A Defense Department official told Politico on Monday it would work with intelligence agencies to overhaul its approach to countering biological and chemical weapons.
Ian Watson, the department's deputy assistant secretary for chemical and biological defense, said it would develop new medical treatments, vaccines, and personal protective equipment that can adapt to new threats.
The Chemical and Biological Defense Program's Enhanced Medical Countermeasures Approach framework is also a response to China, Iran, and Russia's willingness to tweak naturally occurring toxins and pathogens, as well as develop their own.
"We see what we have to prepare for, for the National Defense Strategy, for the pacing threat of China and Russia," Watson said. "We see not only the technology, the intel, the intent, and also the potential impact it would have to our forces if we don't prepare."
"It's a different scale, and it's a different environment in which our soldiers are going to be asked to potentially find it," he continued, adding, the "ability to simply sink endless amounts of defense dollars into a single countermeasure for every single threat that can easily be modified by our adversaries is no longer a solution."
George Mason University researcher Gregory D. Koblentz, an expert in biodefense, said the Biden administration's program would be significant in bettering the preparation of U.S. forces.
"There's definitely a much higher kind of salience and appreciation of how nation-states are using these technologies," Koblentz acknowledged. "Until fairly recently, the focus has mostly been on ISIS and al-Qaida using chemical and biological terrorism. This might be another kind of paradigm shift."
One of the likely catalysts, Koblentz noted, was Russia's development of the nerve gas Novichok for use in assassination attempts. U.S. intelligence warns the same agent can be used in future mass-casualty events.
"Russia's use of Novichok on multiple occasions has definitely highlighted the threat that so-called fourth-generation agents pose," he stated. "These are agents that we know existed, but people were not really focused on them because they were secret until recently."
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