DOD has an advantage it is sharing with civilian agencies in that the Defense Department has been doing pandemic planning for more than 20 years, said Robert G. Salesses, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense.
In addition, DOD conducts rigorous after-action reviews of real-world operations and situations, such as the ones against severe acute respiratory syndrome — SARS — first discovered in 2003. DOD also examined the response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014.