IMO, invading some African countries, searching for sick people and enforcing quarantine would be more useful than getting involved in a new war in Syria/Iraq.
How now?
You might want to read an article or two about the proposed Liberia mission -- and about what is actually being proposed as a role for the U.S. troops there; and why this proposal has gotten the support of the World Health Organization, among others -- rather than just put out whatever fanciful speculations that might pop into your head.
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/world/africa/obama-to-anno...
Have you seen the facilities they have over there now? I think battlefield hospitals are a huge step up. Logistics is also a core function of the military, so once a plan is in place they will bring in whatever that plan calls for and get stuff done.
Where the military doesn't work is when politics is involved and the mission is not so clear.
It's not about winning hearts and minds. It's about containment.
When you don't have trust, you get dead healthcare workers: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-29256443
Fighting ebola has been compared to fighting an insurgency, and I think the comparison is quite apt. You can't win with force alone.
Actually you can, you just need to use enough force and nobody is willing to do that. Ebola could become a threat to the point where the healthy start shooting people trying to escape quarantined areas or simply burning them down.
At the most extreme you could just firebomb or nuke the areas infected. That would be excessive force, but it would solve the problem.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to build trust because the population isn't educated, they don't trust the government from before, and there is no infrastructure for wide-spread dissemination of information.
> You can't win with force alone.
You can.
I think that the part of the problem is that they try to take care of the sick, but they don't have resources, the equipment, the personnel, the education... nothing. The sick can walk out (if they can), anybody can walk in, other people try to "liberate" them, etc. It's mess. Compare their conditions with how ebola-infected people are handled in the west (isolation and containment facilities).
What do to instead: just write off the infected, however cruel that may seem, and transfer them to a closed isolation facility, guarded by military. Heck, I don't think that anything else would be feasible even in any western country if suddenly a few thousand people got infected.
World: We have a small problem in Africa.
US: You need us to invade? No sweat.
World: We have two small problems in Africa.