That brings back memories of a reddit comment I'm going to paraphrase poorly: the US handling of COVID was so shitty that you couldn't get approval for it as a medical trial on ethics grounds.

The most tested and trusted vaccine in history, pushed into service after years of development leveraging SARS-1 and MERS, demonstrated efficacy, and we're just not going to fucking use it?

Then, despite knowing everything we know about vaccines and germ theory and how disease spreads, we're just going to make the flu vaccine optional, but only for one branch of the military? And people INSTANTLY started getting the flu with at least one death from it. At least we have a brand spanking new datapoint about what happens if vaccines got Thanos-snapped.

I am more than half convinced that there's a group of people at a high level in the US that are treating this whole thing like that story from the bible about the soldiers drinking water and going into war with a smaller army is proof that god helps them. That would go a long way towards explaining the advanced munitions usage as well.