Prevailing Over Health and Humanitarian Challenges

Celebrating 50 Years of FORUM

Dr. Sebastian Kevany. Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies

To provide more effective responses to 21st century challenges in the Indo-Pacific — such as those involving health, climate, economics, cyber and maritime security — defense departments and other government agencies have knocked down silos. 

Branches of government look to constantly innovate and aim for synergistic responses to meet social, economic, political and security challenges. Traditionally, governments assigned ministries and departments to tackle such problems, but the agencies often proceeded independently, sometimes by design, and failed to communicate and cooperate effectively.

The paradigm shifted, not because the challenges became more complex — though they did — but because of an increased recognition of the importance of cooperative responses across agencies. These team approaches focus on using combined, partnership-driven, interoperable actions to achieve goals. Such responses also focus not only on primary results but also on secondary or downstream outcomes.

Effective collaboration across all sectors of society requires a parallel shift in how the United States and its Allies and Partners deploy defense assets and other forces. Even a generation ago, it would have been unthinkable for militaries to devote time, energy and resources to devote time, energy and resources to such phenomena. Not only would this have been viewed as weakening primary mission readiness, but the basic skills to address the matter would not have been available under mission-specific systems of governance.

Rise of Purpose-Directed Integration

Despite this tendency to act independently, military commands have learned to deploy resources to traditionally nonmilitary initiatives. 

The capability of many military divisions and individuals to pivot from engaging in primary to secondary skills enables this transition. The most notable example has been the development of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR). Over the past 50 years, countless initiatives based on deploying traditional tools for nontraditional responses have been executed. These include providing aid after natural disasters and extreme weather events, and assisting with refugees, migration, public health and other humanitarian concerns. For example, a NATO force responded after a magnitude 8 earthquake devastated Pakistan in October 2005. The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM) engages in many HADR missions in the region, according to the U.S. Defense Department’s Center for Excellence in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance in Hawaii. Between 1991 and 2024, USINDOPACOM conducted 44 such missions, including responding to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and the 2013 Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.

Operation Unified Assistance provided emergency care and services to victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean disaster. Operation Tomodachi responded to the 2011 disaster, including the joint operational efforts of the Japanese and U.S. navies, and focused on search and rescue and delivering food and other supplies. The U.S. 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit also played a key role in the mission. Operation Damayan provided similar relief after Haiyan swept through the Philippines.

The military involvement during the COVID-19 response was unique. Although military forces previously deployed to address public health issues — the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, for example — the scale and range of security sector actions during the pandemic was unprecedented.

U.S. military assistance to Nepal, which included distributing personal protective equipment and other medical devices, was compelling on humanitarian and diplomatic levels. Similar efforts took place in the Philippines. This advanced the context for accelerated defense sector involvement in in various environmental concerns environmental concerns — themselves closely related to public health and other destabilizing threats.

Resolving humanitarian challenges also can contribute to improved regional or global security and to preventing future security threats. Poverty and ill health can be factors in creating the conditions for extremis. However, with the appropriate design and delivery, interventions can effectively address traditional and nontraditional threats simultaneously. 

This requires a broader range of monitoring and evaluation metrics since the use of traditional, sector-driven measures of success may overlook the environmental dividends of military operations (for example, the development of regional partnerships) and vice versa.

Evolving the Military Resourcing Cycle

Perhaps the most significant challenges associated with the increasing use of defense forces in nontraditional roles are in defining threats and, by association, which tools and equipment are needed to combat such threats. If the greatest security threat in the Indo-Pacific is a pandemic, for example, how should, how should military leaders allocate resources?

Interoperability, in this case, is defined as the capacity of combat hardware to address nontraditional threats, in terms of national forces and international partnerships.

Interoperability can be extended to consideration of military resources — for example, construction battalions, hospital ships and transport infrastructure — that can be used by militaries responding to climate threats.

In all cases, there will be scarcity and competition for resources to address nontraditional threats; interoperability at least partially resolves this problem and constraint.

Promoting Nontraditional Commands

The establishment of the U.S. Space Command shows significant opportunities for expanding traditional command definitions. This might include a weather command or a related health, humanitarian and environmental command, which could be justified by defining these issues as national security threats.

There are also broader implications for regional cooperation. If climate and other issues are considered national security threats, it is also important to recognize that they cannot be addressed unilaterally. Rather, a successful response will require collaboration among all regional countries. In many ways, this is already happening as a byproduct of globalization. For nations to prevail over external threats such as environmental threats and pandemics, the challenges must be framed as common external existential threats.