“They basically said, ‘We know conflict, but we don’t know Ebola,' ” said one American official in West Africa. The military is also tired from fighting two long wars, the official said.

The Pentagon press secretary, Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, said the Defense Department was continuing to “monitor the spread of Ebola,” and was “mindful that it doesn’t just exist in Liberia.” In the next month, it will send two mobile blood labs to Sierra Leone to help reduce the bottlenecks caused by delays in testing.

Many aid officials in Sierra Leone said they crave a more effective command structure. The government runs a national emergency center, but aid officials said that with scores of foreign experts, government delegations and private charities flocking here, coordination was still messy, with many gaps and overlaps. It is extremely difficult, they said, to get even the most basic information, including how many treatment centers exist.

There are also growing questions about corruption, with the government announcing recently that it had found 6,000 “ghost medical workers” on its payroll, even as real Ebola burial teams and front-line health officers say they have not been paid in weeks.

Nothing, though, has raised more eyebrows than the new Kerry Town Ebola clinic, about a half-hour’s drive from the capital, Freetown. The clinic is an impressive campus of blue and white buildings lined up in perfectly straight rows, with all the orderliness of a military camp. It remains quiet, though, without enough trained nurses or hygienists to operate safely at anywhere close to capacity.

Several aid officials said that the Sierra Leonean government had been in a rush to open the clinic, but that the aid group tasked with running it, Save the Children International, had never run a critical-care field hospital. The rows of empty beds have led to some nasty finger-pointing.

Save the Children officials said the government had “begged” them to run the clinic. The government said Britain had made the decision. And the Britons said they had had no choice because no one else wanted the task.