Technology, particularly biotechnology, is accelerating at an exponential pace, reminiscent of Moore’s Law in information technologies. For example, it is now possible, in hundreds of laboratories worldwide, to recreate the deadly 1918 influenza virus.

Biotechnology will both drastically improve and proliferate widely long before today’s USMA cadets become Colonels and General Officers.

The threat of biology as a weapons system has the potential impact on the force and the nation equal to or greater than chemical or nuclear weapons. USMA cadets, at commissioning are conversant and even expert in mathematics, physics and chemistry, but are little better prepared in biology...

The USMA should adopt an interdisciplinary approach to teaching key principles of combating the bio (WMD) threat. This could be done in several ways:

Developing a set of modular curriculum tools that can integrate questions of bioterrorism into traditional classroom settings. For example, creating bioterrorism models for analysis in a statistics class. (This report contains a more detailed discussion of this option.)

Creating a ‘Biology for Leaders’ course as part of a mandatory course curriculum. The course would obviously include the principles of biological---and possibly chemical and nuclear/radiological terrorism---described above, but also other biological fundamentals such as a rudimentary understanding...