Brig Gen Paul A. Friedrichs

Brig Gen Paul A. Friedrichs

RHC-A Commander Brig. Gen. Paula Lodi received a first-hand look at a coronavirus drive-thru testing center during her July 28, 2020 visit to Fort Campbell. Brig. Gen. Lodi met with leaders from the hospital. (U.S. Army)

The size of the 10 Iranian missiles used on Al Asad Air Base in Iraq during the Jan. 8 airstrike is to blame for the increased number of service members diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries (TBI), a Pentagon official told reporters Monday.

"The magnitude or size of the munition certainly creates a different exposure for the service members who are in the area of the blast" as compared to the small munitions used against U.S. forces in the past, Air Force Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs, Joint Staff Surgeon, said at Monday's briefing.

ickam 15th Medical Group host the first COVID-19 mass vaccination last week on Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. By the thousands, U.S. service members are refusing or putting off the COVID-19 vaccine. (U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Anthony Nelson Jr., Department of Defense via AP)

Though Air Force Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs, the Joint Staff surgeon, did not provide the specific infection rate for troops aged 18 to 24, he said it’s slightly higher than young adults nationwide. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not post centralized data about infections by age.

“We believe that the slightly increased confirmed case rate in that age group is a result of the success of ... allowing us to test at the entry to basic training, at the exit to basic training and at many other points in an active-duty service member’s career,” Friedrichs said.

Put simply, so many young troops are either beginning their military careers or preparing to deploy overseas that their positive rate is skewed higher, officials said. Overall, the military’s infection rate stands at just over 1 percent, the same as the U.S. population in general.

The finding comes after several months of ramping up testing has put the Defense Department at 60,000 tests a week ― a figure first proposed by Army Gen. Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs chairman, as a daily goal back in April ― for a total of more than 540,000 since January.

Part of that plan, which came in four tiers of priority, includes testing every recruit who ships to initial entry training, either upon arrival, upon leaving or at both points, depending on the service.

They are part of the “tier one” group, along with high-end counter-terror units and nuclear deterrence commands, like Air Force bomber and Navy submarine crews. Next up are deploying and redeploying troops, followed by troops leaving on or returning from overseas assignments.

“We don’t exactly have those specific numbers in terms of what percentage are asymptomatic versus symptomatic,” Air Force Maj. Gen. Lee Payne, who heads up DoD’s coronavirus testing efforts, told Military Times, but his team is working to compile those and break them out by tier.

As of Wednesday, more than 26,000 service members have contracted COVID-19, and more than 14,000 of those cases are still active.

Payne added that about half of positive tests are coming from personnel going into clinics either with symptoms, to prepare for a medical procedure or as part of a contact tracing effort because of their proximity to another positive case.

“The rest of the tests, probably about 20,000 or more per week, are asymptomatic, because those are people we’re screening for mission readiness,” he said.

That asymptomatic testing has helped control outbreaks, he said, because anyone who comes back positive is then isolated, and their close contacts are also tested and isolated.

To date, three service members have died and under 500 have been hospitalized, rates far below the numbers for U.S. residents, which include more than a 3 percent mortality rate currently.

For the military, however, the question becomes how sidelining tens of thousands of troops ― for as little as two weeks, but into multiple months if they are recovering from symptomatic illness ― affects mission readiness.

U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. (Dr.) Paul Friedrichs, Air Combat Command surgeon general, speaks with 325th Medical Group personnel about the dental clinic’s operations at Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., Jan. 31, 2019. Friedrichs assessed the base’s progress after Hurricane Michael, a category 4 hurricane that made landfall over the Bay County area Oct. 10, 2018. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Delaney Gonzales)

The Pentagon has rejected proposals from senior U.S. military officials to temporarily halt sending new recruits to training amid the coronavirus pandemic, deciding that the process must continue to avoid harming the military, according to a planning document and three defense officials.

The plans would have paused the training of thousands of new recruits who join the military each month and marked a major widening in the Defense Department’s attempt to stop infection. On Friday night, the Pentagon cut virtually all domestic travel for the next eight weeks but said that new recruit training would continue.

Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper met with the service secretaries and top officers on Monday to talk about training, said the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Jonathan Rath Hoffman.

“A decision was made to continue with training missions while taking precautionary measures to limit any possible spread,” Hoffman said. "This will be continuously evaluated to ensure mission-critical requirements are met and our people are kept safe.”

The decision came after discussions over the weekend about how to proceed in facilities that are notoriously susceptible to disease outbreaks due to the proximity in which recruits live and train.

Army officials considered a 30-day freeze on sending additional recruits to basic training. Navy officials, citing the Army’s idea, suggested the idea of a “hybrid” plan, in which new recruits would stop reporting but recruits who already had began training would finish, according to the planning document, which was drafted within the Navy and obtained by The Washington Post.

Other senior military officials raised concerns about the negative effects that stopping training could have as other service members leave active duty, said two defense officials, who like some others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. The Navy plan raised the possibility that the service might need to consider involuntarily keeping some current sailors on active duty through a policy like “stop loss,” but it was rejected, the officials said.

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Hoffman, in a news briefing Monday, alluded to the discussion, suggesting that a change might be coming, seemingly before the idea was scuttled.

“We are taking a look at the training programs given the size of those programs and the impact a major delay on training could have,” Hoffman told reporters at the Pentagon. “We’re looking at that, and may have some update on that in the near future.”

The decision to continue training recruits comes as the number of National Guardsmen involved in the U.S. response to the pandemic continues to multiply. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R.) announced on Monday that he was activating 1,000 guardsmen to respond to the virus’s spread in his state and notifying an additional 1,200 Guard members that they might also be needed.

Other states also have activated Guard members, including New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D.) has directed them to assist in finding facilities that can be converted into makeshift hospitals.

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The National Guard members involved in the response to disease are helping to establish drive-through testing facilities, providing support in state emergency operations centers and disinfecting public areas, said April Cunningham, a National Guard Bureau spokeswoman.

Hoffman and Air Force Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs, a doctor on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, told reporters that the Defense Department is assessing a variety of options to offer more assistance as the virus spreads. But there are limitations, they said.

Friedrichs said that one challenge to a mobilization of medical personnel within the National Guard and reserve military units is that many of the members involved already have civilian jobs in medicine.

“That directly impacts the community where they work,” he said. “That’s the tradeoff, whether it’s a natural disaster or the coronavirus or anything else.”

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Friedrichs said that the Defense Department has 36 hospitals within the United States that primarily treats U.S. service members and their families. But many of them are relatively small.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, speaking during a Democratic presidential debate on Sunday, suggested that the U.S. military could be used to build field hospitals to treat patients, citing U.S. involvement in the Ebola crisis in West Africa in 2014.

Friedrichs acknowledged those “tent hospitals” still exist and vary in size, but said they are not designed to treat diseases.

“The challenge is, they’re designed to treat combat patients and trauma casualties,” he said. “What we’re trying to be very careful of is not over-promising. We want to be factual about what we have.”

The general added that while dozens of positive cases of coronavirus have been discovered in Afghanistan, the U.S. military does not have the ability to test deployed service members for it there. Instead, patients are swabbed for samples, which are tested at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.

As of Monday, no U.S. service member in Afghanistan has tested positive for the virus, Hoffman said.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson visited Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Harrison Township on Thursday, Jan. 3, as one of her first official acts in office, underscoring her plans to provide better service to our nation’s military.

“I was honored to spend the morning of my second day in office visiting our service members at Selfridge,” Benson said. “Our conversations with military officials and personnel are very helpful as we plan to improve our systems to better serve them.”

In her inaugural address on New Year’s Day, Benson said she stands ready to help ensure government works “to serve and protect our military service members, families and veterans just as they have worked to serve and protect all of us.”

Benson toured the base with Maj. Gen. Paul Rogers, the adjutant general of the Michigan National Guard; Maj. Gen. Leonard Isabelle, assistant adjutant general of the Michigan National Guard; Brig. Gen. John D. Slocum, commander of the 127th Wing at Selfridge; and her husband, Sgt. Ryan Friedrichs, a veteran who served in Afghanistan with the 173rd Air Brigade.

“We appreciate Secretary Benson taking time out of her busy schedule to visit and tour Michigan’s Hometown Air Force,” Slocum said. “It’s always great to showcase our Michigan hometown heroes and heroines and the fantastic work they do selflessly serving our state and nation.”

Brigadier General Paul Friedrichs

Military Raises Health Protection Level Globally, Halts Deployments

The Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) will be routed to New York City to help alleviate non-COVID-19 medical needs, President Donald Trump told reporters on Wednesday.

A group of 1st Infantry Division Soldiers wash their hands at the designated hand washing stations just outside the 1st Infantry Division Headquarters, Fort Riley, March 18, 2020. Mandatory hand washing is required before entering the facility. (U.S. Army Photo by Spc. Brandon Bruer)
As travel bans and shelter-in-place orders spread throughout the country, the military is facing an uphill battle containing the spread of COVID-19 within the force. With more than 200 cases among active duty troops as of Wednesday, the services have a 175-per-million infection rate, versus the 135-per-million rate in the U.S.

So calls to get back to work and start lifting quarantine policies could be premature, the Joint Staff surgeon told reporters Wednesday.

as a whole of America approach to
Joint Staff Surgeon Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs shares a message of thanks to all reservists who've answered our nation's call: "They come from America--We're each stepping forward to help each other out."

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We do have tent hospitals. They are deployable hospitals,” he said. “The challenge is, they are designed to take care of trauma patients.”

Friedrichs said that the Pentagon’s 36 fixed hospitals are “relatively small” and are designed to support operational forces in the communities where they are located.

Overall, Department of Defense beds represent 2% to 3% of all hospital beds in the country, estimated Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman, also at the briefing.

The hospitals are accustomed to treating a much younger population than the older, higher-risk COVID-19 patients.

Doctors, in turn, are trained in trauma and combat wounds.

Standing up tent hospitals or using hospital ships would also require appropriate medical personnel, the officials explained. Such personnel are already working elsewhere.

Calling up Reserve and Guard units would remove doctors from their civilian roles, an important factor when evaluating the military’s capabilities to assist in the civilian outbreak response.

“The big benefit of the Department of Defense is logistics and planning support,” said Hoffman.

Hoffman said the Pentagon has looked at capabilities based on disaster relief scenarios, but he would not disclose what capacity, how quickly it could be stood up, or how many respirators the DOD has in inventory.

Hoffman said the administration has not called on the DOD for assistance beyond helping to quarantine citizens evacuated several weeks ago from Wuhan and the Grand Princess and Diamond Princess cruise ships through 11 feeder airports.

Friedrichs said there have been no gaps yet that would require the DOD to leverage military assets.

“The good news right now is as our country as a whole is responding to this outbreak, we have not seen huge demand signals coming to DOD yet,” he said.

The DOD confirmed that, as of 5 a.m. Monday morning, 37 personnel globally have tested positive for COVID-19, and 495 personnel have been tested globally as of Sunday morning. Tests are being evaluated at 13 DOD labs worldwide.

Among the infected are 18 military, 13 dependents, three civilian employees, and three contractors. None work at the main Pentagon building, which was upgraded over the weekend to a new health protection condition, imposing new preventive measures.

Additional cleaning of bathrooms and surfaces was announced, along with the closure of common spaces, and many employees were encouraged to work from home.

Some eateries were shuttered Monday, and the salad bar was closed, but parking lots were still full surrounding the Pentagon building. No additional measures were taken to screen badged individuals, but visitors and tour groups have been halted.

Across the 48 buildings that form the “Pentagon reservation,” there have been two positive COVID-19 tests. One was a contractor working at one of the buildings. Friedrichs said that, after about six days, he was “doing fine.” The other case is that of a Marine at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.

Hoffman said Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist are now maintaining “physical separation” as a precaution, and their staffs only communicate by teleconference. Access to their secure suites has also been limited.

The Defense Department expects to get novel coronavirus tests out to deployed environments in the coming weeks and months as it begins to ramp up production efforts that are essential for test kits, according to a top medical officer.

Air Force Brig. Gen. (Dr.) Paul Friedrichs, the Joint Staff surgeon, said Wednesday that, as soon as the Food and Drug Administration approves emergency use authorities for test elements, such as coronavirus-specific cartridges and canisters, officials will be able to get troops in deployed environments tested faster.

U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. (Dr.) Paul Friedrichs, Air Combat Command surgeon general, tours the radiology section of the 325th Medical Group facility Airman at Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., Jan. 31, 2019. Friedrichs toured the base to examine its progress since the landfall of Hurricane Michael and to determine the needs of the 325th MDG. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Delaney Gonzales)

An Airman searches for salvageable items after missile attacks at Al Asad Air Base, Iraq, Jan. 12, 2020. At a Pentagon news conference, Air Force Brig. Gen. (Dr.) Paul Friedrichs, the Joint Staff Surgeon, said 110 service members have been diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injuries from the attack. Most have returned to duty, while 25 returned to the United States for further treatment, he said, and six more are still undergoing testing. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Derek Mustard)

Air Force Brig. Gen. (Dr.) Paul Friedrichs, Joint Staff surgeon, discusses the Defense Department’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic at a Pentagon news conference, April 6, 2020.

U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. (Dr.) Paul Friedrichs, Air Combat Command surgeon general, views the renovation progress for the 325th Medical Group facility at Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., Jan. 31, 2019. Friedrichs toured the base to examine its progress since the landfall of Hurricane Michael and to determine the needs of the 325th MDG. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Delaney Gonzales)

Our Joint Staff Surgeon Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs briefed the press this week on efforts to address .
Here's a recap of the highlights