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Send in the Marines? Not to Fight Coronavirus

Send in the Marines? Not to Fight Coronavirus

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Although President Donald Trump has declared the coronavirus a national emergency and leading Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden says he would "call out the military now" to deal with it, Defense Department officials are unenthusiastic about the prospect. And well they should be. There are lots of practical reasons the military isn't a substitute for the public health infrastructure needed in this crisis. There are also important reasons that have to do with its role in a free society.  

It’s likely, nonetheless, that at some point the pandemic will require a presidential declaration or Congressional statute waiving the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits using the military in domestic roles regularly performed by civilian authorities. While this is sure to raise alarms among the president’s critics as a precursor to martial law, there is much the military can and should do in a time of national crisis. Not least, service members are some of the healthiest and least at-risk in the population, and are likely to remain able-bodied after the rest of us are not.

What’s vital, however, is ensuring that military involvement won’t undermine civilian authority and expertise, or shift the focus from the civilian agencies designed to provide these services. Here are some things the president and Defense Department should do — and avoid doing — to ensure that they don’t create dangerous precedents in American civil-military relations.

Use the military for what it’s best at: organization and logistics. If medical supplies and people need transport, or someone needs to figure out complicated supply systems, the men and women of the U.S. military are brilliant at that. The Pentagon is also wisely preparing to deploy its two massive hospital ships.

Don’t expect the military to become an alternative medical infrastructure. The Defense Department has 36 hospitals inside the country, but most are small, accounting for less than 3% of all U.S. hospital beds. Military bases have lots of land, and the troops could be asked to build and staff temporary hospitals. But most facilities aren’t in urban areas, so transportation would be a difficulty, and it would separate patients from their local and family support systems.

Don’t federalize National Guard units. Most of them will be needed in their home states to assist efforts under direction from governors — Andrew Cuomo of New York has done so already — and many are first responders and medical professionals in their private lives, so pulling them from their localities would detract from frontline efforts to protect and assist.

Aim to keep active-duty troops off the streets. If public safety requires more law enforcement than our civilian police can provide, National Guard units should be the priority. Guardsmen and women are more likely to be known to the people in the community. The lessons many of them have learned in three decades of peacekeeping and counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan will be relevant in keeping violence, and rending of our social fabric, to a minimum.

Make sure the military is seen as working only in support of civil authorities. No one in a uniform should be standing at the front of press conferences, whether at the White House, state capitols or medical facilities. Nor should people wearing uniforms instruct journalists about what they should or shouldn’t cover, as Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who carries the rank of admiral, did at a press conference on Monday.

The coronavirus may soon require a military response. But the armed forces shouldn’t be asked to do more than they are capable of, or anything that might threaten America’s social fabric and system of governance.  

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Kori Schake leads the foreign and defense policy team at the American Enterprise Institute.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.