The Military Instrument of Power and Pandemics: A Long-Term Perspective.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The potential consequences of a pandemic were predicted in many security risk assessments published over the past decade. The short-term impact has resulted in significant loss of life and disruption to health services and wider domestic security. The focus for NATO has been to prevent the health crisis becoming a wider security crisis. This paper examines the breadth of activities undertaken by the “military instrument” to contribute to global and national responses to the crisis. It also identifies an emerging consensus on the longer-term effects of the Covid pandemic on defence and security from an Alliance perspective. It takes a mixed-methods approach, combining evidence from a collation of open source information on the role of the armed forces during the Covid crisis in five NATO countries (UK, Canada, Netherlands, France and Belgium), and a review of twelve academic papers specifically focussed on the implications for NATO.<br/>The paper identifies many uses of the military instrument under four themes: maintain military capability; protect health and provide healthcare for armed forces personnel (and other beneficiaries of military health systems); provide generic assistance to the civilian response; and to augment civilian health and social care with military reinforcements. The Covid crisis has reinforced “domestic resilience” as an “instrument of national power” alongside others (strategic communications, political, digital, intelligence, financial and legal) that lie beyond the conventional Diplomatic, Informational, Military, and Economic (DIME) paradigm. Looking to the future, the cost of the military instrument in the “Comprehensive Approach” to global and national crisis response needs to be balanced against investment in other instruments of national power.<br/>NATO has supported information sharing, collaboration, and brokering of mutual support across members of the Alliance. The Alliance will need to determine how much of this should endure, noting the improvements in civil-military cooperation, greater health intelligence and public health capacity, increased understanding of the interdependency of key military capabilities with equivalent civilian functions (health, logistics, digital services), and the value of existing standardization and coordination mechanisms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".