The COVID-19 pandemic is testing the U.S. military readiness to fight, forcing it to cope with a new and potent enemy. The Army was forced to suspend taking in new recruits until it overhauled basic training, major exercises were cancelled and a front-line aircraft carrier was sidelined. The Pentagon had plans for combating a pandemic, but General Terrence O’Shaughnessy, the commander of the military response to coronavirus, told 60 Minutes, “This plan did not survive contact with the enemy.”
David Martin brought 60 Minutes cameras to witness the military’s war on coronavirus for a story to be broadcast Sunday, April 26 at 7 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.
Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Hyten is the military’s number-two in command. He confers with the Pentagon’s Crisis Management Team daily. “We have to figure out how to operate and fight through a world where coronavirus exists,” he told Martin. “If we just wait for what, you know, everybody hopes is going to happen, which is the disease goes away, and it doesn’t, and we haven’t planned for the other case, we’re in a bad situation.”
Martin went to basic army training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, where last month, 64 recruits among 940 tested positive for COVID-19. He saw face-masked soldiers struggling to stay apart. “Day to day our biggest problem is keeping them in that six feet,” Lt. Col. Patrick Collins said. “You tend to tell them, ‘OK, separate. Get your six feet.’ Couple minutes later, they start clustering again.”
For two weeks, the Army had to stop taking in new recruits because of the virus. “I’m not aware of any time, at least, you know, in my 39 years, where we stopped taking recruits. But these are different times,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said.
“The toughest decision that we had to make was to cancel Defender 20,” McConville said. The Army was already sending the necessary tanks to Europe six weeks ago for Defender 20, one of the largest exercises since the Cold War. “What would happen if we had 15,000 or 20,000 in a very close environment and… the virus broke out? How would we take care of them?”
Nearly 800 sailors aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt tested positive for the virus, but more than half of them had no symptoms. “We had so many assumptions of what a virus would do,” General Hyten told Martin, “and then when you actually see what coronavirus does, what COVID-19 does, it’s completely different.”
“Having an enemy that you don’t fully understand is always a little bit frustrating.” General O’Shaughnessy said.
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