General Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reminds us: “We have an obligation to protect the American people regardless of the enemy. In this case, COVID-19 is the enemy.”  COVID-19 is straining health, economic, social, and political structures around the globe. This is reshaping security dynamics at the national, regional, and inter-regional level in a host of ways, some of which are still unclear and evolving. What are the security implications of COVID-19 for the U.S. Department of Defense? To address this urgent question, the DoD’s five Regional Centers collaborated to produce an assessment and provide four sets of actionable policy recommendations, which we presented to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in an Executive Summary. 

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Regional Centers are:

Africa Center for Strategic Studies

Daniel K. Inouye Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies

George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies

Near East and South Asia Center for Strategic Studies

William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies

These centers are able to leverage their regional access, convening authority, alumni networks, online outreach, and expert faculty to share lessons learned to enable proactive responses to support, inform, and strengthen defense sector security cooperation.  Drawing on their unique perspective of working with partner nations across the globe on a daily basis, the five DoD Regional Centers have respectively assessed the shifting security landscape resulting from COVID-19 and have collectively identified four priority cross-cutting themes:

Repurpose DoD Regional Engagement Strategies

Prioritize State Fragility and Societal Vulnerability

Sharpen COVID-19 Strategic Communication

Respond to Geopolitical Effects of the Pandemic

These themes were used to structure a two-hour virtual workshop on May 19, 2020 that linked faculty from all of the regional centers, with particular attention paid to highlighting the strategic importance of the four priority cross-cutting themes and policy considerations for OSD. We presented these results to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in an Executive Summary.