Military history is a great teacher that has application to all human endeavor.

History is littered with the carnage caused by generals who threw their troops into battle without a clue about the facts on the ground because their ego eclipsed their judgement.

The stakes are every bit as high with the kind of mass scale efforts to protect the public health that Governors Phil Murphy and Andrew Cuomo are now fully engaged in as they lead our region through the coronavirus challenge.

A public health crisis on this scale requires Cuomo and Murphy make significant judgement calls informed by real time conditions on the ground, in the transit system, in the financial markets, on the streets, our hospitals, in our schools and in the privacy of all of our homes.

In the jargon of the ‘table-top’ exercise, this is what we call situational awareness. Every assumption has to be challenged. All ‘facts’ must be vetted by the question how do we know what we know.

It was having that kind of first-hand awareness in the immediate aftermath of Sandy that earned Gov. Christie an enduring and well-earned footnote in history. In a situation like that the most important thing is knowing how to listen deeply.

In the case of Sandy, Gov. Christie had a willing federal partner in President Barack Obama. Because Christie, at some personal risk to himself, went to the places that people were most acutely hurt by the unprecedented destructive power of that storm, he could impart their circumstance to the media, the nation and its political leadership.

I saw the importance of Christie’s strategy first hand  when I was working for WNYC and was assigned to take a National Guard helicopter into Sayreville the morning after Sandy and provide the national audio feed to document his tour of working class homes decimated by the wall of water wrought by an unprecedented storm surge from the Raritan Bay.

I will never forget the collective sound of so many women crying as we walked through the wet soaked detritus that had been the cherished personal possessions of families who were hit with an Old Testament scale calamity we did not see coming.

What was essential was that Christie gave these people a sense that they were not alone. That proved tough to sustain as days turned into weeks and weeks into months and the state and federal bureaucracies failed to rise to the challenge that was the aftermath of Sandy.

There was anger from some of the storm victims who had been critics of New Jersey’s local land use decisions that resulted in the paving over wetlands and filling of marshes as commercial interests trumped environmental concerns.

Cataclysmic storms and coronavirus outbreaks catch us the way we live. They reveal in real time just how vulnerable we always were to risks we failed to perceive because we had arranged our defenses to face the tribulations we have endured.

And so, for decades we have borrowed trillions of dollars to pay for a military industrial complex to wage wars we hoped we would never fight while woefully underfunding the public health system needed to identify and treat an invisible enemy like the coronavirus.

We treated healthcare like just another consumer choice with options public and private. As state and local governments prepare contingency plans for large scale self-quarantine, we are learning the hard lesson that our personal biology is linked to the circumstances of all those around us.

If they are well, regardless of their ability to pay, all of our odds improve.

Such a recalibration of our foundational societal assumptions is required to face up to the changes of climate change that’s already upon us.

In the current crisis, Murphy and Cuomo are handicapped by a President who is actually incapacitated by a form of malignant narcissism that makes him incapable of hearing with comprehension the import of communications from other people.

That’s really bad news for a Commander-in-Chief and the nation he swore to protect and “defend from all enemies foreign and domestic.”

In essence, what we have is a form of decapitation, yet the POTUS body is still warm, talking and taking up critical space at the top of this now self-serving chain of command. As long as this is all about him, there is little oxygen at the top for an effective response to come from on high.

As a result, Governors and local officials now dealing with the coronavirus pandemic were handicapped by the months of federal government delay in recognizing the threat that first surfaced in China in December.

Luckily for our nation, we have a deep bench of Governors like Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, where the coronavirus has already claimed the most lives.

Like Murphy and Cuomo, Inslee believes in science and understands the nature of the covenant between someone elected to high office and those that elevate them. Remember the phrase pols used to say? It’s an honor to serve the people.

These Governors all lead large peacetime armies of civil servants who put their lives on the line every day to protect and defend the public.

They can’t telecommute from home.