Originally Posted by
Excargodog
In an era when you are struggling to get people to enlist - or even accept a commission - perhaps not the wisest move.
The problem is that once the order was given, the inviolability of following orders trumped common sense. It was apparent from the early COVID demographics in Italy and Spain that military age personnel were not at very serious risk for COVID, and already infected and recovered personnel were at an order of magnitude or two less than that. But it got tied up in politics and so you have it. Not the Pentagon’s finest decision certainly.
As I've said countless times, it was not about safety for 19 y/o AD members, it was about *attempting* to get out from under restrictions to training which were imposed to prevent the AD from spreading covid like wildfire to civilian employees, contractors, dependents, and the community at large. They didn't want the mil to become a huge transmission vector. That was all based on the info they had at the time.