The impact of the coronavirus crisis on internal and international security. A short but chilling analysis

(To David Rossi)
06/03/20

"The new highly contagious pathogen ... can spread rapidly, and must be considered capable of causing enormous damage to health, the economy and the entire human society in any environment ... Building scenarios and strategies only on the basis of known pathogens risks not to make use of all possible measures to ... save lives ". So we concluded, in the penultimate paragraph, our previous article.

Now, in a nutshell, let's try to focus our analysis not on the economic and health impact of a possible spread of COVID-19 with a magnitude equal to that of seasonal influence, but on the security sector, i.e. on those thousands or in certain States millions of uniformed men, military and otherwise, technicians, administrators, politicians and experts who guarantee compliance with the law and the internal and international security of each country, starting with ours.

How many men can lose, even in the short term and not definitively, a division, a brigade, an administrative office, an elective assembly, before they cease to function in a manner consistent with the system?

The answer is not unique. However, it is easy to understand that the members of the police force, the armed forces and public administrators find themselves, like the health personnel, more often in situations where, always citing the recent WHO report, the squeeze "Closeness and contact between people ... in potentially contaminated environments could amplify transmission". We add the contribution of military doctors and nurses to civil health, which could deprive guardians of the order of the best of the assistance available to them.

Let's not forget, then, that it would be enough for a barracks or an office to come into contact with even a single case to force them, at best, to two weeks of quarantine. You understand that an offender or an infected terrorist could, without effort, remove entire crews, barracks or public prosecutor's offices from circulation simply by their presence.

We could therefore expect that the state will have at certain times and in certain territories at risk too less than half of the law enforcement officers available, to fight organized crime, terrorism and other threats to citizens' security.

The situation, if possible, becomes even more complicated in the case of missions abroad by the Armed Forces, including the Italian ones. To give just one but significant example, the UNIFIL mission in Lebanon includes several thousand men, most of them supplied by China, South Korea, Italy, France, Spain, Malaysia, Germany and Austria, all countries hosting the nine tenths of COVID-19 cases. Lebanon itself already has 15 cases, but mainly because of its close ties to the Islamic Republic of Iran, it may already have tens of thousands of cases within it.

Who will have won it first between the fear of the Lebanese for the contagion brought by the foreign military and the need for the participating countries to recall their staff, especially the medical one, so as not to expose them to unnecessary risks of contagion? What about all the other missions where tens of thousands of civilians and uniformed men are employed to guarantee the status quo?

A similar argument, but in other ways even more disturbing, may apply to those countries, such as Switzerland, but above all Israel, where the system of the citizen in arms is in force. For them, the possibility of losing many staff even without fighting and finding themselves with too little expendable reserves is a real problem. As well as the impossibility of conducting exercises, a harbinger of increasing the contagion. Not surprisingly, Israel has imposed quarantine on travelers not only from Italy, but from all countries with a massive onset of COVID-19, in addition to the Palestinian territories where the first cases appeared just yesterday.

This is only the beginning: around the Jewish state, all Islamic countries, unlike Iran, have imposed silence on hospitals boiling with cases of atypical pneumonia, including many staff and reservists. To paraphrase an old adage, each country in the Middle East region hopes to be the last that the crocodile will devour.

Then, there are the technologically advanced countries that play the role of regional power, those - like Turkey to date without "official" cases - who have an air force and a navy capable of projecting themselves into a region ... as long as they have enough pilots who can fly!

What will happen in Syria and Libya when one of the parties finds itself with troops cut down by fever, dysentery, cough and conjunctivitis? Not to mention cases with serious respiratory complications that will certainly not be able to fly or sail immediately after a month in hospital. Will the country with the least infected attempt a desperate sortie?

Finally, the most technologically advanced countries of all remain, primarily the United States. Do they believe they are managing the crisis by charging suspicious cases three thousand dollars a buffer? Or will they find themselves, for the first time, having to divert huge resources from the heavy military budget to that of health care, for a cause called national salvation?

Still citing the aforementioned WHO report, the United States, like "A large part of the global community are not yet ready, mentally and materially, to implement the measures that have been employed to contain COVID-19 in China". And yet “These are the only measures that - it is currently demonstrated - can interrupt or minimize transmission chains in humans. Fundamental to these measures are proactive surveillance to detect cases immediately, rapid diagnosis and immediate isolation of the case, as well as rigorous tracking and quarantine of contacts of the infected, along with an exceptionally high degree of understanding and acceptance of these measures. by the population ". No, definitively the Pentagon and public health will find themselves pulling on both sides a blanket that has become really too short for a country with a huge public debt and over 100.000 billion dollars of future spending commitments still not covered.

We don't know if COVID-19 really will have such a devastating impact on security: once again, we hope we haven't got the picture of the future situation right. We know that "It is spreading with surprising speed" and that its epidemics "In any context they have very serious consequences"which is very evident to us Italians.

If we do not become aware of the dangers the system is facing as soon as possible, in particular due to a possible collapse of ... firewall represented by the police, and we do not imagine, design and propose ways to buffer the leaks, the consequences of this crisis will last for years and years even after we have all been vaccinated by the coronavirus.

In such a scenario, the impact of COVID-19 on the economy, institutions and society will be so devastating as to make it seem like the crises of 1929 and 2008 ... of field trips.

Photo: Arma dei Carabinieri / Unifil / US Army