Pandemic Lays Bare Supply Chain Vulnerabilities.

• Author: Emanuel, Peter

Eighty years ago, America was the arsenal of democracy whose production and supply helped beat back fascism in Europe.

Today, commerce has evolved into an international patchwork of supply and demand that connects the United States to every corner of the Earth. The last decades have seen corporations embrace the tenets of Lean Six Sigma improvement methods, and the benefits of just-in-time manufacturing. In normal times, just-in-time manufacturing allows a well-planned logistical network to deliver products to the right place at the right time, minimizing inventory stockpiles in warehouses around the globe.

But these are not normal times, and the COVID-19 pandemic has frozen the supply lines necessary to feed global corporations. The worldwide embrace of social distancing policies has laid bare the fragility of our supply chains and made clear how vulnerable the U.S. defense industry is in its ability to sustain production of national security materials. Within weeks of the World Health Organization's declaration of a pandemic, standing domestic inventories of textiles and chemicals were approaching depletion, forcing defense leaders to make operational response decisions based on availability of supply rather than best tactical characteristics.

National policies have long recognized that an infectious pandemic will not recognize borders drawn on a map and that it will spread and wreak havoc blind to the boundaries of sovereign nations. The novel coronavirus did exactly what was predicted. Jumping from animals, it spread quickly driven by global commerce and fanned by international flights.

In response worldwide leaders authorized carefully built response plans enacting social distancing and quarantine. What was not widely recognized in the decades of preparation was the social and economic impact of the pandemic response policies built by governments around the world. The calculus behind social distancing policies is based on infection models that seek to flatten the curve of infection through societal isolation.

In a previous job, I served as the assistant director for chemical and biological defense in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President from 2007-2010.

Having been part of the early planning meetings on these policies during the Bush and Obama administrations, I recall the first times these ideas were advocated. I failed to grasp the human aspect of what these policies would require and...