How the State Department and the Defense Department are Responding to the Covid-19 Pandemic
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2020
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this bonus edition of the Lawfare Podcast, we have combined two conversations about about how the Department of State and the Department of Defense are responding to the Covid-19 pandemic, including the impact on the workforce of these agencies, their efforts to assist and protect Americans abroad and domestically, and the broader national security and foreign policy consequences for the United States. Margaret Taylor sat down virtually with Robbie Gramer, the diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy magazine covering the State Department. And Scott Anderson sat down remotely with Katie Bo Williams, the senior national security correspondent for the Defense One news outlet.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:33.9 | We didn't think this was going to be this bad in January. |
| 0:37.1 | The intelligence community has obviously been raising alarm bells about this for months |
| 0:41.3 | now. |
| 0:42.3 | You know, we have, we had data sort of underpinning how pandemics like this work. |
| 0:48.3 | Obviously, this is a novel virus and there's a lot of questions that we don't have answered |
| 0:52.2 | yet as almost any public health expert in the country will say right now. |
| 0:58.0 | But I do think there's sort of some basic questions to be answered about should the United |
| 1:03.0 | States broadly, not just DOD, have moved quicker to put lockdown, essentially lockdown measures |
| 1:10.6 | in place? |
| 1:11.6 | I think that's going to be the kind of the big question is, did we start talking about |
| 1:16.3 | flattening the curve? |
| 1:17.3 | Did we start talking about upgrading the health protection status of individual |
| 1:21.7 | installations? |
| 1:22.7 | Did we start having any of those conversations soon enough? |
| 1:25.7 | And if this happens again, how do we determine what the trigger is for instituting some |
| 1:31.2 | of these sort of broader and more stringent protection measures? |
| 1:36.5 | I'm Margaret Taylor, senior editor at LawFair. |
... |
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