President Biden has announced a “full-scale wartime effort” to vaccinate the American people against the coronavirus. This is hardly the first time our struggle against the pandemic has been likened to warfare. Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership that helped spur the invention of two COVID-19 vaccines last year, has often been compared to the government’s programs during World War II to mobilize scientific knowledge to accomplish awesome technological feats in short order.
Such comparisons lend support to an increasingly popular notion in Washington: that what we need are more Manhattan Projects—more Operation Warp Speeds—to address our most pressing challenges. If, with enough federal money and direction, we were able to invent the bomb in just three years, or a COVID-19 vaccine in less than a year, why couldn’t we do the same for every other major societal problem?
