This morning’s Washington Post has a story about President Bush considering a plan to use the military to “effect a quarantine”. Pentagon planners may consider this to be a worse nightmare than a flu epidemic. Questions that they must be asking:
• Do we prepare combat troops for something that may not happen?
• What if we engage in minimal preparation for quarantine and continue to prepare for combat? Will we see our troops fail because they are unprepared?
• What happens when young soldiers confront mobs of panicky civilians, potentially carriers of a lethal disease?
• How will our forces relate to state and local governments?
• How will we manage public information?
These are only the short-term questions.
In the mid-term, the administration should reflect on the experience in Iraq. What will happen if we again send troops into a conflict for which they are incompletely prepared?
In the long term, we need to ask about the impact of a ever more influential military on our democratic political system.
This is a task better assigned to the Surgeon General of U.S. Public Health Service.
Having said that, if a real crises occurred, I would certainly consider the use of troops
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