By Dave Lindorff
Over the course of just a couple of days last week, the backbone of the US Navy’s Pacific fleet was just been shut down for the next month. The enemy that managed to cause this sudden surprise unilateral disarmament of the mighty US Navy’s Pacific Fleet was not Russian or Chinese cyber hackers or a sneak attack by some foreign enemy. Rather, it was just a tiny virus, COVID-19, that infected one crew member on each of two $13-billion Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carriers.
The USS Reagan and its carrier group of support vessels is now holed up in Japan with at least two infected crew members on board so far and others being quarantined. Meanwhile, the USS Roosevelt, which had been steaming from the its homeport in San Diego armed to the teeth with attack aircraft, bombs other weapons, towards a mission in the South China Sea, has been urgently rerouted to Guam with an onboard epidemic that has already spread to a total of 38 sailors among it’s “Big Stick” crew of 5000.
This effective sidelining of the US Pacific Fleet’s only two carrier groups by some microscopic specks of inanimate RNA protoplasm, offers a perfect metaphor for the absurdity of the decades-long US misallocation of trillions of dollars to the military in the name of national security.
Clearly, the fact that the Navy, deprived of required air cover for the next month, is in no position to engage in significant military action in the Pacific doesn’t put the US in any jeopardy — only the crews of its two carrier groups, who are at risk a spreading coronavirus infection.
Meanwhile, though, the global pandemic caused by that same virus has infected nearly three-quarters of a million people around the globe and close to 150,000 here in America, which has replaced China as the epicenter of the pandemic. The US economy has already been brought to a screeching halt because of a lockdown of the population in most states and urban centers, while hospitals are being overrun with coronavirus patients and their doctors and nurses in desperate need of scarce ventilators, masks, test kits or just empty hospital beds.
Amid this unprecedented crisis, the Pentagon, Energy Department and other military agencies, are seemingly running on autopilot, continuing to spend over a trillion dollars a year (including $13 billion on yet another new carrier, the USS John F. Kennedy, scheduled to be finished and ready for testing later this year), much of it on weapons intended for imagined wars against major powers like Russia and China, or intended for future interventions in countries around the world most Americans cannot even find on a map.
All this spending on arms is happening as it becomes increasingly clear that the biggest threat to the security of the American people is not foreign militaries or terrorist groups, but rather a tiny virus that is completely immune to all the weapons…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/we-have-met-the-enemy-and-its-a-tiny-virus