War Is Boring

The U.S. Navy hospital ship USNS Mercy will use techniques and technology developed for amphibious operations to boost her ability to see patients in remote, under-developed Pacific countries. On May 1, Mercy embarked on a five-month cruise, delivering free medical care to communities in Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, East Timor, Palau and Papua New Guinea.

“Why doesn’t Japan have two former supertankers, converted to 1,000 bed hospital ships, and sail them from Africa to the South Pacific, delivering non-emergency humanitarian assistance?” Kyle Mizokami asked in a War Is Boring post last week. “With its aversion to hard power and immense reservoirs of talent, technology, and cash, Japan should be the absolute king of soft power.

With the May rainy season fast closing in on Port-au-Prince, charity workers in Haiti are undertaking a massive effort to make sure the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the January earthquake have adequate shelter.

In the U.K.’s House of Lords on Feb. 3, members of parliament debated expanding Great Britain’s aid to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the site of several intersecting security and humanitarian crises. “Some 5 million people have died there since 1998,” said Lord David Alton of Liverpool. “It is the most deadly conflict since World War II.”

Lawyers, Guns and Money points out a recent report from Simon Fraser University claiming that today’s wars are less bloody than at any point in the 20th century. “The average war today is fought by smaller armies and impacts less territory than conflicts of the Cold War era,” the Human Security Report 2009 posits. “Smaller wars mean fewer war deaths and less impact on nationwide mortality rates.”

Bagram is the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan. Freelance journalist David Axe visited there late last year, where he looked at the medical facilities that treat wounded U.S. and coalition troops, as well as some Afghan civilians.

Why did it take so long for the U.S. Navy’s hospital ship Comfort to reach Haiti? The vessel arrived more than week after the 7.0 quake that flattened the country. According to the ship’s director of nursing, Commander Mark Marino, a week isn’t long at all.

The U.S. Navy’s USS Bataan assault ship reached Haiti on January 18, right after the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and right before the hospital ship Comfort, which boasts the most lavish hospital facilities. It wasn’t clear how the three medically-equipped ships would work together, and how they would coordinate with troops and NGOs on the ground to flow patients into this ad-hoc, at-sea hospital system.

by DAVID AXE A medical seabase is assembling off the coast of Haiti. By Wednesday morning there will be three large U.S. naval vessels with significant medical capabilities in place, and Colombian and Mexican medical ships en route.  Together, the ships will support more than 1,500 medical personnel plus facilities equivalent to a large urban [...]

The U.S. Navy’s Comfort isn’t the only hospital ship headed for Haiti, to help out in the aftermath of last week’s devastating 7.0 earthquake. “Colombia is sending a hospital ship. It’s on the way,” said Lieutenant General Ken Keen, the top U.S. officer in the country, said on Monday.

Children shouldn’t die or suffer paralysis from polio, and they don’t have to, thanks to the effective and easily-administered polio vaccine. The rationale for mass inoculation seems obvious, but even the prevention of childhood diseases can become a fraught political issue in a war zone. In Afghanistan, keeping polio at bay means working with the Taliban, The Wall Street Journal recently reported.

by DAVID AXE Two years after Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called on the U.S. military to better use humanitarian aid, foreign training and diplomacy to advance U.S. interests, these so-called “soft-power” instruments are really catching on. U.S. Southern Command rotates hospital ships and assault ships on medical missions, while other vessels ply West Africa [...]