The views expressed in this statement are those of the presenter and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the US Government.
Introduction

The Defense Science Board (DSB) has examined new national security missions in the post Cold War period through a series of studies that began in 1995. In Technology for 21st Century Military Superiority, a DSB Task Force examined Department of Defense (DoD) missions with an eye toward identifying where new investments would be appropriate to ensure military superiority. The 1996 Summer Study Task Force, in its report Tactics and Technology for 21st Century Military Superiority, examined ways to achieve substantial increases in the effectiveness of rapidly deployable forces and took a more comprehensive look at the missions identified in the 1995 report. The 1997 Summer Study continues the theme by looking at a new class of threats facing the United States in the 21st Century.

Perhaps less well appreciated, as highlighted in the 1995 study, potential 21st Century adversaries have also been modernizing their forces. Their military modernization has included the purchase of large numbers of missiles and mines; some submarines with high speed torpedoes; the construction of numerous and extensive underground facilities; and development of capabilities for weapons of mass destruction to include biological and chemical weapons. Coupled with their high tolerance for the loss of human life – both theirs and ours – their initiatives present a formidable challenge to long-term national security.

Even a small nation with a modest defense budget can afford such modernization. Last-generation weapons are still effective, particularly in large numbers. And last-generation weapons are much less costly than the more modern weapons. Coupling that with US requirements to be able to rapidly project force to unprecedented locations worldwide results in real problems to global security.

Further, potential adversaries employing inexpensive and much more readily available weapons of mass destruction can now use the global information infrastructure, along with the Global Positioning System and commercial imaging satellites, as their C3I system; and use the worldwide, robust commercial transportation infrastructure to project “force” anywhere, anytime. This can present a military capability as deadly as large conventional forces, and available – now – to very small adversaries, in terms of population, defense budget, and land area. In fact, it is available to adversaries with no claimed homeland – the transnational threat.

The transnational threat lies on a continuum ranging from violent domestic groups to belligerent nation states. It threatens the United States, US forces abroad, and allies. Such transnational threats, with political and economic agendas, and the willingness and ability to use force and inflict mass casualties if necessary to achieve their goals, are better thought of as countries without land than as transnational terrorists.

For them, all war is global war. They can wage campaigns extending over years. Without fixed assets that we can hold at risk in their homeland, deterrence is difficult. Warning may be short. Attribution may be slow, ambiguous, or not achievable.

Transnational threats do not represent a new mission for DoD, but a different and difficult challenge to the traditional mission. In summary, transnational adversaries have three advantages: (1) they are willing to employ weapons of mass destruction; (2) they cannot easily be deterred; and (3) they respect no boundaries, whether political, organizational, legal, or moral.
DoD Responses to Transnational Threats

With the change in the geopolitical structure of the Cold War, we are facing increased threats to the United States and its interests by organizations and individuals with motives and methods quite different than those posed to the nation during its confrontations with the Soviet Union. Among such threats are transnational threats: any transnational activity that threatens the national security of the United States – including international terrorism, narcotics trafficking, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the delivery systems for such weapons, and organized crime – or any individual or group that engages in any such activity.

There is a new and ominous trend to these threats: a proclivity towards much greater levels of violence. Transnational groups have the means, through access to weapons of mass destruction and other instruments of terror and disruption, and the motives to cause great harm to our society. For example, the perpetrators of the World Trade Center bombing and the Tokyo Subway nerve gas attack were aiming for tens of thousands of fatalities.

Threats posed by transnational forces can interfere with DoD’s ability to perform its mission, to protect its forces, and to carry out its responsibilities to protect the civilian population. Defense against transnational threats is part of DoD’s core business. The Department has the capacity to contribute to the mitigation of these threats with its extensive capabilities, training, and experience. And the Department of Defense has been called out in law to participate in the response to transnational threats.

The 1997 Defense Science Board study principally addresses DoD capabilities, options, and responses to transnational threats. It recommends a long-term strategy for DoD’s response that leverages the Department’s resources and strengths. The DSB Task Force recommends that the DoD take on the challenge of developing plans and allocating resources to implement the strategy.

The DSB Task Force addressed the DoD response strategy using six elements:
Treat transnational threats as a major DoD mission
Use the existing national security structure and processes
Define an end-to-end operational concept and system-of-systems structure
Provide an interactive global information system on transnational threats
Address needs that have long been viewed as “too hard”
Leverage worldwide force protection and civil protection

Together, these principles form the structure to help position DoD to meet its responsibilities in dealing with transnational threats of today and the future. Notably, the DSB Task Force holds that DoD can respond without a change to national roles and missions and without change in its own organization. The discussion which follows expands on these six elements.
Organizing a DoD Response
A Major DoD Mission

US presence, policies, and leadership must remain a major stabilizing force in the world, and as such, overseas US military operations will continue to be the norm. The Department of Defense must recognize and deal with an escalating and more dangerous threat environment and its impact on missions overseas as well as within the United States. While the DSB Task Force focused on DoD responsibilities, the national leadership – to include the President – will need to provide vigorous leadership in preparing for this set of threats.

The increased DoD attention needs to include transnational threats in departmental guidance and strategy, in the planning and budgeting processes, and in training and exercises. This is not a new mission for DoD, but the capabilities and motives of these transnational adversaries raise the challenge to a far higher level.
Existing Structures and Processes

The transnational threat challenge requires a “three-tiered” response: global, regional, and force level. This response should capitalize on the parallelism between domestic preparedness, global force protection, force projection, and a major theater war. There is strong synergy between the demands of each. A robust force protection capability is critical to meet US security needs and maintain the nation’s ability to protect its forces abroad. The requirements, procedures, and technology for protecting military facilities against attacks by transnational forces have much in common with protecting civilian facilities in metropolitan areas. Thus, the United States can leverage DoD capabilities and expertise for both force protection and to contribute more effectively to civil protection.

Force protection is a long-standing, major responsibility for the Department of Defense, and for its forces at home and abroad. The Department has taken steps to improve its force protection programs as the new threat emerged. DoD deserves high marks for these efforts to date, but there is still much to accomplish. An enhanced force protection program demands an end-to-end mission orientation, expanded vulnerability assessments, patching the “seams” created by diverse responsibilities, focusing intelligence programs and capabilities, and exploiting promising technologies.

Civilian protection begins with the local and state first responder community – law enforcement, fire and rescue, medical, and emergency management personnel. Both the Department of Defense and civilian communities can benefit from improving the integration between the local, state, and federal agencies. Improvement in communication, training, information sharing, operations, and resource transfers would help to streamline emergency response operations and interfaces across all levels of responders. This will involve developing a plan to expand the scope of the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici program and institutionalizing it within the Department.

Also, utilizing state-level assets, such as the National Guard, more effectively can serve to strengthen the linkages between civil protection and force protection with benefit to all participants. Specifically, the Guard and selected reserve components should establish a national consequence management capability to support state and local agency responses to domestic incidents, particularly those involving chemical or biological agents, and to support sustainment training and exercises with first responders.

DoD can and should respond to the escalating transnational threat challenge using the existing national security structure and processes. But within this structure, the Secretary of Defense should clarify responsibilities throughout the organization for policy coordination, operations, and research and development. Today, multiple offices within the Department are involved in each mission area, with no one effectively positioned to ensure the most effective DoD posture against the threat.
Structuring the Operational and Technical Architectures

The elements necessary to respond to the transnational threat exist within the Department of Defense, as does the expertise. But DoD needs a more comprehensive plan – an end-to-end operational architecture – to refocus varied and diverse elements throughout the Department and to prepare a cohesive, strategic response to the transnational threat.

This planning activity is to define the interfaces between crisis management (pre-event) and consequence management (post-event) to ensure there is no gap. It must identify technology needs and requirements and must identify priorities for research and development, acquisition, exercises, training, and “red teaming” to provide a sound basis for an investment strategy, while effectively leveraging available resources within DoD.

An important part of improving DoD’s capability to respond to the transnational threat includes drawing on and incorporating technological advances into the Department’s response arsenal. In the case of this unique threat, this may mean taking on problems that have long been viewed as too difficult – either bureaucratically or technically.
A Global Information Infrastructure

The United States must get smarter about the transnational threat. The DSB sees a need for an interactive, two-way global information system that would greatly expand the available sources of information. This information system would support gathering more data from the bottom up, exploiting international information sources, and facilitating the sharing and analysis of information collected by different organizations. This would mean global distributed data bases, held at numerous security levels, and accessible by a global information sharing community focused on deterring and dealing with the wide spectrum of potential transnational threats.

At the present time there are no formal processes, infrastructure, and security mechanisms to facilitate the sharing and analysis of transnational threat information collected by organizations such as local law enforcement, National Guard, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Department of Energy, Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Defense, and other organizations. Individually, these organizations collect data that, when viewed independently, may not provide knowledge about plans for an activity or campaign by a transnational adversary. However, correlation of diverse data sources would likely enhance our ability to identify key indicators and provide warning.

Furthermore, other sources of data that could be exploited to provide indicators and warning of transnational threat activities largely remain underutilized. Examples of such sources include the real-time data on international border crossings, real-time cargo manifests, global financial transactions, and the global network carrying international airline ticket manifests. Technology initiatives can support the use of needed data.

If the United States decides to share available information technology, new data sources could be integrated using a tiered security architecture. Tapping into selected US and international data bases, it would be possible to develop a much better global information system that would permit timely, collaborative analysis and correlation of information on transnational groups. This infrastructure would augment each contributing organization’s ability to pursue its specific mission and would be a tool whose specific purpose is to facilitate the acquisition, sharing, and collaborative analysis of data that will provide improved knowledge about emerging transnational threat groups and their activities.

Such a two-way distributed information system – which the DSB Task Force termed the Secure, Transnational Threat Information Infrastructure (STTII) – can be at least started with information technology and relevant data bases that exist today. These technologies include: data communications infrastructure; distributed, relational data base systems; emerging multimedia data base technology; computer-network security hardware and software; and use of the World Wide Web. In addition, significant public and private sector investments are being made in research and development of advanced information technologies to include data mining, data warehousing, intelligent agents for information fusion, intelligent data base triggers, and groupware to support distributed collaboration among analysts.

As public and private sector advanced information technologies mature, the baseline system would be augmented so that the correlation and fusion process becomes more automated, more tools are provided to facilitate distributed collaboration, and dynamic security techniques are integrated to permit various communities of interest to participate in transnational threat warning, deterrence, and prosecution activities. The DSB Task Force anticipates that as this two-way data gathering and distribution system evolves, it would serve not only as a means for obtaining indicators and warnings, but argues that its successful use would also serve as a powerful deterrent to threat activities.

Technology is necessary, but not sufficient, for establishing and realizing the benefits of an integrated, global information system. Strong, dedicated leadership that promotes the proactive use of the transnational threat information infrastructure, seeks necessary resources, and addresses inter-organizational data sharing will be required. This leadership must have sufficient authority to cause the integration of federal, civil, and international information systems. In addition, policy will have to be established that permits sharing of data between organizations with distinctly different missions, constraints, and security structures. A multi-level security structure will be required and huge cultural and institutional barriers will need to be broken down.

Today, the global information infrastructure is viewed more often as a vulnerability – it provides information freely, efficiently, and unaccounted for on many topics potentially useful to certain groups. This view loses sight of many potential benefits. Exploiting the Web provides insight into the type of information that is openly available to a potential transnational adversary, and allows for remote and anonymous participation in on-line “chat” forums that might provide insight into dissident group activities. The medium can be used to disseminate information worldwide and, as noted previously, can be used to solicit, judiciously, information which may be of value.

Although it is important to continue to address vulnerability, security, and information content issues associated with using the World Wide Web, it is also important to determine how best to use this resource as an information tool. Accepting the Web as a resource is not contradictory to concerns about its exploitation by an adversary, but instead takes advantage of a resource that does, and will continue to, exist and grow over time. The creative use of the Global Information Infrastructure and the employment of the STTII are the basis for developing processes and procedures for collectively addressing the transnational threat across the defense, civil, and international communities.
Addressing the “Too Hard” Problems

There are a number of challenges that have historically been regarded as “too hard” to solve: the nuclear terrorism challenge, defense against the biological and chemical warfare threat, and defense against the information warfare threat. The DSB Task Force believes that these challenges should be addressed and that doing so will make a substantive difference in the nation’s ability to respond to these distinctly different and serious threats.

In addressing these challenges, the United States must avoid being trapped into inaction because the problems are difficult. Measuring the effectiveness of actions against only the most stressful threat or embracing only the “perfect” solution can stand in the way of important progress. An incremental approach for improving America’s capabilities to deal with the nuclear, chemical, and biological transnational threats is prudent and is urgently needed to reduce the enormous, potential consequences from such attacks.
The Chemical and Biological Warfare Threat

Chemical and biological warfare agents share characteristics that make them an especially grave threat. They also have substantial differences that must be taken into account when devising strategies and postures to deal with them. The shared attributes include:

˙ They are relatively easy to obtain (certainly compared to nuclear) and potential users do not need access to large and expensive facilities to achieve potent capabilities.

˙ They can be developed and produced in laboratories or small scale industrial facilities which makes them difficult to detect. Also, the technologies required to produce them often have commercial applications as well, so their “dual-use” can be plausibly denied.

˙ They can be extremely lethal so small quantities can be very effective.

˙ They can be delivered by a variety of means.

While chemical and biological warfare agents are often grouped together (along with nuclear devices) as weapons of mass destruction, there are substantial differences in their effects. Perhaps the most important difference is that biological warfare agents can be far more toxic by several orders of magnitude than chemical warfare agents. Thus, the range of effects of a few kilograms of chemical agent could extend several city blocks. By contrast, the same amount of a biological agent could threaten an entire city.

A second significant difference is that, generally, the effects of chemical warfare agents occur much more rapidly – minutes to hours versus days for biological agents. The rapidity of effect was generally considered a positive attribute from the perspective of potential military use against troops on the battlefield. However, the delayed effects of biological warfare agents can work to the advantage of the transnational perpetrator, making covert delivery much easier and attribution much more difficult.

Chemical and biological agents can come in a variety of forms and lethal mechanisms (e.g., against food supplies as well as people) including the possibility of bioengineered new pathogens. However, “standard” agents like sarin (chemical) and anthrax (biological) pose a serious enough threat that one need not hypothesize new and novel agents. Thus, these deadly substances provide the means for individuals to threaten the many and allow the few to wage war, or long-term campaigns, against nations. A new breed of transnational actors, less interested in securing a seat at the table than in bringing down the house, may find considerable appeal in these weapons and their potential for mass casualties.

United States concern about the chemical and biological warfare threat predates the current fear about the transnational threat. During the Cold War, the United States worried about the Soviet Union’s chemical and biological warfare programs, but our approach to dealing with this threat relied largely on our nuclear deterrent capabilities. The United States also complemented its nuclear deterrent posture with a modest capability to respond in kind to biological warfare threats, during the early part of the Cold War, and to chemical warfare threats for most of the Cold War. The United States eliminated its biowarfare offensive capabilities and programs in the 1970s and renounced any use of chemical weapons in the early 1990s. Within this deterrence-dominated strategic framework, direct defenses – either passive or active – against chemical warfare, and particularly biological warfare, rarely received high priority or sustained attention.

The Gulf War brought renewed concern about the vulnerability of US and allied military forces to chemical and biological warfare threats. While deterrence remained a vital element in the strategy against this threat from potential adversaries in regional conflicts, both passive and active defenses were appropriately deemed to play an increasingly important role. Subsequent to the Gulf War, DoD increased attention and resources to chemical and biological warfare defenses as part of its counterproliferation initiatives. Much of the passive defense effort, directed at protecting US military forces against the threat of chemical or biological weapons in regional contingencies, has relevance to the transnational chemical and biological warfare threat.

The biological warfare threat can appear so formidable and frightening that it can engender a posture of inaction. Indeed, it is too hard to find a perfect solution or a totally effective defense. There is considerable merit in former Navy Under Secretary Richard Danzig’s prescription to “think small” with respect to defense against biological weapons. A focus on incremental steps that can help mitigate the threat and raise the price to potential attackers will more likely produce a sustainable and productive effort for the long term. Many new technologies offer the potential to build components of systems that will incrementally add to national capabilities to defend against this threat. This DSB study, like others, while identifying many promising steps, found no silver bullet that will eliminate the entire range of threats.

Combating the transnational threat will require that our strategy and supporting posture be multi-element and provide “defense in depth.” The elements of such a defense are well known and include dissuading and denying possession, deterring use, intercepting delivery, mitigating consequences, and identifying and punishing the perpetrators. However, the relative contributions and weights accorded to each element depend on the particular threat.

For the chemical and biological warfare threats, the elements needing most attention are consequence management and intelligence. The chemical and biological warfare threats require particular attention to consequence management. There are two reasons. While clearly it would be preferable to prevent incidents rather than mitigate them, the United States cannot count on prevention. The signatures for chemical and biological weapon production, storage, transportation, and delivery can be exceedingly small. By contrast, nuclear devices present much higher signatures and thus much greater opportunity for interruption earlier in the cycle. Thus, we must place very high priority on being prepared to deal with incidents involving chemical and biological agents.

The second reason is that defense and consequence management against chemical and biological weapon attacks can be very effective. Vaccines, detectors, masks, collective protection, and prompt medical treatment combined can make a huge difference in the outcome of an attack, perhaps reducing casualties by three orders of magnitude or more. This does not imply that there should be no effort on interdiction against chemical or biological weapons, but rather indicates where priorities should lie.

Intelligence and threat assessment activities are essential to addressing the chemical and biological transnational threats and to both prevent and respond effectively. In an ideal sequence, one would look to intelligence support first for cueing, followed by confirmation, such that the threat is intercepted before any agent is disseminated. Should an event take place, then intelligence support would be critical for attribution. The approach for the chem/bio threat, however, will require a significant departure from more traditional intelligence approaches, which are largely based on national technical means, because the signatures associated with acquiring a chemical or biological capability, especially by a transnational threat group, are low and ambiguous, and also are not completely understood. Cueing must therefore rely heavily on human intelligence, after which other intelligence resources – such as measurements and signatures intelligence or communications intelligence – can be targeted to help confirm acquisition and/or deployment activities. Should an event take place, the laboratory sample analysis capability of the threat assessment community will prove invaluable in identifying the perpetrators.

All of these efforts will be highly dependent on parallel information and data analysis capabilities that are drawn from any number of sources – open sources such as news sources; technical journals and conferences; transaction data bases such as purchases, shipments, or permit applications; law enforcement records; public health sources; and others. This is the basic rationale for proposing the Secure Transnational Threat Information Infrastructure.

In addressing this threat, significant investment must be made to develop analytical tools that target specific chemical and biological threats. Especially important for addressing the biological threat will be epidemiology studies that tie public health information on disease outbreaks with background environmental characterization to assess the unusual nature of the outbreak. Further, associating the outbreak of a disease with information on suspect production sites and/or with meteorological data could lead to pinpointing a facility for sampling and analysis. Effective intelligence of this sort will in turn depend on the availability of robust detection and field/lab analysis means to pull small signals from an extremely cluttered background.

Fully exploiting state-of-the-art knowledge engineering tools and information technology will be the critical enablers for the all-source assessment efforts that underpin every stage of intelligence support for this difficult threat. In addition, the need to disseminate the information among many users and suppliers to the system will require sophisticated multi-level access/security architectures to allow entry to the system only at the appropriate “need-to-know” level.

DoD has unique capabilities among federal agencies to contribute to combating the transnational chemical and biological warfare threat. However, these capabilities are stretched thin and the underlying technology and resource base is fragile. DoD capabilities include long-standing units like the Army’s Technical Escort Unit as well as recently generated assets such as the Marine Corps’ Chemical Biological Incident Response Force. These units have missions that directly support domestic incident response and, as such, have tailored equipment and extensive training requirements. In addition, Army Chemical Units in both the active and reserve components have personnel trained in nuclear, biological, and chemical weapon protection, detection, and decontamination. Although their training and equipment is focused on the battlefield environment, it has application to civil transnational threat scenarios.

DoD’s experience base for dealing with incidents involving weapons of mass destruction is growing through an increasing number of exercises and substantial involvement in preparing for both crisis and consequence management during high profile events like the Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, the 1997 Presidential Inaugural, and the Denver Summit of Eight Conference.

The Department has also made new investments in research and development activities to improve its capabilities to defend against chemical and biological warfare threats, such as 911-BIO, an accelerated growth of DARPA’s biological warfare defense1 initiative, and coordination with DOE’s Chem/Bio Nonproliferation Program.

Having recognized the Department’s unique and impressive capabilities and commended DoD on its recent initiatives, the DSB nonetheless is concerned about the downsizing pressures or “take-it-out-of-hide” edict to those organizations owning significant chemical or biological responsibilities. Of special note is the extremely fragile biological warfare defense expertise.

The DSB endorses the Secretary of Defense’s intent to add $1 billion to the chemical and biological defense program as recommended in the Quadrennial Defense Review and recommends a number of steps to enhance the base of expertise capable of dealing with this threat.

˙ Enhance the Army Technical Escort Unit’s ability to meet its expanding workload and support the local and federal law enforcement community (Federal Bureau of Investigation; US Secret Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; and state and local law enforcement) by enlarging the intelligence and communications sections and adding military personnel.

˙ Expand the teams which support the Combatant Commanders, as well as first responder training in biological and chemical warfare defense; the DSB Task Force suggests a three-fold expansion as a minimum. To provide continuity, the government personnel assigned to this support should be civilian.

˙ Evaluate how expertise at the US Army Chemical and Biological Defense Command can be used to help develop force protection plans at US military bases. This command has the ability to leverage the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program, experience in working on emergency preparedness programs with local communities, as well as the equipment and technical expertise found at the chemical stockpile locations.

˙ Sponsor more interagency consequence management exercises and red teaming dealing with chemical and biological warfare that include all of the lead federal agencies – the Department of Defense, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

˙ Double the investment of the Technical Support Working Group – the counterterrorism interagency development capability – on developing chemical and biological equipment to support military and appropriate civilian first responders.

˙ Further, leverage the extensive national expertise in biotechnology that is resident in universities and industry, as well as the research supported by federal agencies, which can greatly enhance DoD’s capabilities in this area. Relevant expertise includes areas such as genetic screening, diagnostics, DNA sequencing, immunology, rapid drug developments, and point-of-care analytical capabilities.

˙ Establish a threat reduction program with the Russian biological warfare community. The extensive Russian biowarfare expertise and technology has the potential to migrate into the hands of transnational adversaries. Currently three small pilot projects are underway in an effort to mitigate such potential migration. Much more needs to be done with the Russian biowarfare community and thus the DSB Task Force recommends extending the Nunn-Lugar nuclear materials and weapons initiative to include similar efforts with biological warfare capabilities.

˙ Sustain a broad technology and robust development effort in chemical and biological defense – include detection, individual and collective protection, and decontamination.

˙ Incorporate a capability to surge as explicit elements of DoD’s strategy and posture to deal with the transnational chem/bio warfare threat. A hedge strategy and posture – with a strong surge component makes sense because of the great uncertainties about the chem/bio warfare threat – is currently more potential than actual and can evolve in so many different ways. During the Cold War, explicit hedge programs, with their inherent uncertainty, found it hard to compete for resources with their less conditionally based counterparts, but the Quadrennial Defense Review identifies a key role for hedge programs in the new security environment. Surge elements of the posture could include investments in facilities, long lead items, cadre training, mobilization plans for Reserve and Guard units, and other actions which would foster a rapid expansion of capabilities.

In summary, the potential of chemical and biological weapons in the hands of transnational groups casts an ominous shadow as we move further away from the Cold War. DoD must devote more of its attention and resources to help the nation deal with this grave challenge. Considerable effort is already being invested in improving relevant capabilities and the foundations exist for a much more effective posture.
Force Protection Synergy with Civil Protection

Recognize and organize around the strong connections among force projection, force protection, and domestic preparedness. The DSB’s main message is not that DoD should take on a new mission but rather that DoD will be unable to accomplish its core business unless it pays much more attention to the chemical and biological warfare transnational threat. The ability of the US military to project force globally depends on keeping open ports and airfields, both in the United States (points of embarkation, POEs) and overseas (points of debarkation, PODs).

In time of crisis or war, these POEs and PODs may be the preferred targets for paramilitary and transnational threat chemical and biological warfare attacks in order to delay and disrupt time-critical US military deployments. DoD cannot project force if it cannot protect its forces (including those in the US) from chem/bio warfare attacks during deployment. Furthermore, force protection as defined by the DoD extends not only to military personnel but their families as well. Thus, in order to fulfill its force projection and force protection responsibilities, the DoD must develop capabilities directly relevant to domestic preparedness. (An attack on a port in the US is an attack on civilians.)

In summary, the DSB Task Force on DoD Responses to Transnational Threats concludes that such threats can be as serious as those of a major military conflict. Combating transnational threats is part of the Department of Defense’s core business, and DoD can meet these challenges using existing policies and organizations. An effective national response to the transnational threat and implementation of the six element strategy requires a dedicated effort on the part of the national leadership to include senior leadership in the Department of Defense. Such an integrated, focused, and committed response will prepare the Department and the Nation to blunt the transnational threat.

Appendix
DARPA’s Program in Biological Warfare Defense
(April 1998)

The ultimate goal of DARPA’s program in Biological Warfare Defense (BWD) is to eliminate the threat of biological terrorism as a factor in the planning and conduct of US military operations. DARPA’s primary strategy for accomplishing this goal is to identify the features of biological threat agents that are essential for their ability to cause disease, and then undermine these disease-causing mechanisms.

While it is essential to be prepared for the potential use of biological agents in warfare, a special concern is use by terrorists (against US assets both abroad and continental). There is also a tremendous mismatch between the magnitude of the threat and our ability to defend; advances in biotechnology now make it possible for adversaries to engineer “super-pathogens” with new properties, such as enhanced lethality or resistance to multiple antibiotics. For these reasons, the DARPA BWD program has focused primarily on developing innovative broad-spectrum approaches that can be used both to defend against current known threats and to anticipate potential future threats.

There are currently four major thrusts in DARPA’s BWD program: (1) real-time environmental sensing; (2) advanced medical diagnostics for the most virulent pathogens and their molecular mechanisms; (3) pre- and post-exposure medical countermeasures; and (4) consequence management tools.
Sensors

One critical component of effective biological warfare defense is real-time, pre-exposure detection, discrimination, and identification of the threat. To address this requirement, DARPA is developing detection systems which are robust, unattended, real-time (<2 minutes), high sensitivity (2-10 particles), small (<5 pounds), and low in cost (<$5K). The ability to detect biological warfare agents on the battlefield with no false positive or negative alarms is a crucial requirement. To address this need, the program is creating more efficient and effective miniature sampling devices that concentrate contaminated air and enhance the ability to capture biological warfare agents. The program is also designing small, high affinity molecules to bind specific biological agents, replacing the antibodies which are currently used in detection systems. In order to detect that the binding of an agent has occurred, the binding event must be magnified. Traditionally, this is done by tagging the antibody molecule with a fluorescent probe. This program is replacing the fluorescent tags with up-converting phosphors, thus minimizing the size of the sample required to determine pathogenicity and viability of the agent. For further detailed analysis, the program is developing microchips with an array of probes for agent identification across a broad spectrum of threats. In addition to probes that bind to some component of the agent, DARPA has recently begun developing tissue-based sensors – living cells on chips that can react functionally to the presence of threat agents to give an indication of attack. Complementing these thrusts, the DARPA microfluidics program is developing new technologies for carrying out processes on microchip devices. Finally, the use of fluids as a requirement for biological agent detection will be eliminated by using a miniaturized (show box size) time-of-flight mass spectrometer.
Advanced Diagnostics

Early diagnosis is key to providing effective therapy against biological warfare agents since many of these agents cause early, nonspecific flu-like symptoms. The goal of the DARPA advanced medical diagnostics thrust is to develop the capability to detect the presence of infection by biological threat agents, differentiate them from other pathogens, and identify the pathogen, even in the absence of recognizable signs and symptoms (i.e., when the pathogen numbers are still low). Specific areas of interest include: Multiagent diagnostics capable of simultaneously identifying a broad range of pathogens (infectious agents or their products) in clinical samples or in the body. Strategies for identifying both known and presently unknown or bioengineered pathogens (e.g., diagnostic approaches based on fundamental, critical mechanisms of pathogenesis, and targets shared by classes of pathogens). Strategies for early detection of exposure (e.g., early host responses to infection or other biological markers that might serve to detect and identify exposure). Capabilities for continuous monitoring or immediate recognition of infection in the body. Wearable diagnostics for noninvasive broad-spectrum detection of infection in the body.
Medical Countermeasures

The focus of this thrust is the development of revolutionary, broad-spectrum, medical countermeasures against pathogenic microorganisms and/or their pathogenic products. These countermeasures will be versatile enough to eliminate biological threats, whether from natural sources or modified through bioengineering or other manipulation. They will also have the potential to provide protection both within the body and at the most common portals of entry (inhalation, ingestion, and transcutaneous). Strategies include:

˙ Defeat of a pathogen’s ability to enter the body, traverse the bloodstream or lymphatics, and enter target tissues.

˙ Identification of novel pathogen vulnerabilities based on fundamental, critical molecular mechanisms of survival or pathogenesis (e.g., Type III secretion, cellular energetics, virulence modulation).

˙ Construction of unique, robust vehicles for the delivery of countermeasures into or within the body.

˙ Modulation of the advantageous and/or deleterious aspects of the immune response to significantly pathogenic microorganisms and/or their pathogenic products in the body.

Specific approaches currently include modified red blood cells to sequester and destroy pathogens, modified stem cells programmed to detect pathogens and to induce immunity or produce appropriate therapeutics within the body, identification of virulence mechanisms shared by pathogens, development of novel therapeutics targeting these mechanisms, new approaches to rapid vaccine development, and the development of lysogenic lipids.
Advanced Consequence Management

Mission effectiveness requires rapid, correct operational and medical responses to biological weapon threats. The objective of the Enhanced Consequence Management Planning and Support System (ENCOMPASS) is to accelerate ten-fold the development and execution of pre-planned, structured, and highly coordinated response among first responders, civil, and federal agencies. Based on readily available commercial hardware and software and exploiting available communications, ENCOMPASS components distribute common plans and provide the common operational picture of an incident, as it unfolds, to all responding organizations. It provides accelerated situational awareness for covert biological warfare events by detecting exposure to agents through an analysis of casualty electronic theater medical records and will locate and determine the most effective logistical support for providing appropriate treatment and pathogen-specific resources required to mitigate effects of the attack. Current plans envision transitioning these software tools to Service customers beginning in FY 1999. ENCOMPASS was developed and demonstrated with the Marine Corps Chemical and Biological Incident Response Team (CBIRF). ENCOMPASS was used in Denver by CBIRF during the Summit of Eight Conference (June 1997) and during the recent State of the Union to provide distributed consequence management plans, mission execution and situational awareness, and patient tracking in the event of a chemical or biological incident.
Current Funding (for BW-01) in $Millions:

FY 1998: 60.8
FY 1999: 88.0
FY 2000: 77.3
FY 2001: 74.0
FY 2002: 77.8
FY 2003: 75.8