We have a running joke here in the military's chemical-biological defense program. Our dream goals are to develop a tricorder that detects everything hazardous immediately; pixie dust that decontaminates everything within minutes without water and without threat to humans; and the magic pill that cures all ingested hazards without any ill effects. Of course you know we're already spending tens of millions on the last item - the Defense Department's Transformational Medical Technology Initiative. The pixie dust is in the works, but it's probably a decade away from our military labs spending real money on it. And that leaves the tricorder.
We have gotten chemical agent detection down to lightweight systems (Joint Chemical Agent Detector), but the lightweight biological agent detector continues to be elusive. That's not to say that the CB defense community isn't working on it. The latest Chem-Bio Defense Quarterly has a number of articles on biodetection -- including one a tricorder-esque Joint Biological Tactical Detection System (JBTDS).
- the biological aerosol agent detector, providing “bio/non-bio”
discrimination of the four major classes of BW agents (vegetative and spore bacteria, viruses, and toxins) - an aerosol sampler to collect a requisite amount of suspected agent for evaluation
a hand held identification capability (providing increased sensitivity and ability to discriminate a BW within the specific class type) to conduct the “silver standard” - presumptive identification of the collected sample, which is a process that is currently conducted at the theater level or higher echelon of capability and forces
We all have dreams. This is a fantasy that the service reps seem to believe will be fulfilled in the next five to ten years. But it will never happen. This is a flawed requirement and a flawed project. For one, "lightweight" is not 37 pounds. The M22 ACADA is 22 pounds with the battery, and no one calls it "lightweight."
Man-portable, yes. It can't identify specific biological warfare (BW) agents, just "classes"
- bacterium, viruses, that is to say, just about every biological organism floating in the environment.
The biggest failure is conceptual - the users want a biological detector that is as small as a chemical detector and as numerous on the battlefield. This ignores the facts that BW agents don't act or look like chemical warfare (CW) agents, and that BW detectors are much more expensive than CW
detectors, due to sensitivity and variety of agents. The users want every "lightweight" detector to take samples, when "theater-level"
detectors exist already to perform that function. This is a basic failure of imagination, where service users think chemical and biological agents are the same basic hazards, and that tactical concepts are the same for both. They don't want to think at the operational or strategic level.
We need tactical level biological detectors, but they don't have to sample, they don't need to network into the communications systems, and they don't need to detect all the dangerous BW agents at once. All they need to do is warn the individual that there's a bad bug nearby. We need to retain the more expensive operational detectors to do the serious analysis that supports medical decisions and command decisions on attribution. And we need stand-off biological detectors to give fixed sites a bigger warning time. This is a simple operational concept. But for reasons unknown, our military CB defense program doesn't want to do the smart thing.
