Bio-Defense Program Poses 'Sticky' Issues: Military technology not necessarily adequate for homeland defense. (Analysis).

The Pentagon's chemical-biological defense program is well equipped to handle threats to military units in the battlefield, but is not prepared to tackle emerging homeland security missions, experts said.

A case in point is the protection of local communities that surround military bases in the United States, said Albert J. Mauroni, a defense policy analyst and a former U.S. Army Chemical Corps officer.

When developing contingency plans for terrorist threats, military installations should take into account what would happen to the civilians around the base in the case of a biological attack, Mauroni said. There already is a chemical stockpile emergency preparedness program in place, but there is no equivalent effort for biological defense. "There are policy and funding constraints to taking immediate action," said Mauroni. "There's a lot of sticky policy issues that have not been decided yet and until that happens we will continue to have vulnerability."

The upshot, he said, is that the Defense Department must figure out how to deal with emerging threats at home. "The [Defense Deparment's] chemical and biological program has addressed the wartime requirement and we don't have any direction on what to do with homeland defense," he said. "We thought that the bases in the U.S. were always going to be safe."

The force protection policy already in place states that installation commanders have to set up contingency plans for chemical and biological threats. However, it is up to the installation commanders to assess the situation, evaluate the threat and implement a force protection plan. "Not everyone is convinced that a chem-bio threat is their number-one priority," said Mauroni. "Explosives may show up more on their radar screens." Many commanders, for example, would like to use some of their base-operation money to bolster protection against conventional truck bombs, versus biological attacks.

Mauroni suggested that military base-protection plans should be tied in with the public health system and work together with other U.S. agencies that traditionally deal with biological threats. However, he said, there are unsolved issues that stem from having to balance the need to protect military forces against the need to safeguard the general public. "We can't lose sight of making sure that forces can do the job on the field," he said. "Protection of the homeland is the number one issue that we still have to fight."

Even though the biological defenses developed for military use are not necessarily appropriate for homeland defense, Mauroni said, technologies could cross over to the civilian sector. Among the most important civilian systems needed, he said, are medical surveillance devices.

In recent years, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been exploring the use of biological cells and tissues as detector components for sensor devices that will report on chemical and biological toxins.

David Siegrist, director of studies for countering biological terrorism at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, said that more needs to be done to develop electronic signatures for mass-spectrometers that can detect certain proteins. This technology, he explained, could help first responders automate the detection process.

An underwriters' laboratory is needed, he said, to test commercial technologies that are vying for government attention. That way, "people would know which products are reliable and have been tested in realistic environments and would perform well," Siegrist said.

Many of the existing technologies, he said, should be deployed at joint military-civilian locations. "It is important for mission accomplishment that even the local civilians who help the service receive protection," he said. "As some of these detection systems become more reliable and timely, it is a step that should be taken."

Chemical detection technology is quite advanced today, according to experts. That is not the case with biological capabilities, which are much more challenging. "Biological detection is hard, because the biological signatures are not as distinctive as the chemical ones," said Siegrist.

In the presence of potential biological threats, one must determine whether the microbe is a virulent species and whether it is actually alive and reproductive, he explained. In order to be effective, biological agents have to be approximately one to five microns in size. "That is small enough to reach deep into the lungs without being exhaled," Siegrist said.

In his opinion, biological detection is a difficult and time-consuming task. "The military has tried to detect plumes of biological agents in the atmosphere, but they found our there were so many other elements in the atmosphere that they couldn't develop reliable detection," said Siegrist.

Experimental technology employed long-range, infrared lasers that would look for clouds of biological origin. "We haven't gone forward with anything better," Mauroni said.

Both Mauroni and Siegrist agreed that the Joint Portal Shield Network system is the most reliable bio-detection system currently deployed. In fact, the Pentagon has just received one of those systems.

According to the Pentagon's 2001 Chemical and Biological Defense Program Annual Report, Portal Shield is an interim capability for bio detection, used at several locations overseas. Portal Shield currently is in production. It was successfully deployed in support of Operation Desert Thunder against Iraq in 1998 and was also used during NATO's 50th anniversary summit, in Washington, D.C. An additional 19 sites are expected to receive the system by 2002.

The system uses a network of sensors to increase probability of detecting biological agents, while decreasing false alarms and consumables (extraneous elements in the atmosphere), said the report. Portal Shield consists of a variable number of biological sensors mounted around the perimeter of a fixed site, forming a network under the command and control of a centralized post computer.

The computer communicates with the sensors and also monitors them. Sensors are modular in design and can detect and presumably identify up to eight biological weapon agents simultaneously in less than 25 minutes, according to the report. The system also has chemical sensor interfaces that facilitate an integrated chemical and biological sensor network.

Although Portal Shield is the most advanced system available today, Mauroni said that it could take up to 30 minutes to detect the biological agents. "It is a commercial system, it needs a specialist to run and is expensive to maintain and keep it running in the field," he said. "It is better than having nothing at all."

Portal Shield also is difficult to maintain, because it is highly customized technology, so spare parts are not easy to obtain.

In the future, the Defense Department plans to introduce a new system to replace existing biological detectors. It is called the Joint Biological Point Detection System (JBPDS). According to Mauroni, the system would detect biological agents in about 15 minutes. It was designed to be used by all the military services, with spare parts readily available in the Defense Department depot system.

"It will use the same technology [as Portal Shield], but it will decrease the detection time," said Mauroni. "It is a military designed and tested equipment, cheaper and easier to maintain." Each JBPDS system costs about $500,000. The price may come down as larger quantities are produced, said Mauroni.

The Defense Department so far has ordered 25 JBPDS units, which will be tested extensively, before any more systems are purchased. "There were some issues on test and evaluation they are still working on the system," Mauroni said. "If everything goes right, they will go into full production at the end of 2003." The Joint Program Office awarded an Engineering and Manufacturing Development contract in fiscal 1997 for the development of JBPDS prototypes for all services.

According to the chemical-biological annual report, the JBPDS common biological detection suite will consist of four functions: trigger--which detects in real time a significant change in the ambient aerosol; collection--which gathers samples of the suspect aerosol to be analyzed by the JBPDS and to confirm analyses; detection--which is able to broadly categorize the contents of the aerosol and lend confidence to the detection process; and identification--which provides presumptive identification of the suspect biological weapon agent and increases the confidence in the detection process.

These four functions will be integrated, in order to automate biological detection and warning capabilities. According to the report, the JBPDS program will undergo block upgrades over time, so the system can be fielded as soon as possible, while taking advantage of advances in the biological detection/identification, information processing and engineering sciences.

In the inventory today is the seven-year-old M31 Biological Integrated Detection System, or BIDS. It was constructed in modular fashion to allow for easier component replacement. Anna Johnson-Winegar, deputy assistant to the secretary of defense for chemical and biological defense, said that JBPDS could be integrated into BIDS, "to provide fully automated, broad-spectrum biological detection/identification capability."

BIDS is mounted on a shelter-equipped Humvee truck. One BIDS variant is capable of detecting and identifying four biological agents simultaneously in less than 45 minutes. Thirty-eight BIDS of this type were fielded to the 310th Chemical Company (U.S. Reserve) in 1996. BIDS is a corps level asset.

An upgraded version of BIDS, called the Pre-Planned Product Improvement variant, is capable of detecting and presumably identifying eight biological agents simultaneously in 30 minutes. "The suite is semi-automated and contains next-generation technologies, such as the Ultraviolet Particle Sizer, Chemical Biological Mass Spectrometer and the Biological Detector [antibody based device]," said the Defense Department's annual report. Thirty-eight systems were fielded to the 7th Chemical Company in 1999.

All these technologies offer point detection, which is also known as "detect-to-treat capability." They essentially alert troops in the field of a biological attack in the area. Stand-off detection is more technically challenging, said Mauroni. But that is what is needed to protect units in combat, he said. "What everybody ideally wants is a system that lets you put on a mask before you are exposed."

Mauroni noted that the technology favored within the defense community is a combination of an ultraviolet (UV) and infrared (IR) laser. The IR laser could detect a cloud 15 to 20 kilometers away while the UV laser could tell whether it is a biological cloud. "The UV laser can only go out to 5 kilometers and could give you a few minutes' warning to give you some caution," said Mauroni.

According to the Pentagon's annual report, the government is developing a joint biological stand-off detection system, or JBSDS. The system will be capable of providing near real time, on-the-move detection of biological attacks or incidents and stand-off, early detection/warning of biological agents at fixed sites or mounted on reconnaissance platforms. JBSDS will enable stand-off detection of aerosol clouds at ranges of up to 25 kilometers, with an objective of 40 kilometers, officials said.

This system will provide early-warning through the Joint Warning and Reporting System, which at this point is an advanced concept technology demonstration (ACTD). "It may have short-range biological standoff detection systems and dense arrays of small, rugged point detectors, integrated into a distributed network of sensors," said the report.

The JBSDS will augment and integrate with existing biological detection systems to offer a biological detection network capable of near real time detection and warning theater-wide. "JBSDS will have the flexibility to warn automatically or to allow for human intervention in the detection-to-alarm process," said the report. JBSDS will be used at fixed sites, air/sea ports of debarkation, amphibious landing sites and various platforms.