Biothreat Bedlam: A (Much Needed) Framework for Planning, Programming and Prioritizing

For more than 20 years, we have lacked a consensus about the threat biological agents pose to the United States. Various and sometimes voluminous "risk assessments," "threat assessments" and "vulnerability assessments" have yielded wildly different conclusions. This impass is unworkable for several reasons, but the current economic environment and recent world events, including regime change in several countries with biological weapons programs, make its resolution an urgent matter. This paper, which is intended to be the first of a three-part essay, proposes a conceptual framework to mitigate the problem. It envisions a biological attack as the output of a complex system. Discerning threats requires an interdisciplinary team to provide the essential, but disparate inputs for each of the model's dimensions. Each essay portion will explore a separate dimension of the framework in depth: beliefs and behavior, biology and bureaucracy. After proposing the basic framework, the focus of this paper is the biology (capability) dimension of the model. After all, before we can predict how an adversary might infect, poison or contaminate a target, we need to clearly undestand what is required to infect, poison or contaminate a target. It's not as hard as you might think!

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