The recently released FY 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) marks a watershed moment in the integration of biotechnology as a core element in the current and near future development of United States (U.S.) defense policy and military capability. The legislation’s 17 new biotechnology provisions, which span research, strategy, supply chains, ethics, and intelligence integration, reflect bipartisan recognition that emerging biotechnologies have now become foundational to the character and conduct of future conflict. For the Joint Force, understanding the tactical, operational, strategic and ethical ramifications of these changes is imperative.
Tactical Capability in Strategic Context: Why Biotechnology Matters — Now!
Biotechnology has considerable dual-use implications for deterrence, force protection, logistics, and direct operational capability. Advances in synthetic biology, neurocognitive sciences, bio-industrial manufacturing, biodata, and genomic engineering are creating both unprecedented opportunities and complex challenges and risks for national defense. Peer-competitors, most notably the People’s Republic of China (PRC), are investing heavily in biotechnology capabilities that could confer competitive advantage in economic, public health, and military domains. These trends have been noted by the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB), which advised Congress that the U.S. must act to harness these technologies for defense and security or risk ceding ground to strategic competitors. The FY 2026 NDAA’s biotechnology provisions reflect this urgency in seeking to establish enabling structures within the Department of War (DoW) and across the intelligence community to align capability development with strategic priorities. The legislation’s biotechnology components span multiple domains of military relevance, to include:
1. Institutionalizing biotechnology leadership and strategy, to establish a Biotechnology Management Office reporting to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and mandating a DoW Biotechnology Strategy that incorporates assessments of bioindustrial capacity, integration into wargaming, supply chain resilience, and workforce training. This centralizes strategic direction and resource allocation, enabling coherent policies and investments keyed to evolving bio-technological landscapes.
2. Expanding research, development, manufacturing, and supply chain capacity. Key here is the authorization of bioindustrial manufacturing research. Enterprise in this space can create programs to incentivize commercial biomanufacturing and establish supply chain resiliency accelerators for biotechnology products. Such measures counter the exigent vulnerabilities exposed by global disruptions (e.g., pandemic stresses) and reduce strategic dependencies on foreign production for critical biological materials.
3. Integrating biotechnology across the defense and intelligence communities to designate senior officials for biotechnology and enhance intelligence sharing about biotechnological threats and competitor advancements. These steps will direct efforts toward securing biodata from adversarial exploitation and fortify situational awareness and early warning across biological domains to enable more capable threat assessment and strategic decision cycles.
4. Ethically responsible development of biotechnology reinforces the need for iterative guideline and policy formulation to ensure that innovation proceeds in ways consistent with U.S. values and international norms, thereby reducing the risk of inadvertent harm or strategic backlash.
5. Security and supply chain protection to include a BIOSECURE framework restricting procurement from designated “biotechnology companies of concern,” particularly those with ties to peer-competitor and/or adversarial actors. This underscores awareness that adversaries might seek to exploit supply chain dependencies for strategic leverage, covert engagement, and power influence in the economic, public health, military and geo-political domains.
Operational and Strategic Implications; Recommendations for Force Readiness
I posit that the integration of biotechnology as projected by the FY 2026 NDAA has implications in five major domains relevant to the character of war; these are:
1. Force readiness and resilience. Biotechnology can directly affect physical readiness by facilitating the rapidity of improved vaccines, fortifying real-time diagnostics, tailoring medical countermeasures and enhancing biodefense measures; all of which can reduce non-combat attrition and support sustained operations in biothreat environments. As well, investments in on-shore and friend-shore biomanufacturing enterprises can warrant that U.S. and allied forces have timely access to critical — and secure — biological supplies.
Recommendation: The Joint Force should integrate biotechnology-derived medical readiness protocols into force health protection doctrines and conduct regular training and preparedness exercises to assess capabilities to address and successfully engage a range of biological burdens, risks and threats.
2. Operational advantage(s) through bio-enabled capabilities. Emerging biotechnologies are envisioned and iteratively being employed to develop new dimensions of warfighter and warfighting capability. Bio-inspired sensors and transmitters, rapidly bio-fabricated materials, synthetic biological systems that augment traditional platforms, and direct applications of biotechnological (human-machine) interfaces can be applied to support warfighter health, operational protection and enable mission effectiveness.
Recommendation: The Joint force should establish cross-functional teams within (and across) combatant commands to test and evaluate bio-enabled capabilities to determine those contexts and situations where such capabilities afford best uses and outcomes in operational practice(s).
3. Biosecurity and information superiority. Biosecurity has become integral to operational safety. The degradation or theft of biodata could enable adversaries to exploit informational and physical vulnerabilities in U.S. personnel and/or defenses to exert covert, clandestine or overt effect(s) in both non-kinetic and kinetic domains. Thus, maintaining biodata security — by design — is essential to successfully utilizing big data and advanced computational tools and methods to facilitate biotechnology integration within joint force operations.
Recommendation: Integrate biological data security into joint cyber strategies, aligning protections with DoW’s broader information security frameworks and ensuring rigorous access controls for biological datasets.
4. Strategic competition and deterrence. Peer-competitor and adversarial investments in biotechnology directly influence both current and longer-term strategic balances of global power competition. The integration of biotechnology into U.S. defense posture can enhance deterrence by complicating competitor and adversary commitments to power calculations by signaling U.S. technological leadership in particular domains and dimensions of global power.
Recommendation: Deterrence frameworks should be developed that explicitly incorporate biotechnological capabilities in both offensive and defensive domains, and which establish clear criteria, thresholds and consequences for competitors’ and adversarial escalation.
5. Ethical and legal domains. Indubitably, the use of biotechnology in military contexts warfare raises normative questions that have rarely been, but are now increasingly likely to be encountered in both kinetic and non-kinetic domains. Extant guidelines, policies and regulations of regnant signatory treaties and conventions (e.g., the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC); EU Export Regulations; etc.) do not adequately address current and near-term biotechnological capabilities. Thus, iterative developments in the field challenge existing legal and ethical frameworks, and this may afford competitors and adversaries opportunity to gain technical, tactical and strategic advantage.
Recommendation: The Joint Staff and combatant commands should establish formal advisory bodies that can provide (militarily-relevant) subject matter expertise to inform and guide ethical and legal aspects of permissible use and risk thresholds of biotechnologies in defined operational settings and scenarios.
Conclusion: A Path Forward
To prepare the Joint Force for the realities of a biotechnologically-integrated battlespace, it will be necessary to educate and train current and future personnel to engage the initiatives established by the FY 2026 NDAA. Such biotechnologic literacy must extend beyond specialists. Servicemembers and leaders at all levels will encounter biotechnological systems and threats. To meet this inevitability, I propose that biotechnology modules should be integrated within Joint Professional Military Education (JPME) curricula and professional schools, focusing on real-world operational implications, threat recognition, and ethical considerations. Constituent to such training, emerging biotechnologies should be incorporated into doctrine and wargames to address bio-enabled warfare, inclusive of simulations of biological disruption, industrial bio-surge capacities, and integrated defense scenarios.
In truth, the FY 2026 NDAA’s biotechnology provisions codify what has been evident for years: biotechnology is no longer on the periphery of national security; it is central to it. Therefore, the Joint Force should regard biotechnology as a domain of competition, innovation, and operational effect. Realizing this transition will require strategic vision, organizational adaptation, and ethical rigor. Implementing robust policies, training, and operational frameworks will ensure that U.S. forces can adroitly harness biotechnology for decisive advantage while upholding the values and norms fundamental to the exercise of U.S. military power. By doing so, the Joint Force can remain agile, resilient, potent and ready to confront the complex multi-domain and dimensional challenges of 21st century warfare.
The views and opinions expressed in this essay are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the United States government, Department of War or the National Defense University.
Dr. James Giordano is Director of the Center for Disruptive Technology and Future Warfare of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University.