Spillover of COVID-19: Impact on National Defense

Abstract

The rapidly spreading impact of Covid-19 has potentially dire consequences for the Ministry of Defense's ability to protect national interests. The unprecedented effects of this pandemic are directly undermining the ability of the Ministry of Defense to carry out the National Defense Strategy. In particular, Covid-19 has harmed the readiness of the Armed Forces, their ability to project power globally, and their speed of modernization for future challenges. This paper uses a descriptive qualitative approach as the main writing approach and uses the concept of impacts across key organizational pillars by Beth McGrath (2020), including (1) Workforce planning, (2) Training methods, (3) Reprioritizing spending, and (4) Policy. The results of this study are: (1) The Ministry of Defense must be prepared with a complete set of strategies, (2) Distributed Virtual Reality training is a natural solution to the challenges posed by the current pandemic, (3) The military has no other choice but to make it a priority in spending on defense equipment and in carrying out military operations. The obvious choice is the big budget items that cause problems, and (4) The defense equipment procurement program, military operations, and Research & Development (R&D) activities are expected to be hampered. As governments seek to prevent and mitigate the impact of this pandemic, the positive role played by military forces can be seen as an excuse to offset some of the expected defense budget cuts.