The Greatest Threat to the U.S. Military: Chemical and Biological Weapons?

Robert Beckhusen

Security, Middle East

U.S. troops aren't ready for chemical and bio-attacks. That's a big problem, because we're seeing these toxic threats more often in Syria and Iraq.

The U.S. Army is worried its troops are not prepared for a biological or chemical attack. At the same time, chemical warfare is growing more common while it’s becoming easier for terrorists to cook up home-brewed bio-weapons in their basements.

“Not a lot” of soldiers are good at “at donning their mask in nine seconds,” Lt. Gen. Perry Wiggins, commander of U.S. Army North, told reporters Oct. 15 according to Air Force magazine. “We need to get back to the ‘B’ in CBRN.”

Wiggins deployed the acronym for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons. His larger point? Troops were going under-trained for a poisonous battlefield after years of counter-insurgency warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But in Iraq, chemical weapons — at least — were becoming more common. Insurgents attacked U.S. troops around two dozen times with chlorine weapons during the course of the war, according to the New York Times. Hundreds of American service members were exposed to blister and nerve agents discovered in leftover Iraqi army stockpiles.

This would end up paling in comparison to Syria’s chemical war. On the morning of Aug. 21, 2013, the Syrian army fired bulbous, custom-made rockets loaded with sarin gas into rebel-controlled suburbs in eastern Damascus. Hundreds of people suffocated to death — most of them unarmed civilians.

There’s some evidence Islamic State has deployed chemical weapons in both Syria and against Kurdish forces in Iraq. These weapons are most likely chlorine and mustard gases, or another concoction that shares characteristics with them. It’s not clear whether Islamic State cooked up the chemicals itself or captured them from the Syrian army. It could be some combination.

What’s particularly unsettling is the repeated, scattered but credible reports of it from Kurdish forces on the receiving end. In short — we’ve entered a scary new age of low-level but persistent chemical warfare.