Better Strategy to Protect U.S. Agricultural Sector

Mauroni says that the report identified a number of challenges to the successful use of Department of Defense (DOD) assets in response to an agroterrorism attack. “It should not be a surprise that DOD defers to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for options on how to handle such events, and that DOD’s priorities are often pointed at contingency operations in overseas locations,” he writes. “That said, there are natural affinities to the DOD homeland security role, both in the form of forces provided through plans developed by U.S. Northern Command and in the extensive medical management and biosurveillance capabilities within the military services. It becomes a matter of employing the interagency to leverage DOD capabilities in a timely manner, ideally in a proactive manner, to prepare for agroterrorism events.”

The just-published collection of studies provides an update on several of the topics associated with concepts to address agroterrorism, concepts and topics first raised in the 2006 volume.

Here is preface, by Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Burgess, Jr. (Ret.), to the new edicted

Preface
By Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Burgess, Jr., U.S. Army (Ret.)

Just as this book on agroterrorism reaches the final stages of development, our nation is in the midst of fighting a global war. Our foe is not an intractable nation-state bent on world domination, but rather an invisible, inanimate, mindless enemy that surrounds us.

The United States spends massive resources annually on responding to “thinking adversaries.” However, this “unthinking adversary,” the SARS-CoV2 virus and cause of the COVID-19 pandemic, has caused unprecedented global disruption, worthy of the most clever and powerful adversarial nation-state. Nature has once again proven to be the most dangerous bioterrorist and again reminded us that we have much to learn from it.

As of this writing, we certainly do not yet understand the full spectrum of implications from the coronavirus. Who would have anticipated that physicians and medical personnel in some parts of the country would experience pay cuts or job loss during a pandemic? And yet, it has happened. Before the start of the pandemic, the thought would have been inconceivable, yet what would happen to us if the trained health professionals just walked away, exhausted by the relentless hours and no longer willing to absorb the risks or personal costs?

We must recognize that a deliberate attack against our crops and livestock could be equally as devastating and exhausting as this current crisis. For many human and animal outbreaks that have occurred over the years, government, medicine, and business decisionmakers have demanded new technologies to help detect, contain, and mitigate the spread of disease. In most instances, the existing plans and capabilities had to be rapidly modified once the disease gained momentum. As is often the case, some assumptions borne of long planning and gaming were wrong, or perhaps only partly right, while others were spot on.

As the current pandemic has reminded us, logistics challenges always seem to occur during emergencies. A future agroterrorism incident will have similar features, such as a shortage of emergency supplies, deterioration of strategic stockpiles of certain items (e.g., surgical masks and gloves), or bureaucracies that emphasize form over function.

As we prepare to defend against agroterrorism, we must factor in the human element, the thinking adversary who chooses to advance the chaos borne of a pathogen to gain advantage. To be successful, the adversary must penetrate our nation’s defenses before his pathogenic weapon can be deployed. Once deployed, the pathogen remains first undiscovered or undiagnosed, enabling it to gain a foothold in the targeted animal or plant population.

From there, the disease takes on a life of its own within that population, magnifying the disease effects, as its spreads. With the pathogen now delivered, the adversary can fade into the darkness, awaiting the next opportunity to attack.

Due to the intentionality of the adversary, agroterrorism has the real potential of needing an even more complex response than an outbreak of a naturally produced virus. The very real possibility of intentional chemical contamination of food further complicates matters, because response time and medical management would almost certainly prove inadequate.

Agroterrorism differs greatly from natural disease outbreaks and disasters for many reasons, primarily because Americans have not known widespread hunger since the Great Depression. Government and agribusiness are supposed to be vigilantly on the lookout for adversaries. However, as has been proven many times since the Sept. 11, 2001, (9/11) terrorist attacks, those in charge of surveillance have to be right every time while the adversary gains advantage by only having to be right once. The primary goal of the adversary, beyond diminishing the availability of the actual food supply, is stoking fear about what remains. Is it safe to eat?

Amidst the problems encountered in emergencies, people emerge by discovering expedient solutions to problems unimagined in white papers or mathematical models. People and their intellectual prowess will always remain our greatest assets and yet we often do not treat them as such with the freedom to think, question and challenge.

Countless times in our nation’s history, these people have proven essential to our survival. The selections in this book demonstrate that we can listen to them and prepare for these crises, rather than have such crises come upon us unannounced.

Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Burgess, Jr., U.S. Army (Ret.), is Executive Vice President of Auburn University.

— Read more in Albert Mauroni and Robert A. Norton, eds., Agroterrorism: National Defense Assessment, Strategies, and Capabilities (U.S. Air Force Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, August 2020)