You have the same feelings that I had for about the first 30 hours, I was outraged, at first I was thinking we were sending in labor to do what Africans could do, but then I got into looking at it deeper.
People forget that the military, and mostly the Army, are the very experts and people who deal with this stuff, and biological warfare and in all areas, from laboratories to the battlefield.
I also looked at what they will be doing and it is stuff that only they can do, building 17 treatment facilities totalling 1700 beds, and building a hospital to treat infected medical workers (that will serve as a confidence builder for them, the military also plans to run schools to train 500 medical helpers, PER WEEK, and they will be handling massive movement of supplies and materials.
The military needs this experience, and they darned well better be able to pull this off, or else we are telling the world and our enemies, that biological agents are our achilles heel, and that all the military expertise that we thought we had in protecting our people and our forces from devastation from biological agents, was all fake, and that all they have to do is get some Ebola across the border and they take out the country, or infect a couple of soldiers and our generations of training falls apart as the military contaminates each other and all of it’s bases, in some B horror movie scenario of military incompetence as they all stand around going “golleee, infectious diseases, and weaponized bio agents, we weren’t ready for that threat!”.
Yes the Army folks have been at this since near the end of World War II and yes they are probably the preeminent specialists on Ebola. But this operation is so huge in its scope and so dangerous because of the subtlety of a microscopic enemy that has become widespread. It will be only through an Act of God that we pull this off without a hitch. I’ll pray for His Mercy.
As for our enemies, if we did little they still couldn’t be sure that biological weapons are our Achilles heel, now we are in the position to prove our strength or weakness in this regard one way or another. Hope we are using the right strategies and tactics so all goes well.
Our servicemen and women are very brave indeed.