This year, NATO allies committed to increasing defense spending to 5% of GDP annually by 2035. 3.5% will go specifically toward core defense spending. As part of these efforts, it is crucial that all NATO nations quantify their biological defense activities and include them in these capability investments.
The new NATO expenditure targets are driven by a threat environment that is both severely challenging and dynamic, broadly speaking, and related to biological threats specifically. Russia is bending many norms in its war against Ukraine, including regular use of chemical agents that NATO nations now believe indicates a serious lack of restraint in their willingness to conduct illegal chemical and biological attacks.
Beyond looming Russian threats, artificial intelligence, robotics and other technologies are transforming the landscape of who is capable of developing and engineering biological weapons for a broader range of distinct purposes.
While it is clear that this threat environment will require concerted biodefense investments, active, ongoing discussions focus on what to count as core defense spending — the focus of NATO’s new target of 3.5% of GDP annually — and what should count as the non-military portion of societal resilience, for which NATO nations have pledged to spend 1.5% annually of GDP by 2035. This question has arisen in part because most countries have rarely (if ever) quantified their biodefense spending, and because many of the tools for addressing biological threats can be used for both military purposes and civilian functions. This includes resilience to pandemics and general emergency response.
As such, let’s focus on the 3.5% for core defense spending. Generally, this includes funds to man, train, equip and command military forces, or others, such as the coast guard or national police, when used for military purposes. It can also cover the stockpiling of equipment and supplies for wartime reserves, research and development for military purposes and common infrastructure, such as command-and-control networks and surveillance systems, along with personnel costs.
Military biodefense capabilities fall into this category in a clear-cut way.
Many NATO nations have laboratories operated by defense agencies that are central to detecting, characterizing and defending against biological threats (in addition to chemical weapons and other militarily significant threats). These include the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in the United States, the Bundeswehr Institute of Microbiology in Germany, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory in the United Kingdom and others.
These labs are essential for addressing biological weapons threats and deterring the development and use of prohibited biological weapons.
Likewise, investments in biological threat detection and characterization equipment, personal protective equipment and medical countermeasures for military forces fall squarely within the 3.5% as part of equipment and supplies under operations and maintenance. Because these types of items are often stockpiled, they are easily quantifiable. For example, the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile contains enough doses of smallpox vaccine for the adult population, and many nations subscribe to the 100 Days Mission goal of developing diagnostics and countermeasures for a newly emergent pathogen within 100 days. Such goals can be easily tailored for military requirements and what is needed to support them directly.
Similar to how NATO maintains situational awareness for space and cyber, a biodefense capability target should focus on ensuring that every NATO nation’s military base has biological threat detection and early warning assets in place, as soon as possible. Basic capacity should be cost-effective to set up. For example, wastewater sequencing and other approaches have scaled incredibly in recent years. For wastewater and environmental monitoring, as well as other early warning tools, the analytical approaches used to characterize pathogen threats are rapidly growing more powerful and cost effective.
The capability targets set by NATO in this space should also ratchet up over time. Examples could include plans to scale the number of sites with metagenomic sequencing-based early warning systems; and decreasing the time to detect and characterize a novel, engineered pathogen to hours rather than days.
Additionally, investments that aim at biological weapons attribution and verification of noncompliance by adversaries with the Biological Weapons Convention clearly apply to core defense and deterrence. Russia’s sustained, flagrant treaty violations need to be monitored and called out.
Yet another biodefense expenditure category is military training and exercises, for both responding to a biological weapons attack and preparing to maintain operational force readiness during outbreaks, even if the source of the causative pathogen has not yet been determined. Indeed, such exercises should also be used to incorporate evolving technological developments so capability targets can be refined to ensure NATO force readiness against biological threats. Exercises and related public affairs activities aimed at increasing awareness of biodefense efforts, both for deterrence and to pre-bunk information threats, are a crucial part of core defense spending.
This is not an exhaustive list, but it demonstrates that NATO countries have many clear starting points for detailing a full suite of biodefense capability targets and quantifying investments in those capabilities. This will help ensure that NATO meets core biological defense and deterrence needs effectively, in the face of rising biological threats.
Hon. Andy Weber is a senior fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks and previously served as assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs.
Christine Parthemore is the CEO of the Council on Strategic Risks and previously served at the Pentagon.
