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U.S. Response: Pentagon Officials Ignore Chemical Defenses, Report Says By David McGlinchey The Pentagon is not ready to deal with such an attack in Iraq, the report says. The Army declined to comment on the report directly, but a spokeswoman said the Army’s combat units will be prepared for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons if they are sent into combat. “We have better equipment and capability than we did in Desert Storm,” said Army spokeswoman Nicole Dowell. A array of U.S. officials — from General Accounting Office investigators to Pentagon Inspector General Joseph Schmitz — have criticized the Defense Department’s chemical and biological defense equipment in recent months. There has been little public criticism, however, of training or military leadership in this area. “Senior commanders present a major roadblock to implementing realistic and technically meaningful NBC training for the troops,” according to the report by Eric Taylor, now a chemistry professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Previously, Taylor served as a captain in the Army Chemical Corps and he has authored Lethal Mists: An Introduction to the Natural and Military Sciences of Chemical, Biological Warfare and Terrorism. The most glaring weakness in U.S. chemical and biological defenses is “seniormost officers who regard NBC as a waste of time, a nuisance, a pain in the neck,” Taylor told Global Security Newswire. After observing training exercises in 2000 and 2001, Taylor concluded that military personnel are insufficiently prepared for an attack with weapons of mass destruction. The problem, he said, is a lack of preparation. The report says that military units need 40 hours of annual training to prepare for an attack, but “the military services require only four hours of training per year for new recruits and two hours of refresher training thereafter.” Only 30 percent of the Army’s Chemical Corps officers have science degrees, which compromises the training further, according to the report. Taylor visited several military bases in 2000 and 2001, observed training exercises and interviewed personnel across the services for his report. The Defense Department suffers from a lack of classroom instruction, insufficient testing and poorly focused training in its chemical and biological defense efforts, the report says. Specialized military personnel receive better training than most, but a poor training program for the military as a whole “may some day prove disastrously lethal and make the first American troops confronting CB weapons sacrificial lambs,” the report says. “I have been concerned that the only real way the starred officers in charge of the U.S. armed forces will ever get the message is if we suffer” heavy losses from a nuclear, biological or chemical attack, Taylor said in an interview. Some service officials have seen an increase in funds for protective equipment, but there has not been a matching increase in funding for training, the report says. While Taylor criticizes the training that he observed, he said that in the end it is senior leadership that is holding back progress on chemical, biological and nuclear defense training. “Any impetus for change must come from the top,” Taylor said. During one interview with a service member, Taylor was told that “most commanders fear and would rather avoid the training because they don’t understand it themselves,” according to the report. Another member of a military medical unit said that units in the 1991 Gulf War asked chemical or biological related questions but medical personnel did not know the answers. Little has changed in U.S. military training or education since 1991 and with another Iraq war on the horizon officials should be concerned, the report says. “This dismal state of affairs should be a wake-up call to officials of the Bush administration as they plan for a second war with Iraq,” according to the report.
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