Dakota Wood: Coronavirus impact reaches the US military

Dakota Wood, Senior Research Fellow for Defense Programs at the Heritage Foundation and former strategist for the United States Marine Corps Special Operations Command, joins Secure Freedom Radio to explain how the US military is being impacted by the coronavirus outbreak.

“It is situation dependent- if you are on an outpost in Afghanistan or in Iraq or Syria, by default these are fairly isolated. You are part of your team, you are not interacting that much with the local population so you can really monitor and continue doing the things you need to do. The situation is different in places like in South Korea and Italy, which are just hot beds for this coronavirus. You have personnel who live out in the community, they come out to work at the installations and then go back out. So, there is a higher risk level of somebody catching something. When a Navy ship pulls into port, whether its Spain, the Mediterranean or the Pacific region, sailors are going to go off their ships and interact with the locals. The US navy has put in the policy that if a ship pulls into a port, it cannot touch another port for a minimum of 2 weeks. This is the 14-day incubation period for the virus they are trying to account for.”

Listen to the whole show here.