Far from being a warmonger, the geopolitical reality in 2025 demands that trauma and burns providers in the Indo-Pacific region prepare for Large Scale Combat Operations (LSCO) and what role they would be called upon to fulfill.
In the past quarter-century, the world has undergone a period of breakneck trade and economic globalization. Although this mega-trend has allowed for consumption of cheaply priced goods across many nations, rampant unsustainable mercantilism has led to accelerating imbalances in national power, prestige, wealth, and diplomatic leverage. The economic disequilibrium has reached a point where multiple nations perceive that their vital interests are threatened to the point that wholesale preparations for war have reached a fevered pitch not seen since the mid-20th century.
In the first half of this decade, the global COVID pandemic underscored the tenuous grasp of human life on this planet, and extinction of the species is not something of mere fancy. More alarming, however was how politicized the eventually successful response and recovery from the pandemic proved to be. Nationalism and systematic manipulation of information was a dark and worrisome aspect of this recent history.
Four major flashpoint in this region are primed for explosive consequences should cooler heads fail to prevail: 1)War between India and Pakistan, 2)Overlapping sovereignty claims in the South and East China Seas, 3)Forceable control over Taiwan, and 4)Re-ignition of war on the Korean Peninsula. Additionally global leadership of multiple countries have drifted towards a more nationalistic and nativist bent, further making poorly thought out escalation to kinetic warfare that much less predictable.
It is compulsory for all of us to begin planning in earnest how we will respond to a conflagration, the likes not seen before by humanity--potentially driven by nuclear weapons--over vast distances. To not seriously discuss contingency plans is abject dereliction of duty.