What the Covid war exposed, what every recent crisis has exposed—even in Iraq and Afghanistan—is the erosion of operational capabilities in much of American civilian governance. The giveaway is how often governments and agencies had to hire management consultancies—McKinsey, the Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Co., and a number of others—to perform basic operational tasks. These firms used to be thought of as outsiders that would occasionally be called in to assess the usual operators. What was telling in the Covid war, as in other wars, was how often such firms were asked to do the work
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