Opinion: Boris has failed the Rumsfeld test.

Thank you to Truth Reporter for submitting this opinion piece to UNN.

Boris has failed the Rumsfeld test.

Donald Rumsfeld famously once stated:

‘Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones’

Rumsfeld was a controversial character, adored, feared or hated by those he worked amongst but whatever deficits his personality may or may not have had his statecraft was razor sharp. He might have been perceived as brutal but his ability to analyse risk in complex systems was second to none.

His famous quote with which I began sounds facetious to some but in fact his analysis was crystal clear. Essentially he states that some risks are known and quantified, some risks are known but not quantified and some risks are unknown and unquantifiable as they are by definition, unknown.

If we go back to day one week one of statecraft lessons, the mantra that is laid down is that the first purpose of a government is to protect the welfare of the citizenry. This point is a topic of heated debate as to what degree this is really true and to what extent governments really believe it but despite all these caveats it is a commonly held maxim.

Returning to Mr Rumsfeld’s statement in the context of the protection of the public – who exactly is responsible for categorising, assessing and ranking the range of threats to the UK’s population? I can’t think of one specific person, maybe from an organisational perspective the Home Office – but certainly collectively the government is charged with that duty.  How is it doing?  Poorly.

We are well used to the various measures taken by the government to prevent threats like terrorism and we have seen terrible examples of terrorist outrages in cities in the UK. On the continuum of probability of occurrence terrorist attacks rate quite highly. If we consider other threats like a meteor strike we usually consider these less pressing but nonetheless a possibility – remote maybe but still possible (NASA has a dedicated department for this purpose).

A novel pandemic virus to which the world population has no natural immunity is a threat that has not only been perceived, it has been modelled, simulated, dramatised, game-planned and publicised. Films like Outbreak (1995) brought this concept to the big screen and there have been many such treatments of the subject in popular TV drama.

Analysis of the threat is not just in the realm of drama. In October 2016 Exercise Cygnus tested the NHS for its level of preparedness for such a novel virus outbreak, the findings were so shocking that the results were never published. Essentially the NHS had no centralised planning or logistical contingencies that would control such an outbreak. Supplies of protective equipment were insufficient and deployment methodologies were incapable of being scaled to meet the demands of an emergency.

In the four years after this experiment, you might have thought that the Department of Health and Social Care would have in the light of their shortcomings, spent some considerable time and resources making sure their pandemic virus strategy was more robust.  Sadly you would be wrong.

This is where Mr Rumsfeld’s paradigm becomes so very important.  People in government need to be able to discern between threats they can quantify and those they cannot. If they can assess those threats then they surely have a duty to produce workable contingencies to counter them.  The evidence that a novel virus pandemic would be a disaster was writ large in front of them but there was no discernable policy response.

The idea that such an event was improbable was equally moribund given that there are numerous laboratories around the world that are experimenting on such viruses – all it would take is an accident or malicious act for an escape to happen. This event was not unforeseen or unforeseeable, it existed as a ‘known known’. The extent to which the disease itself is deadly or otherwise should have been the red flag for Boris, China’s reporting of the statistics did not at any point correspond with their massive lockdown response and the World Health Organisation’s collusion with China’s obfuscation should also have been a source of concern – there is no evidence the government made any effort to critique or really come to terms with the multitude of inconsistencies coming from foreign governments.

Boris has failed the Rumsfeld test, his statecraft, although hailed by many commentators has serious flaws.  He failed to interrogate the evidence coming out of China with sufficient curiosity, he ignored the disparity between the official and unofficial narrative in Wuhan. Boris could have slowed the influx of passengers from infection hotspots, he could have screened passengers coming through airports, he could have closed certain routes to incoming passengers and he should have done these things early on before the virus became widespread in the community.

Anyone reading the independent media could see the scale of the disaster coming down the track and without being distasteful this was nothing to do with the death toll. The disaster is economic and it is ripping the entire western economic system apart. Admittedly Boris was faced with a tough policy decision, to follow the majority of nations in lockdowns or to grit his teeth and fight through the storm. The hysterical mainstream media’s pressure saw to it that Boris chose the lockdown strategy and with that he has sealed the fate of the UK economy for the next decade.

David Kurten appeared on the UNN broadcast on 3^rd April and made a telling statement – ‘The government does not have a health strategy – it has a communications strategy’. I could not agree with this more. From the outset the government, and Mr Johnson by implication has sought to manage the narrative around the COVID19 outbreak, not actually address the problem. Measures that are being taken now are always one step behind the events – and in a situation like this that is not good enough.

UNN is a truly alternative news organisation delivering live shows, articles, outside broadcasts and so much more! We desperately need your support to continue each month and you can support our work by Clicking Here Now and SUBSCRIBING to show your support for Real News!