Obama's Response To Ebola Is Right

Front-page news: Obama is sending the US Military to West Africa to help "combat" the Ebola outbreak. 3000 troops & some other stuff is the gist.

He's right.

"This epidemic is going to get worse before it gets better," he said in a press conference at the CDC.

He's right. Only a month ago the World Health Organization was talking about 20,000 cases, and I went on record saying that was an underestimate by an order of magnitude. (Sort of, since in that article I was anonymous. I made my official stand here.) With each passing day, the WHO estimate seems like a best-case scenario that is increasingly unlikely to play out, and bigger numbers--much bigger numbers--are starting to be bandied about.

"We must take the dangerous, deadly threat of Ebola as seriously as we take ISIS," said Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

He's only half-right. ISIS is repugnant, but at worst will only cause some minor mayhem to Americans or other foreigners traveling in that part of the Mideast. They're unlikely to do real damage to the US. Ebola, by contrast, has the potential to bring world travel to a halt. That's rather worse.

The involvement of the US Military “could change the trajectory of the spread of the disease — if that response is fast,” said Steven Radelet, a "former development expert at both the Treasury and State Departments in the Clinton and Obama administrations who now advises the Liberian government on economic matters" according to the NY Times.

He's definitely right.

The question is: why the Army?

The key is this: we think of the Armed Forces of the US as being a monster with a lot of guns. That characterization is true, but it's not the whole story of what they do, either. What they also do--and they do better than any organization on earth--is figure out logistics and mobilization at short notice. Need to send 500,000 people somewhere in 3 months? Okay, fine. Where will you put them? How will you feed them? How will you set up fresh and clean water? Make sure waste is removed without turning a living site into a cesspool? Get electricity and telecommunications to a remote, off-the-grid location? Done. Anything else you need?

Nobody can do this like the US Military. A few others can come close: the Brits, the Germans, the French. I suppose the Russians could. The Chinese almost certainly could. More on them in a moment. But no matter what way you cut it, military organizations think about these kinds of issues all the time.

And what's needed right now is this kind of logistical expertise, especially in the chaos of West Africa. You want these aid organizations to send hundreds, maybe thousands of volunteers to help contain this epidemic? Okay, how are you going to build the facilities to care for the patients? Where will you house the volunteers? Who will clean their laundry without infecting them? How will they get in and out of the Hot Zone? How will you establish command and control? How will you organize your supply chain? And on and on.

The US Military is uniquely qualified to tackle this problem. Without them, the day may well be lost; with them, the tide may turn, although even then, some of the worst scenarios make me shudder.

The Ebola crisis is a national security threat, make no mistake. There is a good deal of ranting on right-wing websites carping about how 200,000 people from Ebola-stricken countries have visas to enter the US. Not surprisingly, it's the wrong preoccupation with the wrong aspect of this calamity. Those 200,000 people won't all get on a plane and come straight to the US, as those stories darkly (if only subconsciously) imply. Indeed, it's become almost impossible to leave Liberia right now by air as commercial carriers have stopped their routes and all but isolated the country.

But all it takes is a few infected people to get to Nigeria, the regional travel hub of Africa, and then the decision tree gets much more difficult. People from Nigeria go everywhere. Will we simply impose a travel ban on everyone from Africa? What would happen if we do, and Ebola travels to Europe or East Asia anyway? Then what would we do? Shutting down Transatlantic or Transpacific travel would cripple the world economy, and could lead to problems just as dire as the prospect of spreading infection itself. 

This is why a group like the US Military is needed. Whether or not they are the only solution is not yet clear. But it's not an overstatement to suggest they might be saving the world by ramping up in the region, which is not at all what their presence will do in Iraq.

As to the Chinese or the Russians being involved in the solution, perhaps they will soon come to recognize the threat of this problem. In the meantime, it is the US government that has drawn a line in the sand and committed itself in the name of world security. That is leadership, and why I am proud to be an American today.

--Billy