From the rising price of ground beef at commissaries to foreign-deployed soldiers who have been quarantined repeatedly, service members expressed their frustrations to the Pentagon’s senior leadership, who previewed more coronavirus-related protocol changes in a virtual town hall Thursday.
“The light gets even stronger at the end of the tunnel at this point in time,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper said in his opening remarks, thanking the more than 55,000 service members, including the 45,000 National Guardsmen who have been deployed on the home front in the COVID-19 response.
Esper revealed that the military may reduce its quarantine timeline for exposed service members from 14 days to 10 days after a recent meeting with White House Coronavirus Task Force members Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx.
“The risk level is not that much higher between those two timelines for our population, the military population,” he said.
Esper said, however, that testing and precautionary measures will remain in place after the Pentagon released guidance Tuesday to begin lifting instructions on movement in accordance with downward trends in the rate of infection.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley added that a 10-day quarantine would cover more than 98% of potentially infected individuals.
“Somewhere in the 5 to 6 days is the normal incubation period,” he noted.
Milley also expressed his “high confidence” that a vaccine will be online by the fall and widely available by Jan. 1 in accordance with President Trump’s timeline as outlined in his joint Health and Human Services/DoD plan for Operation Warp Speed, announced May 15.
“We’re in a war, and the secret weapon here is a vaccine,” he said. “We will be able to immunize the military and will be able to immunize the population at large and then will see a very, very rapid decrease in this disease throughout the country, and we will get back to more normal conditions.”
Esper also delicately commented on the controversial presidential memorandum ending National Guard federal deployment on June 24, one day before many National Guard members would start receiving educational and retirement benefits.
“If they are on a valid mission assignment approved by FEMA, then we should certainly extend them,” he said, again deferring the decision to the Federal Emergency Management Agency that made the recommendation to the White House to end the federally designated Guard status.
National Guard members would also lose TRICARE health benefits on June 25.
Legislation introduced in the House and the Senate would extend those benefits for a transitional period.
Meanwhile, service members from Fort Meade, Maryland, to Kuwait and Germany complained about rising food costs, the inability to transfer their personal effects, and deployment extensions with no end in sight.
“My grocery costs have gone up,” read the question from one technical sergeant at Fort Meade, who quoted ground beef prices at the commissary rising from $2.30 a pound to almost $6 a pound.
In response, the Pentagon said it would call for raises in living allowances during the next budget cycle and said hazard pay was under discussion for all pandemic-related front-line deployments.
