Biological Warfare: Passive Defense to Preemption

Biological Warfare: From Passive Defense to Preemption?

Israel and the United States confront a new biological risk: pandemics, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and critical infrastructure are blurring the boundaries between military defense and civilian protection. The challenge is no longer simply to survive an attack, but to detect a threat early enough to prevent it from paralyzing military forces and society — raising, ultimately, the question of preemption.

Biological warfare once conjured a relatively straightforward image: a pathogen used as a weapon, soldiers wearing protective gear, civilians sheltering from contamination, and medical teams treating casualties and decontaminating affected areas.

That picture is becoming outdated.

The US Army’s new biodefense strategy, unveiled in September 2026, starts from a much broader premise. The Army wants its forces to remain fully operational in what it calls a “biologically contested environment.”

The phrase matters.

Such an environment may result from a deliberate enemy attack, but it can also emerge from a naturally occurring pandemic or the accidental release of a pathogen. For scientists, lawyers and policymakers, the distinction is fundamental. For a military unit immobilized by contamination, however, the immediate operational consequences may be remarkably similar.

In all three cases, soldiers can become unavailable, bases can be isolated, transportation disrupted, supply chains interrupted and the deployment of forces compromised.

Biology is therefore no longer simply a matter of military medicine.

It is becoming a variable of warfare.

The Military Lesson of COVID

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that a pathogen does not need missiles or armored divisions to disrupt national power.

Transportation networks, industries, hospitals, government agencies and international mobility were all affected. Militaries themselves had to modify training, deployments and force-health measures.

The US Army is now drawing an operational conclusion from that experience.

Lt. Col. Dave Kingery, the Army’s biological defense integrator, has stated the objective plainly: a global pandemic or another health emergency must not prevent the United States from projecting forces forward, fighting and enduring through a conflict.

The doctrinal shift can almost be summarized in that single statement.

Yesterday, medicine protected the soldier.

Today, biodefense must protect the ability to wage war itself.

From the Mask to the Sensor

The Army’s strategy organizes this transformation around five lines of effort: building knowledge, gaining situational awareness, managing information and communications, building biodefense readiness, and modernizing biodefense.

Behind that structure lies a deeper transformation.

Traditional biological defense was largely reactive. A threat appeared; authorities identified it, protected personnel, isolated affected areas, vaccinated, treated and decontaminated.

The Army now wants to move further upstream.

It plans to integrate biological sensors into existing systems, accelerate sample analysis, improve information-sharing among the military, government agencies and allies, and use artificial intelligence to identify unusual biological patterns earlier.

Portable genetic sequencing devices already allow deployed personnel to analyze certain suspicious samples in roughly 24 hours. In the past, those samples might have had to be sent back to the continental United States, with results taking weeks.

Compressing that timeline changes the nature of the problem.

Biology becomes intelligence.

When AI Watches the Living World

Artificial intelligence adds another dimension.

The objective is not merely to recognize a known pathogen. It is to establish a biological baseline: What diseases normally circulate in a region? How frequently? How transmissible are they? What environmental variations are normal?

By processing large quantities of health, environmental and scientific data, AI can help identify departures from that baseline.

An unusual increase in illness around a military installation, unexpected animal deaths or the appearance of an unfamiliar pathogen can become weak but potentially significant intelligence indicators.

Satellites, signals intelligence, cyber intelligence and human intelligence could therefore be joined by another category: biological intelligence.

But the same technological revolution has a darker side.

Advances in AI, genetics and synthetic biology that make pathogens easier to detect and counter can also make biological capabilities easier to misuse.

NATO has explicitly recognized this duality. The Alliance is examining AI-enabled biosensors for detecting chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats while warning that the convergence of AI and biotechnology could facilitate new biological threats.

As in cyberspace, defensive and potentially offensive capabilities increasingly draw upon some of the same technologies.

Are We Sick — or Are We Under Attack?

This is where the strategic problem becomes considerably more difficult.

The US strategy distinguishes among naturally occurring biological events, accidental releases and deliberate attacks.

But how does a government make that distinction during the first hours of a crisis?

Imagine an unusual illness appearing around a military port, an air base and a major metropolitan area at roughly the same time.

An epidemic?

An accident?

Or an attack?

The initial response would naturally be led by public-health authorities. But if biological analysis begins to coincide with intelligence suggesting hostile activity, the character of the crisis changes.

Who takes command?

Health authorities? Homeland-security officials? Intelligence agencies? The military?

Increasingly, the answer may be: all of them.

Biological threats are therefore eroding one of the oldest institutional distinctions in warfare — the line separating the front from the home front.

Passive Defense Is No Longer Enough

European countries once spoke explicitly of “passive defense”: the military fought the war while civilian authorities protected the population from its consequences.

That distinction is increasingly inadequate.

A pandemic, whether natural or deliberately caused, can simultaneously affect soldiers, defense-industry workers, train operators, hospital personnel and power-grid technicians.

Conversely, information essential to military commanders may come from civilian hospitals, laboratories, veterinary surveillance or wastewater monitoring.

We are therefore moving from passive defense, which absorbs the consequences of an event, toward active defense, which detects and contains it, and then toward preventive defense, which searches for the threat before it can achieve its effects.

A fourth stage remains far more controversial: preemption.

From Prevention to Preemption?

The distinction matters.

Prevention seeks to stop a future threat from developing. Preemption means acting against a threat judged sufficiently imminent that waiting for it to materialize is considered unacceptable.

The new US Army strategy does not announce a doctrine of preemptive military strikes against foreign biological facilities.

Claiming otherwise would go beyond the evidence.

What it does provide, however, are capabilities designed to discover biological threats earlier.

Suppose a biological anomaly is detected. Genetic sequencing reveals unusual characteristics. Intelligence reports indicate suspicious activity. Cyber collection produces additional evidence. An allied service provides corroborating information.

At what point does an accumulation of indicators become sufficient certainty to act?

The question is especially difficult because biological attack offers a potential adversary one extraordinary advantage: time.

A missile reveals itself when it is launched. A biological agent may circulate for days before anyone realizes that the event is not an ordinary outbreak.

A potential aggressor therefore benefits from the gap between the event and its attribution.

Israel: Where the Home Front Is Already a Front

Nowhere is this question more concrete than in the Middle East.

Israel is a special case because it has limited strategic depth and because the distinction between military front lines and the civilian home front has long been less pronounced than elsewhere.

Missiles and drones have already turned cities, ports, power plants and other civilian infrastructure into direct components of military confrontation.

Biological threats take that logic one step further.

Israel also possesses a scientific institution particularly relevant to this challenge. The Israel Institute for Biological Research describes its national mission as addressing biological threats arising from both deliberate attacks and naturally emerging diseases. Its work includes detecting and identifying biological threats, investigating potential bioterrorism agents, and developing vaccines and treatments.

The distinction between natural events and hostile action is therefore already built into Israel’s biological-defense architecture.

And another feature of Israel makes the stakes especially tangible: water.

Desalination: Strategic Success, Strategic Dependence

Israel responded to its historic water scarcity with a remarkable technological achievement: large-scale seawater desalination.

Desalination has become one of the pillars of Israeli water security, with a significant part of the country’s supply now dependent on a relatively small number of major coastal facilities.

Events in late August and early September 2026 demonstrated the resulting dependence.

Exceptional seawater turbidity associated with a microalgae bloom originating around the Nile Delta forced five of Israel’s six major desalination plants to suspend operations. After some facilities restarted, several had to shut down again when turbidity increased.

It was not an attack.

That is precisely why the episode is strategically instructive.

A biological or environmental disturbance can simultaneously affect several pieces of critical infrastructure without a single missile being fired.

Nor was this entirely unprecedented.

Between 2007 and the end of 2023, Israel’s State Comptroller recorded 14 seawater-contamination incidents that caused desalination plants to halt production. Eight — roughly 57 percent — were microbiological; four involved fuels or oils; and two involved severe turbidity associated with events including storms or earthquakes.

Shutdowns lasted from several hours to as long as five days.

The vulnerability therefore exists without any need to posit hostile action.

Water, Power, Cyber, Biology

A desalination plant is also an unusually clear example of strategic interdependence.

It depends not only on seawater quality but also on electricity, industrial control systems, pumps, filtration membranes and distribution networks.

It therefore sits at the intersection of physical, energy, cyber and biological vulnerabilities.

This does not mean that deliberate contamination of Israeli desalination plants is imminent, or even likely.

It means that water security has become an integral component of Israel’s strategic resilience.

Now imagine that a biological anomaly one day forces several plants to shut down.

The initial response would be technical and public-health oriented.

But suppose laboratory analysis identifies an agent inconsistent with known natural phenomena while intelligence simultaneously points toward deliberate interference.

At what point does an environmental incident become a national-defense emergency?

Israel’s Dilemma

And at what point can defense become preemptive?

For Israel, that question carries particular weight.

A doctrine based on absorbing a first strike and retaliating afterward is harder to sustain when a country is geographically small, densely populated and dependent on a limited number of critical infrastructure nodes.

Yet biological preemption creates an additional difficulty.

A laboratory is not a missile launcher.

Biotechnology is profoundly dual-use. The same equipment can support medical research, vaccine production and legitimate biodefense — or activities that are far less benign.

Physically destroying a biological facility could even cause the very release one is trying to prevent.

Neutralization, therefore, would not necessarily mean bombing.

Cyber operations, sabotage, interdiction, covert action, disruption of a supply chain or accelerated development of a countermeasure could all become part of this emerging grammar of preventive action.

The Middle East as a Laboratory of Convergence

The region has another distinctive feature: forms of warfare once treated separately are already converging.

Ballistic missiles, drones, cyberattacks, covert operations, disinformation, electronic warfare and precision strikes now coexist within the same strategic environment.

Biology could become another layer.

More important, these instruments could be combined.

A future crisis might involve cyber disruption, a disinformation campaign, attacks on electricity and a real or suspected public-health event at the same time.

In such a scenario, an agent’s lethality might not even be the only relevant measure of military effectiveness. Disorganization, uncertainty and panic could themselves become desired strategic effects.

That helps explain why the new US Army strategy also treats information management and countering disinformation as components of biodefense.

Europe and NATO: Protect Society So the Military Can Fight

Europe still tends to approach the problem primarily through resilience: public health, hospital capacity, medical stockpiles, critical infrastructure and civil protection.

The United States is placing greater emphasis on continuity of military operations.

The two approaches will inevitably converge.

NATO is where they increasingly meet.

A European military cannot fight for long if ports are immobilized, the power grid is disrupted, hospitals are overwhelmed, transportation breaks down or defense industries lose significant portions of their workforce.

Conversely, a society under major attack may need military capabilities in intelligence, transportation, detection and command.

Civil protection does not disappear.

It simply ceases to be passive.

How Much Surveillance Is Prevention Worth?

This transformation ultimately raises a political question.

Detecting a biological anomaly very early requires data.

A great deal of data.

Health information, environmental data, veterinary surveillance, wastewater analysis, absenteeism and genetic information can all help identify an unusual event sooner.

Military and public-health effectiveness therefore increases with surveillance capacity.

But a democracy cannot simply treat its population as a network of biological sensors.

Biodefense thus encounters the same dilemma already familiar from counterterrorism and cybersecurity: how much liberty are societies prepared to trade for a few additional hours or days of warning?

Is Life Itself Becoming a Strategic Domain?

Land, sea and air were once the traditional domains of warfare. Space and cyberspace were added later.

Will the living world be next?

The new US strategy does not yet justify such a definitive conclusion.

But it clearly indicates that something fundamental is changing.

Yesterday, the objective was to survive a biological attack.

Today, it is to detect and identify one before it can paralyze military forces and society.

Tomorrow, the objective may be to discover it early enough to prevent it from happening at all.

The decisive question would then cease to be purely scientific or military. It would become political and legal:

How much evidence does a state need before it can regard a detected biological threat as an imminent attack?

And in the Middle East, a second question immediately follows:

How long can a country wait for certainty when it has neither strategic depth nor room for error?