Please keep this in mind before criticizing Biden for pulling out of Afghanistan: pandemics are bad times to have wars. It should be noted that COVID-19 has killed more Americans in a single year than Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS managed to kill in two decades.
Pandemics and wars alike stretch a nation’s morale and resources. They make each other worse. The enemy may intentionally or accidentally spread the virus among our troops whenever one of them is taken prisoner. Combat zones tend to be lacking in quality healthcare facilities. Citizens resent the irony of being told not to go the bar across the street when troops are still being shipped overseas.
An aircraft carrier was incapacitated by COVID-19. No enemy navy has managed that kind of feat since World War 2.
Pandemics are the times when countries should be working together instead of fighting. You really don’t even want your worst enemy to get infected, because he might pass it on to people who will in turn pass it on to people you care about. Suppose Kim Jung Un got sick. He might pass the disease onto his bodyguards. They would pass it to their families. A defector might carry the disease across the DMZ and pass it along to BTS.
With all this in mind, if a lethal virus starts spreading during a war, the rational thing would be to use this as a pretext with a ceasefire. The problem with that logic is A) rational leaders don’t go to war with the US and B) the US doesn’t always have rational people in charge.
To be sure, wars are more fun to think about than pandemics. There are way more action movies and video games about the former than the later. Some folks have said it out loud: they would rather die in battle than from a virus.
It is unsettling that Paul Gosar would talk about death options as if you could order them from an app. Anyway, what I said about pandemics during wars applies to civil wars too.