Italian Military Magazine Says the West Has Lost the COVID War

Dec. 30, 2020 (EIRNS)—The West has not recognized that this fight against COVID is a war, and it has lost the war, argues Difesa Online Italian military magazine (“La Terza Ondata È Già In Atto: Dobbiamo Uscire Da Una Logica Emergenziale E Ragionare Da Militari”). After having documented that in all Western countries, the third wave of the pandemic is on and is bigger than the preceding two waves, the geopolitics desk editor David Rossi wrote:

“That is because we hid behind the Maginot Line of a fixed defense, instead of multiplying and rapidly moving troops.... In no country, maybe except in Communist China, have governments dealt with this emergency in the logic of a ‘real war.’ On the other hand, the truth is that no country is prepared today for a long war, over several theaters and with many losses, but only for lightning conflicts in one country at a time, or at most for operations of peace enforcing in two countries of the same region.

“Thus neither military nor even civilian medicine is able to even conceive the idea of moving, in a few weeks, from ordinary care for uniformed personnel in peacetime, to caring with extraordinary means and modalities for tens of thousands of infected, maimed or wounded reserves in wartime—a real war, as in World War II, Vietnam in the ’60s and ’70s, or Afghanistan in the ’80s. And yet, this is the logic we must accept in order to learn how to manage what is no longer an emergency but an  historical cycle, which probably won’t be defeated even by vaccinations, since we don’t know how long protection lasts....  Therefore, we need to develop the ability to multiply beds and staff very quickly, to cope with the need to hospitalize 10-20% of detected cases, that is probably 1-2% of actual cases. In other words, we must act as if we had 2-3 million reserves  engaged in fighting on a very large front and with a large number of wounded to be treated every day.

“Did you ever ask yourself how they managed, until a few decades ago, to go from say a half-million uniformed men in peacetime to rotating 5 million reserves on a couple of fronts in a fighting war?

“They did it because military health was a bit like a bagpipe, which stayed limp when it was necessary to manage the ordinary administration (appendicitis, injuries, etc.), but that when you began to fight seriously you could swell beyond expectation. To do this, you need money, human and material means, but above all the honesty to get out of an insane emergency logic and to admit to the public that this scenario will not change for years.”