Three Huge Defense Threats For Which Washington Is Woefully Under-Prepared

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Loren Thompson

The United States outspends every other nation on defense, and as a result has the best trained, best equipped military in the world. The joint force regularly undertakes missions that no other country’s military would be capable of executing.

However, there are existential defense threats for which the nation is not prepared—existential in the sense that they could make the continued functioning of democratic government within U.S. borders nearly impossible.

These threats get short shrift in national strategy, either because they have never occurred before or because there are no easy remedies. Unfortunately, the vulnerability of the U.S. to the threats could make them attractive options for America’s enemies in the future.

Here are three such threats.

Artificially engineered pandemics. Pandemics are epidemics that spread across vast areas, including potentially the whole world. There have been several in recent centuries that killed many millions of people. The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which originated in Kansas, eventually spread throughout the world and killed 50-100 million. Life expectancy in the U.S. declined by ten years. Smallpox killed more human beings than all the wars of the 20th century combined.

These contagions, like the current coronavirus outbreak, were naturally occurring events that resulted from spontaneously occurring mutations—often allowing the disease to jump from animals to humans. Today, for the first time in history, it is possible to engineer such mutations in a laboratory, spawning microbes that combine the virulence of seasonal influenza with the lethality of smallpox.

A weaponized strain of influenza might combine the transmissibility of seasonal H1N1 with the ... [+] WIKIPEDIA

In fact, using synthetic biology, it is possible to fashion novel pathogens (disease-producing microorganisms) for which there is no previous experience. The technological tools and genetic material for conducting such experimentation are available for a few hundred dollars on the Internet, often with no questions asked, and millions of people around the world possess the skills to use them.

A bipartisan report on biodefense issued on the eve of President Trump’s inauguration warned that the U.S. was “woefully under-prepared” for coping with major incidents, whether naturally occurring or artificially engineered. The new administration acknowledged the danger when it issued a revised national security strategy, and put in place a whole-of-government framework for preparing. But the amount of money allocated was modest and a reorganization of the National Security Council staff eliminated personnel dedicated to the task.

If a truly novel pathogen were introduced into the U.S. population, either by a foreign nation or non-state actor, there might be little the government could do before vast numbers of people were killed. At the height of the 1918 flu pandemic, 4,597 people died in Philadelphia during a single week.

Undeterrable nuclear players. Nuclear weapons are the most destructive tools of war ever devised. A single Russian warhead delivered against a major U.S. city could kill hundreds of thousands and cause panic throughout the nation; Russia currently has over a thousand such warheads aimed at America.

The United States has no defense against a sizable attack from Russia or China. Instead, it relies upon the threat of assured retaliation to deter enemies from contemplating nuclear aggression. That’s why the U.S. maintains a diverse arsenal of nuclear weapons, but spends only a fraction of 1% of its defense budget on active defense of the homeland—mainly to counter a small North Korean attack.

The assumption among many experts is that it is not feasible to build effective defenses against large-scale nuclear attacks because each weapon is so destructive and the cost to an enemy for increasing its arsenal is a fraction of what it would cost to add to defenses. In other words, the “cost-exchange ratio” favors the attacker.

The problem with this reasoning is that not all nuclear powers will be led by rational actors. Some will be bad at calculating risks, some will have difficulty thinking clearly in a crisis, some will be accident-prone, and some will be downright crazy. The current U.S. nuclear posture offers few options for dealing with an adversary who is not deterred by threats of retaliation.