Report: U.S. vulnerable to biological attack.

• Author: Feuss, Taylor
• Position: Global Defense

* The U.S. government is "gravely and insufficiently" prepared for a domestic biological attack, found a forthcoming report.

"We're going to see the use of biological weapons eventually. When I say eventually I don't mean decades from now," said former intelligence officer Asha George, co-director of the Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense, an advisory group under the post-9/11 Commission that convened from December 2014 to April 2015.

The panel--comprised of current and former government officials, homeland security advisers and other field experts--examined the nation's current state of biological defense in a report to be released in October. It found that the United States is particularly vulnerable to an intentional or unintentional spread of infectious diseases like Ebola, George said.

"It didn't seem that there was a lot of oversight and understanding in what was happening in terms of addressing bioterrorism and biological warfare in the U.S.," George said.

The report will be response-oriented and provide specific legislative and policy-related actions to help combat intelligence gaps, she said.

Going "beyond pointing fingers," it will address where change is needed and provide funding methods as well as pre-drafted legislation to move forward, she said.

"We want people to pick it up and go do something with it immediately," George said. The nation's current way of "reacting to everything as it comes" is inefficient, she added, calling for more preemptive...