By Michael F. Duggan
After more than two months in steep decline and the introduction of four highly effective vaccines, COVID-19 numbers in the United States are plateauing again. This of course is after three spikes that made the U.S. number one worldwide in the total number of COVID deaths. In some respects, the way that much of the country has dealt with the pandemic is reminiscent of how the Allies prosecuted the First World War on the Western Front.
The Great War in the west was a war of position. After an initial campaign of maneuver during the summer of 1914, the front quickly bogged down into a 450 mile-long line characterized by trenches and deadlock—”trenchlock.” The lines would barely move in either direction for four years.
The problem was not one of parity between the belligerents, but rather a disparity between modes of warfare at that point in military and technological history. The defensive, the inherently stronger mode, was given an exponential advantage by modern weapons wrought by the Industrial Revolution (repeating rifles, smokeless powder/flat-trajectory bullets, barbed wire, machine guns, modern artillery, etc.). The technologies of the modern offensive were more complex and technologically sophisticated—light automatic weapons, flamethrowers, attack aircraft, tanks—and were in their infancy or were actually developed during the war. Even if these weapons had existed in numbers, tactical, operational, and strategic doctrine was not sufficiently developed to employ them effectively until 1918. Even then, they were not definitive in securing victory.
As recent historians have observed, the First World War was characterize by a learning process: new weapons were developed (poison gas, flamethrowers, and tanks were all spawn of the Great War). New and innovative tactical and operational approaches were also formulated: the British and Germans both experimented with modern small unit infiltration tactics, and the combined arms attack that would win fame in the Second World War as Blitzkrieg were born during the First. But these measures were too nascent, too weak to overcome the entrenched power of the defensive mode. If this period marked the birth of the offensive revolution, it was more notable as the apex of the defensive revolution.
For most of the period from late 1914 until well into 1918, the war was characterized by unimaginative “pushes”—the “classic” World War One infantry assault supported by artillery hoping to punch through the enemy lines to a war of sweeping mobility and victory. Sure the generals tinkered with the formula: creeping barrages, “hurricane barrages,” gas barrages, variations in unit density, tanks used here and there, limited “bite and hold” attacks, etc., but most of the major attacks from Loos in 1915 to the great German Spring Offensives in 1918 were fairly similar. Both sides kept trying the same thing in the face of failure. So it is with so much of the American approach to COVID-19.
There was a learning process during the COVID-19 pandemic too, but it was mostly technical. Unlike the technical developments during the First World War, the development of a vaccine was quick and effective—the companies working on them got the solution (several solutions) right the first time. One genetics company mapped the genetic sequence of the virus in a matter of hours. Vaccines were produced within weeks, and were being administered to the public by December. It is one of the great success stories of medical history. But again, policy interfered.
I am not a physician, much less an epidemiologist. I am not a medical professional of any type. I do not understanding the mathematics of contagion, of vectors and trajectories of infection. And yet I do understand that if you put people infected with a highly contagious disease in close proximity to uninfected, unvaccinated people, the disease will likely spread. This is what happened: first in April, then in July, and then massively in the fall and early winter. Increases in new cases followed public celebrations of holidays and the partial reopening of businesses (fortunately the nation was spared a post-Christmas/New Years spike). Major universities opened in the fall of 2020 and then quickly shut down again after outbreaks among the student population.
Americans—a large percentage of whom seem incapable of any kind of shared national sacrifice—have let down their guard time and time again during this crisis. Some never had their guard up. Rather than bite the bullet and shut things down in earnest, the authority to shut and open business fell to the states and local governments. The result was a checkerboard approach of half measures and temporary half-results. Premature partial re-openings kept infection rates high until early January when the numbers began coming down. Now a new wave of relaxed state and local restrictions appears to be causing a plateau in the number of cases in spite of the impressive vaccination effort by the new administration. Since many Americans apparently no longer possess the kind of determination that gave us the magnificent industrial mobilization and war effort that let to victory in WWII, perhaps technology will save us in spire of ourselves.
By contrast China, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Vietnam did bite the bullet—came up with strict national policies that effectively shut down the virus. Not only are all of these nations open for business today, but their losses relative to ours speak volumes: Taiwan lost 10 people to the disease (Florida, with a population smaller than that of Taiwan has lost 32,712 to date). New Zealand lost 26 people. Vietnam, 35. If Chinese numbers are to be believed, their nation, which has a population more than four times larger that of the U.S. has lost 4,636. As of this morning, the United States has lost about 541,000 people to COVID-19. When necessary policies are rendered impossible or ineffective by the system, then it is the system and not the policies that have failed.
The offensive revolution in arms, technology, and doctrine arrived in earnest on the Western Front during the summer of 1918. But its success was mostly local in actions like the battle of Hamel on July 4, 1918 and on a larger scale at Amiens a month later. But by then the Germans, unable to capitalize on their gains from the Spring Offensive and faced with the prospect of 1,390,000 freshly-arrived Americans, succumbed to exhaustion and mostly traditional Allied attacks all along the front, rather than the decisive arrival of the modern combined forces offensive.
It is possible, perhaps even likely, that the rapidly-increasing number of vaccinations will eventually outpace contagion. With more than 80 million vaccines already administered, hopefully the plateau will not become a spike. Of course to defeat the virus, we will have to reach a percentage of vaccinations possibly in the 80s or 90s, and recent polls suggest that a quarter or more of Americans say they will not take the shots. The alternative is to reach herd immunity through a combination of injection and infection. In this case some of the non-vaccinated will continue to die (if there is no price for stupidity, then what is the benefit of not being stupid?). Let us just hope that the virus does not mutate sufficiently to produce a vaccine-resistant variant before we reach population immunity.
And so, like the chateau-bound generals of the Allied high command in WWI, governors of some states are pursuing a policy of more of the same. By starting to reopen businesses, the hope, presumably, is that a strategy that is largely responsible for the deaths of more than half a million Americans will yield fruit this time. Infection rates are increasing again in 16 states. The Great Abdication continues.