![]() These services typically make up a small fraction of overall defence expenditures. This historical continuum is exacerbated by contemporary dynamics at both international and national levels.Īt the national level, militaries usually encompass medical services. COVID-19-related military engagements have, therefore, emerged amid a historical continuum linking health and military actors. 6 The United States (US) Military Committee on Medical Research's development of anti-malarial chloroquine treatments during the Second World War 7 or Major Walter Reed's yellow fever human experimentation programme 8 are paradigmatic instances. 5 Militaries have long contributed to medical innovation and population-level disease control efforts. 4 Enduring French military cooperation (through the Pasteur Institutes’ worldwide presence), for example, bears witness to this legacy. 2 A global politics of medicine (linking medicine and warfare) can be traced back to colonial times 3 and context-specific martial politics have carried through civilian institutions. This phenomenon has long institutional roots militaries have historically used health activities to legitimise their presence in domestic and foreign settings. I understand global health military engagement as an understudied phenomenon linking foreign and domestic military health practices. This two-way process is owed to the interdependence of international and local civil-military health engagements. 1 This presence has taken hold through the reciprocal increase of health activities within defence policy and that of militaries in the global health policy realm. Often thought of as a last resort, militaries have become a preferred response in humanitarian crises, health emergencies, and pandemic preparedness. ![]() ![]() Fomenting new COVID-19-related civil-military assemblages, these involvements will inescapably influence future local and global civil-military relations. These partake to a country's historical military legacy, the robustness of its civilian health system, and its public health approach (including pandemic preparedness models and delivery frameworks). Overarching dynamics characterise these involvements. They also point towards specific lacunae within health and political systems. Each of these trends provides a scale of military encroachment into national health apparatuses (see Table 1). ![]() I identify three emerging trends in national military responses to COVID-19: (1) Minimal technical military support (2) Blended civil-military responses and (3) Military-led responses. The article positions the pandemic as a pivotal event in global health military engagements. It highlights issues of continuity, change, and resistance in military health-related roles. This article situates these COVID-19 military involvements amid the contemporary use of militaries in global health. In some settings, like the Philippines or Indonesia, the military led the entire response. These ranged from setting up field hospitals in Serbia, Russia, or France, to delivering protective equipment or enforcing lockdowns in South Africa, Spain, or Italy. Militaries took on a wide variety of roles amid national responses. The months that followed the WHO's declaration of the novel coronavirus outbreak as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern saw most states mobilising some level of military capacity.
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