The US Army to Africa's Ebola Episode

News reports indicate that the US Army will ship around 3,000 medical personnel off to Africa in the next week.....to help one of the countries in their requirements.  This is one of those deployments that will not end well.

You can figure that 2,000 of the group will be actual medical personnel.  The other 1,000?  Well....you start to get into support.  There will be some kind of communications team....maybe eight guys to ensure satellite communications are up and computers are working.  You can figure they will drag their own chow hall along with them, and twenty personnel will be keeping that running.  Logistical folks?  Figure at least fifty doing various things.  Engineering folks?  At least a hundred.

So, problem one.....the camp where they 'live' and the compound where they work, will be separated, and each will end up requiring security.  In Africa.....things tend to disappear....so you can figure a minimum of twenty guys for each camp will be on security patrol.

Concentina wire?  Yep.....they will put it up and make it look threatening.  The locals will question this and ask if this really help or creating a military presence.

Food?  You can figure they will fly in food every couple of days on a military transport.  The water supply?  No one is going to trust the local water supply....no matter how much the Colonel says it's pure and he sips each day.

In the heat of the tropics.....guys will screw up and make a mistake, and somewhere around day thirty of the deployment....one of the Army guys will come up with a fever.  Tests will take forty-eight hours, and then they confirm that Private Snuffy got himself a case of Ebola. Snuffy will thrown on some transport aircraft, and hustled off to some Army fort in Georgia where his family arrives and gets all frustrated that the Army guys won't talk over his odds or his treatment.

A week or two later....the second guy gets Ebola.  The Army tries to explain this to the Pentagon, but no one can understand how guys screwed up on the procedures and got infected.

When the unit is told to wrap up their initial six months and group two will arrive.....then someone in the Pentagon will write up an order that the first team must spend three weeks at some camp in Texas where they will be isolated and kept from everyone....before they can be released back to their regular lives.

Yeah, it's not the kind of medal or achievement that you'd want to brag much about.