Soldiers Now Training to Fight Through Bioweapon Attacks

Everyone who has served in our country's armed forces will remember their regular NBC training, NBC standing for "Nuclear, Biological, Chemical." In other words, what are known as weapons of mass destruction. These are nasty, and a great part of the training for these eventualities involved just surviving them. And of the three, it's biologicals that should scare the absolute daylights out of anyone.

Now, today, increases in genetic engineering are making the biological threat greater than ever, and the Army is now working up training to not only have our soldiers survive such an attack, but to carry on the mission in the face of a biological agent release.

The U.S. Army unveiled its plan to prepare soldiers to fight through biological attacks rather than assume every threat can be stopped.

The newly signed plan bringing biological warfare scenarios into routine combat training as artificial intelligence (AI) and biotechnology raise new concerns about the weapons America's adversaries could develop in the near future.

The threat here is significantly different from the threat posed by nuclear and chemical weapons. Both nuclear and chemical weapons pose the greatest threat up front; once the nuke goes off or the chemicals are dispersed, the worst is over. Lingering radiation, fires, and the after-effects of nukes pose a lasting problem, but one that decreases over time. The same applies to chemical weapons. Some degrade and disappear in minutes, by design. Some persist, but they still degrade, in sunlight, in rain, or just in the air. But biological agents spread themselves, they reproduce, they change. It's a very serious threat.

"Can we protect every soldier from every possible bio threat? Probably not," Dr. Alison Tamasi, a senior official at the Army's Nuclear and Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Agency, told reporters on Monday.

"We can't put them in a bubble," she added.

The shift comes as U.S. officials continue to assess whether Moscow maintains an offensive biological weapons program after a mysterious death in Russia was linked to an anti-plague facility — reviving questions of biological safety and transparency.

That's a serious admission. And it's hard to underestimate the threat; the recent death of a 28-year-old employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Siberia would seem to indicate that Russia is up to something along these lines, and there have been repeated incidents of illegal Chinese biological laboratories discovered right here in the United States.

Writing as someone with a background in biology, I will tell you this: The notion of biological warfare scares the absolute kapok out of me, and it should scare you, too. It's a horrifying prospect. Perhaps soldiers, with proper protective gear, will be able to fight through the event of a biological agent release, but that agent won't just go away. Sooner or later the soldiers will have to come out of that protective gear, and all around them will be a possibly infected population, most of whom will have no access to protective gear. And no, a cheap paper mask isn't going to do the job.

Biological weapons could result in a civilization-ending event. It's that serious. And it's troubling beyond words that both Russia and China appear to be messing around with this technology, and that our own Department of War is taking that threat seriously enough to start training against it.

As I've been saying and writing for a long time, the Great War was the war of chemists, and World War II was the war of physicists. World War III may well be the war of biologists — and if anyone survives that, the Albert Einstein's famous prediction may well come true, that World War IV will be fought with rocks and sticks.

Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are once again respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.

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