The Ohio National Guard is excited. They've got one of the first Biological Integrated Detection Systems (BIDS) - a modified Humvee, for spotting nasty agents, featuring the Joint Biological Point Detection System. If only they knew what to do with it...**
“Whether you have thousands who die or zero depends on your detection ability; and you have the best,” [Col. Daniel] Berry said. “Ohio is now on the forefront of chemical detection and protection.”
Er, I think you mean__ biological__ detection, Colonel. But, hey: chem, bio, no big difference, right? Anyway, about four years ago, the Defense Department decided that the Army needed a dozen BIDS companies - not to deploy overseas with the troops, as the vehicle is designed to do, but rather to "protect the homeland" from bioterrorists. I guess they're just coming into the field now (you know, lag time between getting the funds into the budget and then actually spending them).
Colonel Berry's melodrama aside, biodetection systems - very expensive systems requiring some specialized training - need to be situated at the right place, operating at the right time, and will work only if that the bioterrorist uses one of the ten agents for which you have the proper assays. That is, if there ever is a bioterrorist who uses his agents outdoors using an aerosol sprayer in a quantity large enough to allow one of the detectors to grab a sample and identify it (as opposed to indoors, through the mail, etc). Ironically, the Army stationed a number of BIDS vehicles around the Pentagon after 9/11, with people arguing for weeks whether the system would actually work in the event of a bioterrorist incident.
Using biodetection systems for homeland security is a lousy idea; the high cost of operating and sustaining the much simpler
BioWatch system year 'round - with all its faults - ought to be an indicator. For a battlefield where you expect a weaponized agent in a specific location, it makes sense. They don't make sense for the homeland security scenarios. But you know how it is. Someone in the
Office of the Secretary of Defense gets a brainfart, next thing you know, people are falling all over themselves to get a piece of the credit. Now we're going to have a few hundred million dollars in gear out there in the Guard units, sitting in the depots, looking pretty.
All because someone thinks it's a matter of if, and not when (six years after the Amerithrax incident).
