Biological Warfare
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The Pentagon’s 2023 Biodefense Posture Review (BPR) outlines broad reform initiatives and details specific initiatives and organizational efforts necessary to implement them. The proposed reforms are meant to “strengthen the posture necessary to address the evolving biothreat landscape, prepare the Department of Defense (DoD) to operate in a biothreat environment, and support the national biodefense enterprise at home and abroad.” The top priorities of the BPR are to:
Fully assess the biothreat landscape through 2035.
Clarify biodefense missions, priorities, roles, responsibilities, authorities, and the capabilities needed to enable biodefense.
Position DoD to address future biothreats in alignment with the National Defense Strategy.
Examine DoD’s role in the National Biodefense Strategy and provide appropriate support to other departments and agencies.
Align policies; authorities; research, development, and acquisition (RDA) responsibilities; investments; and force structure to meet DoD’s biodefense requirements.
Ensure biodefense is routinely included in DoD training, exercises, and doctrine.
The DoD’s most important activities to improve biodefense include:
Expanding threat understanding and biothreat awareness.
Innovating and modernizing biodefense capabilities against the threats DoD will face through 2035 to maintain a ready and resilient force in support of the National Defense Strategy.
Improving readiness through training and exercising to identify and report shortfalls aiding the prioritization of modernization efforts.
Establishing the Biodefense Council to synchronize, coordinate, and integrate authorities and responsibilities to provide an empowered and collaborative approach to sustained biodefense.
The Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, a privately funded entity established in 2014 to assess U.S. biodefense efforts, released a report in May 2024 that included 36 recommendations and 185 associated action items. The Executive Summary highlights the following six:
Strong national biodefense requires sustained leadership from the White House. The report recommends reinforcing White House leadership of the national biodefense enterprise. Congress should amend the National Security Act of 1947 to codify the role of the National Security Advisor as the leader of national biodefense. Further, Congress should establish a Deputy National Security Advisor to perform the day-to-day duties and responsibilities of national biodefense and global health security. This is the bottom line: 15 federal departments, 9 independent agencies, and 1 independent institution currently have biodefense responsibilities. One federal department cannot tell other departments and agencies what to do. Only the White House has that authority.
A comprehensive National Biodefense Strategy is critical to success. Every future Administration must ensure that the National Biodefense Strategy keeps pace with the rapidly evolving and increasing biological threat.
That is why the report calls for a quadrennial biodefense review that would culminate in an updated National Biodefense Strategy and Implementation Plan submitted to Congress by the White House. The threats change. Technology changes. Our biodefense must also change. It is critical that the federal government engage in both biodefense policy and technology development to permanently eliminate pandemics as a national security threat. As such, the Strategy must address science and technology needs for biodefense, as outlined in the Commission’s 2021 report on The Apollo Program for Biodefense.
Much has been learned about the Nation’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. At the top of the list is the need to reduce pathogen transmission indoors. Built environments such as offices, healthcare facilities, schools, and airplanes allow for easier transmission of dangerous pathogens, particularly those communicated most effectively via respiratory pathways.
While the U.S. exerts significant effort to engineer and defend such indoor environments against fires, earthquakes, and floods, far less effort is put into engineering and protecting indoor environments against pathogens. That gap likely resulted in significant loss of life during the Covid-19 pandemic. New technologies to reduce transmission on surfaces (including self-sterilizing and fomite-neutralizing materials) are available now. However, the most promising public health interventions involve improving indoor air quality. Accordingly, Congress should amend the Public Health Service Act to produce a research and development plan for reducing pathogen transmission in built environments. Among other things, this plan should address the integration of indoor biological detection technologies.
U.S. investment in medical countermeasure development is dangerously insufficient and requires emergency funding from Congress each time America faces a biological event affecting national security. This panic-and-neglect cycle is a bad approach that results in needless loss of life. Each time a crisis emerges (be it H1N1, Zika, Ebola, or Covid-19), Congress eventually appropriates emergency supplemental funding to enable the rapid development of drugs and vaccines and shore up our country’s declining public health infrastructure.
The devastating impact of this myopic strategy was made clear in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Emergency funding came only after nearly two months of disagreement between Congress and the White House about precise needs and funding levels. Moreover, failure to follow this funding with sustainable annual appropriations threatens to undo much of the progress made during the pandemic.
That is why we must prioritize, fund, incentivize, and align investments in medical countermeasures across all stakeholders before the next pandemic or biological attack occurs. The list of action items needed to accomplish this goal is long. It begins with a requirement that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases create a specific biodefense budget plan that is responsive to priority national requirements and includes ways to transition medical countermeasures more easily from early-stage development to advanced research and development. Time saved equals lives saved.
Biological events (either naturally or human-generated) affect critical infrastructure and immediately place our national, economic, and public health security in great jeopardy. Imagine waking up to the news that you cannot drink the water in your home because a deadly pathogen was intentionally released into your water system, survived water treatment, and propagated despite the volume of water. Now expand that to include your entire city, state, or region, and that you and millions of others will not be able to use the water in our homes for months, perhaps longer.
Our lives will immediately be turned upside down. Moreover, it is highly unlikely that a biological event will affect just one critical infrastructure sector. An event might affect several (if not many) sectors directly, with cascading impacts on others. Remember that the anthrax events of 2001 affected or involved 11 sectors. This is why we must prioritize the protection of critical infrastructure against biological threats.
Replacing BioWatch with a national biological detection system that actually works. The Commission has argued, and continues to argue, that 20 years after its implementation, the potential of BioWatch remains unrealized. Put simply, BioWatch is a waste of money that hinders the ability of first responders in our Nation’s largest cities to detect biological events before they produce illness or death in humans, animals, and plants.
Congress should amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to replace ineffectual BioWatch technology, using other technologies that are already known to work. We cannot afford to be caught flat-footed by an airborne pathogen released in huge population centers.