American Biodefence: How Dangerous Ideas about Biological Weapons Shape National Security.

• Author: Smith, Ron
• Position: Book review

AMERICAN BIODEFENCE: How Dangerous Ideas about Biological Weapons Shape National Security

Author: Frank L. Smith III

Published by: Cornell University Press, New York, 2014, 192pp, $US35.

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was launched ostensibly to deal with that state's covert programmes for the production of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical and biological). However well founded that threat might have seemed at the time, the plain fact is that little of this Iraqi preparedness was evident when the country was eventually occupied. This may have been just as well. It now appears that at the time of the invasion the United States military was woefully unready to deal with biological weapons had they been used against them. The central purpose of Frank L. Smiths book is to explain why this was so and to draw attention to the persistent flaws in US military policy formation that gave rise to the situation. He also suggests that these flaws have the potential to undermine the American strategic response to other modern threats, such as cyber warfare.

As Smith sees it, the central questions of military policy formation turn on what weapons will be used and how they will be used, and the crucial concept here is what he calls the 'kinetic' concept of war. Within this, the weapons to be used will be predominantly guns and bullets, planes, bombs and tanks, and the organisation involved will be what is necessary to deploy them to best effect. This, he argues, is the dominant frame of reference for policy decisions in the American military, and always has been. Within it, non-kinetic weapon systems, like gas and biological weapons, struggle for recognition. This is the problem of 'American biodefense' and the source of the 'dangerous misconceptions' that are the main focus of the book.

Could it have been otherwise? Smith considers the possibility that military policy in regard to biological weapons and defence against them could have been formed in the post-Second World War world on the basis of a realist appreciation of the potential and the danger of such weapons. But it was not. Neither was it driven by bureaucratic capture, where competing hierarchies struggle for power when a new funding stream becomes available. It was, he concludes, simply a case of a dominant ideology ('a fire-power obsession') which made serious consideration of biodefence impossible. Human and organisational factors pushed in the same direction. As is true in other...