US Doesn’t Have Enough Resources to Help Civilians in Coronavirus Fight: Pentagon

“The Department of Defence is ready, willing and able to support civilian authorities to the greatest extent possible with the direction of the president,” Hoffman said, speaking at a briefing Monday. “We just want to make sure that the conversation that is being had is informed by the facts of what is possible, what is not, and what those trade-offs are.”
Specifically, the spokesman explained that the Department of Defence runs only between 2-3 percent of the hospital bed capacity that private US hospitals do.

Air Force Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs, the Joint Chiefs of Staff’ top doctor, who took part in Monday’s briefing alongside Hoffman, warned that the military, which received $686 billion in funding last year, only has access to 36 hospitals, with these largely geared toward combat casualties, not infectious diseases like COVID-19.

“Our doctors are, unsurprisingly, trained highly in traumatic injuries and [for] dealing with traumatic injuries. We have a much younger population that we’re dealing with treating in our hospitals. And so all of these [issues] kind of factor into what is that capability we have for a potential outbreak that generally has been more devastating to older persons who require a different type of attention than we normally do,” Hoffman explained.

Friedrichs added that even the military’s ad-hoc emergency tent hospital response capability is largely geared toward trauma care, not contagious diseases.

Another problem, according to Pentagon officials, is that physicians at the disposal of the National Guard also often combine their work with duties in the private sector. “If you mobilize the Guard and Reserve medical personnel from their civilian jobs, they’re no longer in their civilian jobs, and that direct impacts the community where they worked, and that’s the trade-off that –whether it’s a natural disaster, or the coronavirus or anything else –that’s part of the trade-off that we look at as we offer options going forward,” the Pentagon chief surgeon said.