Military Review English Edition July-August 2016 | Page 134

light for military leaders and their staffs. Staff members
who develop course-of-action recommendations can use
the techniques described by Lawrence to provide quality
analysis. Commanders will have the confidence from
their staff estimates to choose the best courses of action
for future military operations. Logically estimating the
outcomes of future military operations, as the author
writes, is what U.S. citizens should expect and demand
from their leaders who take this country to war.

Brig. Gen. John C. Hanley, U.S. Army, Retired,
New Berlin, Wisconsin

BARRIERS TO BIOWEAPONS

The Challenges of Expertise and
Organization for Weapons Development

Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley, Cornell University
Press, Ithaca, New York, 2014, 240 pages

P

resident Bill Clinton reportedly read Richard
Preston’s The Cobra Event, the terrifying fictional story of a viral bioterrorist attack against
New York City. The novel seems to have had an impact
on Clinton, more so perhaps than the nonfiction strategy documents of his predecessor. In
President George H.W. Bush’s 1993
National Security Strategy, the last of
his presidency, the term “biological”
was mentioned only four times, and
the focus was on arms control measures and the need to “press for a full
accounting of former Soviet biological
warfare programs.”
With Cobra Event on his bookshelf, Clinton’s 1998 National Security
Strategy devoted entire sections to the
perceived biological weapons threat:
“The Administration has significantly increased funding to enhance
biological and chemical defense capabilities and has
begun the vaccination of military personnel against the
anthrax bacteria, the most feared biological weapon
threat today.” The document also highlighted terrorist
use of biological weapons, and in a commencement
speech at the U.S. Naval Academy, Clinton announced
a massive effort to protect the civilian population from
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biological weapons. Initiatives included public health
and medical surveillance systems, training and equipping first responders, development of medicines and
vaccines, and notably, preventing the nefarious use of
biotechnology innovations.
In the days following 9/11, letters containing spores
of Bacillus anthracis were disseminated through the U.S.
postal system, resulting in the deaths of five people, and
spreading fear and panic in an already fragile public and
national security apparatus. Overseas for the CIA at the
time, I remember receiving my mail from the United
States; the yellowed, barely-legible, brittle envelopes
were the result of irradiation as a precaution against
additional attacks.
The threat from biological weapons seemed to be
expanding, as the United States attempted to understand and deal with terrorist interest in biological
weapons, along with nation-state programs—the
former Soviet Union, China, Syria, Libya, Iran, North
Korea, and Iraq, among others. Then in October 2002,
the U.S. intelligence community produced a National
Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs that stated unequivocally,
“Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons.” This
certainty evaporated quickly.
Author Sonia Ben OuagrhamGormley deploys this history as backstory to her thought-provoking work
on the challenges of accurately assessing
the threat posed by biological weapons.
She was able to incorporate into Barriers
to Bioweapons interviews with several
scientists from the Soviet and American
biological weapons programs, her visits to
former bioweapons facilities in the former
Soviet Union, and her involvement in
the DOD-sponsored Cooperative Threat
Reduction Program—designed to reduce
the proliferation threat posed by a crumbling post-Soviet WMD infrastructure.
The result is a persuasive analysis of the challenges
involved with the development and dissemination of
biological agents. She points out, for example, that the
two largest programs, the Soviet Union and United
States, were well financed and lasted many years, but
they were never as successful as this investment warranted. She then compares the outcomes of these larger
July-August 2016  MILITARY REVIEW