No Chaplains in a Foxhole: I Can Read, Lieutenant!

A *MOURNING* DEVOTIONAL ON OPERATION: SECURITY

In cost accounting, unit level managers will begin with a budget, and during a fiscal year will accrue and record actuals to compute a variance to determine the success or failure of mission accomplishment, and a similar process is employed in the military, as is demonstrated in after action reviews (AARs), in progress reviews (IPRs) and at quarterly training briefs (QTBs), with the idea that making periodic adjustments to plan, an organization can become more efficient and effective at mission accomplishment.

In basic training, or boot camp, initial entry training (IET) soldiers are introduced to the common tasks, to shoot, move, and communicate, associated with the basic functions of a soldier to ensure survivability of those battle assets, for mission accomplishment, and it accrues to the best interest of a soldier asset to ensure his or her own survivability. A soldier will be instructed in the distinction between cover from small arms fire and concealment from observation, and will become familiarized with basic camouflage techniques to mask their location and operations, or combat operations security, but will also be instructed on the proper operation of his or her primary weapon, where the first step is to develop a good sight picture, because it is impossible to hit a target that you cannot see, and impossible to acquire and defeat a target you don't even have.

Some have suggested that a current public health crisis had been planned, and, as in research and development in the private commercial sector, such an endeavor would require a sufficient development timeline, just as had been required in the development of what were described in the Emergency Use Authorization Declaration, on March 27, 2020, as "COVID-19 countermeasures products", not "vaccines." And, generally, an adversary will work to employ operations security to avoid detection before proceeding in an offensive operation, while it should be axiomatic that it is nearly impossible to develop actionable intelligence against a potential emerging pathogen from nature; so, the event will most likely be a surprise requiring a methodical process and quick reaction capability to develop a good threat picture, as the President had indicated during his speech on the anniversary of the pandemic, in which he had asserted that valuable time had been lost.

However, given the surprise nature of an emerging public health crisis, it is a fact that by December 31, 2019, there were only a total of 15 cases, and by January 10, 2020, there was only one fatality, despite the provocative headlines that had been created from the seventh largest city in China, and any robust response would have been premature; however, by February 24, 2020, a robust joint effort had been engaged, deploying 1,800 teams of at least five epidemiologists to examine 55,924 laboratory confirmed cases--19 times more than had been reported in the entire U.S. by March 15, 2020, and that 40-page report had found a disease from which 80% had experienced no worse than mild pneumonia, a pathogen that had presented infection clusters with no wider community spread, and with a secondary attack rate of between 0.90 and 0.48%, four times too low to validate the existence of a disease being transmitted from person to person and 12 times too low to set off a super spreader event.

So, using the military decision-making process (MDMP), FM 6-0, known to any military leader, this PowerPoint presentation demonstrates what appears to be an dedicated effort to defeat the development of an accurate threat picture during that crucial step of identifying a threat or risk in the composite risk management process. DA Pam 385-30.

And, unless General Austin, Dr. Fauci and the President can explain why so many basic protocols and procedures were neglected, distorting the presentation of what had been known early to be a chimeric coronavirus, with an ophidian codon usage bias, which does not occur in nature, beyond a reasonable doubt, a novel coronavirus had been cultivated in a laboratory, and, worse, had been permitted to be deployed.