APPROACH AND METHOD This project takes an external and comparative perspective to open source information published on the internet of national responses, both civil and military, to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is illustrated at Figure 1. Whilst there are existing internal processes for observing and learning lessons within the armed forces of each country and organisation, it is very early in this cycle and there is limited publicly available information. This project fills this void by interpreting publicly available information without the constraints of compliance with internal organisational sensitivities. The analysis uses a structured approached to ensure consistency across case-studies and an analytical hierarchy from strategic context to tactical recommendations. Figure 1 - Analytical approach to civil-military response to COVID-19
COMPONENTS OF ANALYSIS The project is based on 4 components: 1. Review of the COMEDS survey of NATO military medical services’ responses to COVID-19. This component analyses the survey undertaken in April 2020 and the subsequent NATO videoconference of military medical services on 23 April led by the Chairman of COMEDS to identify themes and to develop an analytical framework of military activities. 2. Case study analysis of key European states. This analysis considers the role of the armed forces in the national response to the COVID-19 crisis based on case studies of the six European countries with the highest COVID-19 mortality rate reported by the Johns Hopkins University Mortality Analysis (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality) on 08 Jul 2020 (Belgium, Spain, France, UK, Italy, Sweden). These case study analyses are based on a GoogleTM search for the first 100 website hits in local languages using the search terms “Country AND covid-19 AND (military
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