In your piece, you advocate a military response. What do you want militaries to do to combat this problem? I'm terrified of this becoming a shooting war in which people suffering such horrible misery also become victims of violence intended to keep them "away."
I don't want tens of thousands in west Africa to die of ebola, but I certain don't want them to die lonely, thirsty, and ducking for cover. :-(
It seems like the most important tactic for reducing the R0 to <1 is building isolation treatment centers, yes?
I should write a follow up piece explaining why a military response, but the basic reasons are:
1. The scale of the problem is too large (both geographically and in the numbers of people affected) for any organisation (or group of organisations) other than the military to handle. Even if we moved to immediate mobilisation today it would still take months to get up and running on the ground by which time the problem will be vastly bigger.
2. We need to enforce a effective quarantine in the area and provide protection for the health care personnel. Only the military has the ability to do this.
3. I think we will have problems recruiting enough volunteer medical staff and may need to conscript them to get them to go.
4. Only full-scale mobilisation will stop the political games. Only if this problem is treated as war will we be able to get effective action out of the bickering political parties.
The military is quite good at operations 'other than war'. I was a minor cog in one effort, in 1991: Joint Task Force Sea Angel.
Details are searchable, but the upshot is that NGOs (I no longer recall if the term was used then) provided far more disaster relief assets and supplies, than the military did.
What the Marines brought to the party was command and control, and the ability to field, and support, a thousand guys in only days for delivering food, water, and medical aid.
And also, one shouldn't underestimate the ability of a brigade of disciplined troops to control masses of infected people. If they're told 'don't shoot' then they won't shoot.
Honestly I have been disappointed by how effective they have been. I would expect the Army to be able to build field hospitals faster than this. There have been a lot of setbacks, detailed in a recent NYTimes article: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/us/us-effort-in-liberia-ba...
" the local contractor announced that the crusher’s engine, needed to smash rocks, had broken" and "Hauling parts and equipment from the United States and Europe takes time, and then there are negotiations with local contractors for heavy equipment."
That's crazy. The Seebees and other military engineers have rock crushers, and construction equipment. They know how to break that stuff down and put it on airplanes. The Air Force is used to transporting that stuff.
Now, I was only a stupid jarhead, and there may be issues not called out in the article, but I'd expect a week, tops, could get engineers on site, working, with their own equipment.
replying to you since i can't reply to the child reply i wanted to address.
If they deployed the SeaBees this wouldn't be happening. The key word is 'contractor', by using companies to avoid the political taint of 'getting involved where they aren't wanted' or being accused of 'wasting money' we send the proverbial 'lowest bidder' instead of the trained experts. Sad but true.
I don't want tens of thousands in west Africa to die of ebola, but I certain don't want them to die lonely, thirsty, and ducking for cover. :-(
It seems like the most important tactic for reducing the R0 to <1 is building isolation treatment centers, yes?