DTRA On the Chopping Block?

Say it ain't so ...

Last night, WIRED magazine announced that it had received documents in which DoD leadership is considering cutting up to 75 percent of its workers who are in the DoD countering WMD community. It’s hard to determine exactly what the proposed cuts would be, as this is a budget drill and not a done deal, but the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the funds it spends in support of other nations is being considered as not supporting the administration’s national security direction.

In response to the Pentagon’s request for information, the agencies contemplated lower bounds of cuts of 20, 40, and 60 percent—a counter-offer, the Pentagon source says, because officials in these agencies see a 60 percent cut as a “red line” that would still severely hurt global and domestic security.

A 20 percent reduction in funding, the memos say, would reduce some mine-clearance efforts in former war zones, significantly hurt programs to surveil and prevent infectious disease outbreaks in Africa, and worsen biosafety and biosecurity programs at biological laboratories worldwide, among other losses.

A 40 percent reduction would limit funding for counter-extremism programs in Africa and the Middle East, close all mine-clearance operations, shut down programs to intercept and prevent the development of weapons of mass destruction, and completely shut down biological surveillance programs.

A 60 percent cut would be significantly more severe, according to the memo. It would fundamentally eliminate America’s role in preventing the spread of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, the documents warn, and increase the likelihood of a lab accident or theft of potentially dangerous biological material.

I can’t say that I’m entirely surprised by this, although it does kind of take one’s breath away in the initial read. There’s only one defense agency that focuses on countering WMD, and that’s DTRA. In a time when the services increasingly ignore counter-WMD policy issues and the combatant commands lack adequate staff to plan for conflicts that involve WMD, this proposed cut is kind of a big deal. At the same time, nobody cares about protection from NBC weapons and DTRA is sort of a collection of different tribes that are doing a lot of disparate things without a strong champion within the department. But it is a unique capability that doesn’t really cost a lot of money.

There’s a proliferation prevention program in DTRA that provides support to other nations’ militaries to train them to better detect and interdict the smuggling of WMD-related materials. There’s also the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which originally focused on ridding Russia and the former Soviet Union states of their excess nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, but it morphed largely into a “biological threat reduction program” that focused on improving other nations’ biological laboratories that supported their public health systems. These two programs in particular are suspect as “security cooperation” efforts that don’t fit the “America First” direction of this administration.

All of DTRA’s activities address the threat of weapons of mass destruction, that’s why it was formed in 1998 as part of the Defense Reform Initiative. There are three main sections, research and development, operations, and business enterprise. The R&D section includes science and technology research for WMD-related activities to include nuclear survivability, modeling of WMD and explosives events, and offensive counter-WMD capabilities. The operations side has a 24-hour global ops center that supports the services and combatant commands as needed, a group that supports U.S. arms control treaty obligations, and a section that assists the DoD nuclear enterprise through surety inspections. It’s a diverse organization.

Let’s take a closer look at the numbers. You can find the budget materials at the OSD Comptroller site, and here’s a link to the CTR-related activities. In 2024, CTR-related activities had a budget of $351M, which is about $100M less than its better days, of which $228M is for biological threat reduction, $19.4M is for global nuclear security, $16.4M is for chemical security and elimination, and $6.8M for eliminating delivery systems. There is also $46.3 million for proliferation prevention programs that support other nations, and $34M for admin/other costs. Russia pulled out in 2015 in part due to (surprise surprise) its invasion of Ukraine. After 2016, the biological threat reduction program increasingly moved from addressing biological weapons to supporting biosecurity for laboratories in Africa, SW Asia, and Eastern Europe. Over the past five years, Russia (and China) have increasingly (and falsely) declared that the DTRA support to Ukraine’s biological laboratories was cover for an offensive bioweapons program. The Proliferation Prevention Program doesn’t get as much press, but it is focused on improving security operations in Eastern Europe and the Middle East with regards to interdicting WMD-related trafficking operations.

To sum it up, yes, in fact, one could make the case that these programs are “foreign assistance” to other nations. At the same time, one could also make the case that these efforts support U.S. national security because no one wants WMD-related material being moved across the globe or biological releases from research laboratories overseas. Both threats could wind their way to U.S. shores with catastrophic effect. In its response, DTRA pushed back hard on potential security risks that could occur, even if it’s largely hypothetical in nature.

A Pentagon source tells WIRED that if cuts on the higher end of the proposed spectrum are made, DTRA will effectively end. “Anything more than a 60 percent cut cripples the program,” they say. The source, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the spending review, claims a total elimination of these programs is also on the table.

"All reductions increase risk to US due to pathogen spread and easier adversary pathways to develop WMD,” the memos read.

…

DTRA, for example, currently works with 35 nations, helping to upgrade their biosafety and biosecurity practices while also helping them destroy dangerous biological samples. Much of this work takes place in veterinary clinics, which often treat and collect samples from sick livestock, making them the front line of infectious disease outbreaks. This work, in recent years, has included many of the African nations hit by Ebola.

Partnering with local health authorities not only helps prevent the next epidemic, but it also makes sure that these virological samples are kept secure—“so it's not accidentally going to leak out of these public health facilities or not be stolen by a terrorist,” Robert Pope, director of Cooperative Threat Reduction at DTRA, explained in a 2022 interview.

DTRA’s staff operate as an “early warning system,” a congressional staffer tells WIRED, ahead of any deployment of the US military, they say. While it may not be a traditional kind of military power, they add, it should still fit into this administration’s priorities. “It secures our border from pathogens.”

I’ve had a long, long relationship with DTRA. I worked there as a contractor and I received their funds to support Air Force education on WMD issues. They have great people there. At the same time, I’ve never liked how the CTR program moved from its focus on weapon systems to supporting other nations’ public health programs. IT’S NOT THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT’S JOB TO FUND PANDEMIC PREPAREDNESS FOR GLOBAL HEALTH SECURITY. IT’S NOT THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT’S JOB TO PREVENT BIOLOGICAL LAB LEAKS ACROSS THE GLOBE. IT’S NOT DTRA’S JOB TO BE AN EARLY WARNING SYSTEM FOR PATHOGENS. Why is this so hard to figure out?

We have the Department of Health and Human Services and U.S. AID to work this angle (well, we used to have U.S. AID funds for health programs). I don’t care how many times the OSD leadership (in the past) has promoted this effort, the only reason the BTRP continued in the fashion that it does today was because nobody in the upper DoD leadership really cared what the program was doing. The money was approved and it was being spent, and U.S. partners enjoyed the benefits of the program. That’s all they cared about.

Russia and China have benefited by pointing out that a military agency is engaging with other countries’ biological research facilities, when it is appropriately a non-defense global health security mission. I fully support the Defense Health Agency playing a role in global health security because they need to prepare U.S. forces to go into areas of the world that have nasty diseases. But DTRA’s CTR program should have died when the former Soviet Union states ran out of NBC weapons or stopped cooperating. Government programs have that habit of perpetuating themselves until they are finally killed off.

The DoD CWMD community has had a misguided view of the dangers posed by biological threats, and in particular pandemic threats, and it’s skewed the conversation for at least ten years. DoD leadership has increasingly taken its eye off of dealing with WMD threats and it doesn’t see the value of DTRA anymore, and that’s a shame. There’s a lot that DTRA does outside of BTRP that needs to be retained. The Counter-WMD technologies directorate is a great workshop to support the combatant commands with offensive options to take out WMD facilities. The Defense Nuclear Weapons School at Kirtland AFB, New Mexico, is a singularly important education facility for preparing military and civilian members for WMD threats (even though they don’t teach counter-WMD courses necessarily, but that’s a story for another day). I have to wonder if the NDU Center for the Study of WMD is going to be able to stay open if DTRA closes. It’s a harbinger of bad times ahead for the WMD community. At the same time, it’s also a call for the counter-WMD community to examine itself and determine why it’s out of step with DoD leadership.