About 4,000 of the nation's 1.4 million active duty troops have come down with COVID-19, with testing of personnel, plus the entire National Guard and reserve forces expected to take months to complete.
Pentagon Joint Chiefs vice chairman Gen. John Hyten believes that the pre-coronavirus “2019 normal will never exist against” for the military, and that means the US's fighting forces will have to prepare to fight in a coronavirus world.
The senior officer admitted that despite twice daily briefings of the Pentagon's crisis management team, the military “still don't fully understand the virus…We had so many assumptions of what a virus would do, what a pandemic flu would do. And then when you actually see what coronavirus does, what COVID-19 does, it's completely different,” he complained.
Despite its massive $686 billion budget, the US military has proven surprisingly unprepared to tackle the coronavirus pandemic. Last month, Pentagon officials complained that the armed forces had access to only 36 hospitals, most of them geared to combat casualties, not infectious diseases. The same problems were made apparent in the deployment of the military's ad-hoc emergency tent hospitals, and its doctors, who are similarly more geared toward trauma care than to fighting viruses.
Earlier this month, Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Miley similarly said that he didn't think “business as usual” was possible as far as US military operations were concerned….
