CIAO DATE: 07/02

Biological War and the "Buffy Paradigm"

Types of Attack: Determining Future Methods of Attack and the Needed Response

The most important single message that anyone can communicate in regard to biological weapons is that we face a very uncertain mix of existing threats politics, commercial development, and technology will change constantly as far into the future as we can look. The issue is not what we know, but how little we know and how little we can predict.

No one who has looked at our response to this issue to date can ignore just how difficult it is to put biological warfare into perspective

• We have experts who feel that massive future attacks are inevitable and experts who feel the spectre of biological attacks is grossly exaggerated.
• We have experts that see biological weapons as a state-driven threat and others that see it as a new form of terrorism.
• We have experts who claim they can characterize weapons effects and how they will impact on scenarios and experts who feel the situation is dominated by uncertainty.
• We have advocates who favor focusing on overseas defense, homeland defense, and response,
• We have advocates who believe that arms control is the answer and others who believe it is impossible.
• We have technologists and program advocates who claim there are solutions to characterizing foreign threats and facilities, new ways of detecting and inspecting the flow of goods into the US homeland, ways of detecting and characterizing attacks as they occur, and effective treatments that range from stockpiling old cures to developing nearly universal vaccines.
• We have experts who feel that the rule of law and human rights must be given priority and others that talk about security measures based on expediency. We have debates over quarantines and triage.
• We have a focus on physical and psychological casualties, but little focus on economic impacts and actuarial calculations and risk.
• We still think largely in national terms, but our battles may well be international or focus on allies.
• We focus today on the threat that emerged on September 11 th , and the related problems of the Middle East and Islamic world, but we have no guarantee that totally different threats may emerge in the future and even the Anthrax attacks that followed September 11 th may be largely domestic.

The fact is that we are entering - or have entered - a world we do not yet understand and cannot predict and we are struggling desperately to come to grips with it. In the process, we often seek to deny much of the uncertainty involved. We want a clear course to follow, and a clear plan of action. The fact is, however, that the recent Anthrax attacks, and British experience with hoof and mouth disease, has shown us that old science is old science, while the events of September 11 th have shown us that even when we think we know a threat, we can get all of the essentials wrong.

• The US intelligence community will issue its new NIE of terrorism in the next few weeks without ever having performed a net technical assessment of biological weapons and the trends in the ability to produce more lethal agents and more effective defenses.
• At the same time, some 44 federal departments and agencies are rushing into the field, along with 50 states, and an uncountable number of regions, communities, and counties - and this ignore the international dimension.
• We are developing programs and making major investments based on very uncertain and outdated information. In many cases, we are developing technologies without asking whether they can ever been used in reliable and cost-effective systems. We often have no year future year program. We do not fully analyze cost to deploy and sustain, cost to defeat, and cost to improve. We are doing what we can do quickly and consciously or unconsciously paying the price.

Full Text (PDF, 42 pages, 174K)