Is the Defense Department still preparing to fight biological warfare as if it’s 1970?
When preparing for biological warfare, most nations picture scenarios in which an enemy openly sprays traditional agents over wide areas to kill their adversaries. However, revolutionary capabilities in the life sciences and biotechnology have transformed the threat. China’s approach to warfare, combined with these emerging technologies, reveals new vulnerabilities among Western forces that, to date, have not been fully acknowledged. In no small measure, this is due to the U.S. government’s continued reliance on a 20th-century strategy for countering weapons of mass destruction. In particular, as China is a major nuclear power, it cannot be threatened after it uses biological weapons as easily as a non-nuclear state. Given these points, can China be deterred from using such advanced biological weapons during a regional crisis in the Indo-Pacific, especially an invasion of Taiwan? And if not, is it possible to mitigate the damage from such a scenario?
Although Western attention has focused on the rapid expansion of China’s nuclear and conventional warfighting capabilities, one ought to expect equal analysis of China’s biological warfare potential. By examining China’s most recent efforts at biological research, we put forward that it has bypassed 20th-century Western concepts of biological warfare and has new capabilities that could be effective across the entire conflict spectrum. Given China’s new capabilities and nuclear arsenal, we assess that standard strategies of deterrence and protection likely will not work in the future. New approaches and new concepts will be necessary if the United States is to prepare itself for potentially new forms of biological warfare in the 21st century.
What We Suspect about Chinese Biological Research
Little reliable open-source information exists about an offensive Chinese biological warfare program. Beijing has never admitted to possessing a biological warfare program, although the U.S. government assesses that China had an active offensive biological warfare program from the 1960s to at least the late 1980s. Beijing’s historical biological warfare program reportedly developed and weaponized ricin; botulinum toxins; and the causative agents of anthrax, cholera, plague, and tularemia. The U.S. government consistently has highlighted concerns — in both the annual State Department arms control compliance reports as well as the annual Department of Defense reports to Congress on Chinese military power — about studies at Chinese military medical institutions that include researchers identifying, testing, and characterizing diverse families of potent toxins with dual-use applications.
As China’s biotechnology and biopharmaceutical sectors mature and become more innovative, China is also developing a dual-use production capability and scientific know-how relevant to sophisticated offensive biological warfare research. Yet the U.S. government has stopped short of claims that China possesses an offensive biological warfare program. Clearly, China has the capability to research, develop, produce, and weaponize sophisticated biological weapons should the national leadership decide to do so. On very short notice, China can also produce a wide range of biological threat agents and sophisticated delivery systems (i.e., a mobilization capability converting civilian infrastructure to military use).
China’s civilian life sciences research sector and biopharmaceutical industries are highly integrated with the People’s Liberation Army and its Academy of Military Medical Sciences. Many life science researchers in academia and industry serve as People’s Liberation Army officers. Chinese life science researchers also benefit from funding from the central government through its 14th Five-Year Plan, released in 2021, which emphasizes growth in China’s indigenous biotechnology capabilities, specifically in the convergence of biotechnology and information technologies. Through its “Made in China” campaign, Beijing strives to produce medical equipment, prophylaxes, and therapeutics domestically. With government and venture capital investment, the Chinese biotechnology and biopharmaceutical sectors are second only to those of the United States in terms of market capitalization. A recent U.S. congressionally sponsored study has predicted that China will soon surpass the United States in biotechnology development if the latter does not quickly take action. Chinese AI capabilities already equal if not exceed those of its competitors.
Published accounts out of China from 2005 to 2020 point to increased interest in advanced biological weapons and their role in future conflict. In 2005, then-Col. Guo Ji-wei wrote a seminal article, “Ultramicro, Nonlethal, and Reversible: Looking Ahead to Military Biotechnology,” that looked at military uses of proteomics, which are transgenic technologies used to “vastly enrich the military’s ability to defend and attack.” Col. Guo elaborated that biotechnology affords or soon will afford militaries with the ability to design agents that “attack only key enemies without harming ordinary people … Injuries might be limited to a specific gene sequence or a specific protein structure.” Col. Guo expanded on his thesis in a book, War for Biological Dominance, emphasizing the role of biology in future conflict. In 2015, Lu Beibei and He Fuchu — the latter was president of the Academy of Military Medical Science at the time — wrote an article in the People’s Liberation Army Daily extolling the development of “new brain-control weapons and equipment that [will] interfere with and control people’s consciousness, thus subverting the combat style … ”
In 2017, a retired Chinese National Defense University president, Zhang Shibo, argued: “Modern biotechnology is gradually showing strong signs characteristic of an offensive capability, including the possibility that specific ethnic genetic attacks could be employed.” Undoubtedly, until COVID-19 emerged, the Chinese military was actively and openly discussing the potential military advantages of next-generation biological weapons. The 2020 edition of China’s Science of Military Strategy emphasized the growing importance of biotechnology on the battlefield. It stated the following:
The biological field has become a brand-new territory for the expansion of national security. For example, the use of new biological weapons, bioterrorism attacks, large-scale epidemic infections, specific ethnic genetic attacks, and purposeful genetic modification of the ecological environment, food, and industrial products, and the use of environmental factors such as population migration, climate change, and natural disasters.
According to the discussion in this book, China anticipates that biotechnology, including biological weapons, will dominate the modern battlefield. China not only will defend itself against adversaries’ use of biotechnology (including biological weapons), but it also likely will be prepared to use biotechnology offensively. The need for China to seize the initiative is emphasized in Science of Military Strategy:
The situation of military conflict in the biological field is becoming increasingly severe. We must deeply understand its importance and urgency, and raise the initiative to seize the military conflict in the biological field to the height of safeguarding the overall situation of national security, strengthen strategic guidance, and comprehensively enhance the strategic response ability of military conflict in the biological field.
The absence of any more recent discussion of this topic in the open Chinese literature raises concerns that current work is now classified. In addition to Chinese statements, one also needs to consider an understanding of the social and technical factors that can incentivize or disincentivize a Chinese biological weapons capability, which, to date, has given a mixed picture of Chinese biological weapons research. In short, there are numerous forms in which this capability could be manifested in a regional conflict.
Options for Countering China’s Biological Weapons Threat
Calls to address biological threats as a domain of warfare will largely fail for several reasons in particular, the tendency to conflate deliberate biological incidents and natural disease outbreaks. Given the impact of COVID-19 and the threat of natural disease outbreaks, calls for increased funding and attention on mitigating the effects of such events are expected. However, this prioritization diverts any meaningful focus on deliberate biological threats in the hope that public health programs will mitigate any deliberate disease outbreak. This approach fails to respond to the integration of new methods and biotechnologies into the conduct of war in an era of intense great power competition.
In addition, this argument often fails to appreciate the second- and third-order effects of such a decision. The overwhelming majority of defense analysts and policymakers already treat chemical and biological defense issues as tangential but not primary aspects of warfighting. By creating a “biological domain,” U.S. defense agencies would relegate biological warfare concerns to a small, isolated technical community and continue to ignore the potential impact of biological weapons on operational plans.
The U.S. government’s strategy to address biological warfare threats falls along two distinct concepts: (1) threatening massive retaliation and developing robust defensive measures for U.S. forces, while (2) relying on public health measures that improve the resiliency of its civilian population. Trying to deter China’s use of biological weapons through the threat of retaliation will fail. Even as U.S. administrations call for the option to use nuclear weapons in response to a chemical or biological attack, it is not credible to believe this would happen if the biological attack did not cause significant U.S. casualties. China’s leadership will not fear additional U.S. military retaliatory strikes if it is in the process of taking Taiwan, one of the key goals in China’s national revival. In addition, China’s strategic nuclear arsenal and overwhelming conventional superiority in the Indo-Pacific will cause U.S. decision-makers to deter themselves from undertaking any disproportionate retaliation in response to biological weapons use.
Likewise, deterrence by denial will not work if U.S. allies and partners in Southeast Asia are not fully prepared to stave off biological threats regardless of origin. Few countries have the funding and public support to develop robust defensive measures against all potential biological threats. Contagious and non-contagious diseases cause tens of thousands of deaths every year and consume an overwhelming amount of federal funding. As the United States makes dramatic cuts to its health security measures and continues to starve military and civilian chemical and biological defense programs of adequate funding, deterrence by denial becomes impossible. Deterrence by denial will not work as long as China understands that the United States does not, in fact, have a robust biodefense and health surveillance capability.
What, then, can the U.S. government do to adapt to this new future? First, we should consider that deterring China from the limited use of biological warfare agents in a regional conflict is not feasible, much as Russia has used banned non-lethal chemical agents in Ukraine to advance battlefield successes. Recognizing that this threat does not mirror Cold War threats is a first step to moving forward on realistic concepts and capabilities.
U.S. executive agencies must focus on their core competencies. The Department of Defense’s strategies and funding should focus on deliberate biological threats, while Health and Human Services’ strategies and funding address natural biological threats. This will require direction from top defense leaders, which has been lacking in this area for some time. The United States must move quickly to leverage Congress’ interest in maximizing the benefits of biotechnology for national defense, as outlined by its National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology. The Department of Defense should immediately stand up an office under the assistant secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment to research threats and leverage potential new biotechnologies.
Finally, the U.S. government must address the vulnerabilities of critical defense infrastructure, particularly in the Indo-Pacific theater, to novel biological threats that affect materiel as well as individuals, and apply risk management measures to mitigate them. The Department of Defense should also advance the nuclear hardening of its critical infrastructure to reduce their vulnerability to a Chinese attack. The technology to harden defense infrastructure is there, but not the priority to execute these plans.
Conclusion
Traditional views of large-scale battlefield use of biological warfare, particularly in large-area coverage attacks, are obsolete and rooted in outdated Cold War doctrines of a bipolar world. This does not mean that biological weapons are not a current threat — ongoing advances in biotechnology, genetic engineering, and AI have both military applications as well as public health implications. The challenge is, and will remain, to convince policymakers not to talk about biological weapons in isolation from how adversarial nations could use them to support national priorities and military objectives.
Biological weapons are not a primary threat — they are supplementary to a country’s use of conventional and nuclear weapons. At the same time, they have limited utility in a small set of situations in which countries with advanced industrial capabilities are not confident that their conventional weapons can win the day for them. China has an overwhelming conventional superiority in the Indo-Pacific region but faces considerable challenges if it tries to take Taiwan by force. As a result, one can envision China’s use of biotechnology to give its military forces an edge when those amphibious fleets launch from the mainland.
China’s conventional and nuclear strength undercut arguments for deterrence by retaliation, and U.S. unwillingness to invest in military biodefense and public health undercuts arguments for deterrence by denial. Today’s policymakers and military analysts must abandon concepts of large-scale military use of biological weapons that evolved from the Cold War arms races. These historical scenarios have no application to modern biological warfare. Policymakers and military planners today must collectively re-examine the biological weapons threat and take steps to move away from 20th-century threat models for biological defense.
Al Mauroni is a senior policy analyst with 40 years of experience with U.S. military chemical and biological defense and is the author of BIOCRISIS: Defining Biological Threats in U.S. Policy.
Glenn Cross, Ph.D. is a former deputy national intelligence officer for weapons of mass destruction responsible for biological weapons analysis.
The views expressed here are solely those of the authors in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views, positions, or policies of the U.S. government including any of its constituent departments, agencies, or entities.
Image: Sgt. Gianna Sulger via DVIDs
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