Army sets new biodefense plan to counter pandemic, adversary threats

FORT BELVOIR, Va. — The Army announced today its new biodefense strategy to build a force that can fight to its full operational potential in a “biologically contested environment,” an official from the US Army’s Nuclear and Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Agency told reporters today (USANCA) said. 

Such contested environments can consist of: naturally occurring threats like the COVID-19 pandemic or malaria, accidental threats caused by pathogen leaks from facilities, and deliberate biological threats manufactured by adversaries, Lt. Col. Dave Kingery, the biological defense integrator for the Army’s headquarters and USANCA, told a small group of reporters today during a media event. 

“We have to ensure that a global pandemic or some other health event does not stop us from our ability to project those forces forward, so we can be in the place to fight and win the war and endure through any conflict,” Kingery said. 

New Lines Of Effort

The new strategy, signed by former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, has five lines of efforts that the service hopes to implement by 2035, according to the strategy document sent to reporters ahead of today’s event. Under the first effort, “building knowledge,” the Army plans to recruit, develop and retain talent “to expand the pool of scientific, medical, and operational biodefense SMEs [subject matter experts] at all echelons,” according to the strategy. This line also aims to further include biodefense curriculum in training and education courses. 

The second line is “gaining situational awareness,” under which the service plans to integrate biological sensors and analytical tools into existing platforms to “enable decision advantage” while also monitoring indications of adversaries using biological weapons.

Regarding the third line of effort — “managing information and communication” — the service wants to standardize biological information sharing systems across the joint force and with other agencies and allies. The Army also wants to counter misinformation and disinformation, which it plans to do by monitoring information spaces using artificial intelligence and machine learning tools.

“Building biodefense readiness” is the fourth line of effort. Through this, the Army wants to provide decontamination and protective equipment to mitigate biological threats and shift away from “treating biothreats as a purely medical problem to viewing them as
operational constraints that affect warfighting functions.”

Lastly, the fifth line of effort is “modernizing biodefense.” According to the strategy, this will look like employing faster acquisition processes by leveraging AI, synthetic biology and additive manufacturing. The service also plants to update its doctrine by identifying “remaining gaps” in its current principles.

According to the strategy, the Army will prioritize lines three and five through 2028 as they will “create the necessary architecture for success across the other lines of effort.” Lines one and two will be prioritized from 2028-2031 and the Army will focus on line four from 2031-2035. 

Why Now? 

Allison Tamasi, chief of USANCA’s survivability and effects analysis division, told reporters there’s “not a particular catalyst” for the new strategy but it comes after lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, “the overall threat picture” and the “advancements in precision medicine” that “could be potentially also used against us.” Kingery added that exercises in the Pacific and those in the US homeland have also helped inform the new strategy, but he did not provide any specific details on the exercises.

Col. Dennis Rufolo, deputy director for Force Health Protection at the Office of the Surgeon General and Army Medical Command, said more tools like mobile genetic sequencing devices have allowed soldiers in operational environments to test samples of “suspicious” looking wildlife remains or a strange, potentially harmful substance in as little as 24 hours. A few years ago, he said, this would have taken weeks as soldiers would have to send the samples back to the continental US to get tested. The updated speed helps to mitigate the risks of exposure, he said.

Further, the new strategy piggybacks off the service’s 2021 biodefense strategy, Tamasi said. The main differences between the two strategies is that the 2021 strategy was “focused very much on the Army getting those initial pieces in place,” within its specific biology or chemistry shops whereas the new strategy includes guidance for how all of the Army can implement biodefense. 

“It’s no longer where if you see a group of dead wildlife, you just leave it to the surgeon team. Everyone has to have a part,” she added. 

Rufolo echoed Tamasi’s statement, explaining that now it’s not only Army biologists or surgeons that will be responsible for tackling biodefense issues, but also intel professionals, protection professionals and more. 

What’s also different from the 2021 strategy is the proliferation of artificial intelligence, Rufolo said. The Army has been using AI to establish a “baseline” for diseases — referring to a benchmark that tells users how common and transferable a disease is based on different data sets.

“So, from other nations, they’re going to publish potentially data, and we could, through open sources, collect that information and be able to translate that and provide baselines. Where other information comes in, we can establish baselines. So when we have increases, we’ll identify the concern potentially much faster with establishing a robust baseline through the utilization of AI, starting now onward,” Rufolo said.