiers into transports are going to look mighty unattractive as long as there is no vaccination to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

If we don’t develop an effective vaccine, or have reason to believe our enemies might employ novel pathogens in wartime, then some military practices will need to change permanently. This would seem to give greater impetus to the use of unmanned systems in combat, because unit cohesion among troops might be impeded by medical concerns.

There are many other adjustments the joint force could need to undertake if coronavirus persists or the specter of biowar is deemed more plausible. Right now everybody is in a wait-and-see mode, hoping that a silver-bullet solution to COVID-19 can be found. But that solution will likely take a long time to arrive, if ever.

So maybe instead of thinking of our current crisis as a passing thing after which a return to normalcy can occur, we should try to imagine what it was like living in the gay community circa 1986. Suddenly your friends are dying all around you from a disease for which there is no cure (AIDS). How are you going to change your behavior to survive and thrive?

We should have a good idea within a few months whether there will be a near-term solution to coronavirus, or wrenching adjustments will be required over the longer term. If the latter possibility proves to be the case, the joint force will have to rethink a fair amount of what it does to defend the nation.

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