Biodefense and Beyond
Biodefense and Beyond
The Influence of Ideas on National Security
This concluding chapter presents three major findings in the biodefense study. First, biological weapons do not conform to the military's assumptions and heuristics about projectile weapons and explosives. Second, as a consequence of this discrepancy, the armed services have tended to rely on inaccurate stereotypes that conflate biological weapons with other nonkinetic weapons. These stereotypes let the military neglect biodefense while disregarding it as a matter of routine practice. Third, different ideas produce different results. The influence of different ideas on organizational decision making is one major reason why some civilian organizations are more willing and able to support biodefense than their military counterparts.
Keywords: biodefense, biological weapons, military stereotypes, nonkinetic weapons, organizational decision making
Cornell Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.