I am ex-Army.
I work for the U.S.Military.
The Army has medical occupation specialties.
Doctors, nurses, medical technicians, dentists, etc.
And may contract medical specialists and researchers.
Soldiers are not trained to be doctors, beyond basic first aid/battlefield emergency treatment of serious wounds to stabilize the injured/ill until they can be transported to a hospital/trauma center for proper treatment.
Soldiers do not have the level of specialized medical training for them to be individually effective in this kind of situation (highly contagious serious disease).
The soldiers role can only be as gofers and guards.
Consequently the risk of soldiers catching ebola is higher than the politicians will admit to.
Please understand, no career politician will be the one who cries “Fire” in the theater...even when there is a fire. They do not want a panic. So they seek to assure all that all is well, there will be no problems, no chance for infection, etc etc. They will lie to avoid panic.
Unless, of course, they seek panic to accomplish some goal of theirs (”never let a crisis go to waste.”)
So in summary, sending 3,000 or whatever soldiers to a place where even the trained medical personnel are catching the disease, is VERY dangerous.
VERY.
I agree with you. We are sending the military to set up the logistical base to support the efforts of the professionals from other government agencies and to provide force protection. But sending 3,000 personnel, the vast majority of whom are not medical personnel, could be very risky.