The widening breadth and complexity of the biological threat landscape demand that military and civil defence embrace new ways of working together to deliver biosurveillance capabilities. The UK possesses world-class scientific institutions, proven civilian-military cooperation, and advanced AI capabilities – positioning it to lead the global shift toward predictive biological intelligence. By fusing military intelligence structures with civilian biotechnology, the UK can shift from reactive pandemic response to predictive biological security, securing lives and growing the bioeconomy (1).
Introduction
The convergence of revolutionary biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), genomic sequencing and biodetection capabilities creates an unprecedented opportunity to transform national biological security. The UK stands at a strategic inflection point where next-generation biosurveillance (NG-BSV) can shift the paradigm from reactive pandemic response to predictive biological intelligence – potentially preventing the next crisis before it begins.
The COVID-19 pandemic cost the UK more than 200,000 lives and around £321 - £421 billion (2), a devastating price for late detection and slow response. The crisis further impacted the readiness of UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) assets and forced the MOD to deploy ~34,000 personnel for over two years in response to more than 440 civilian requests (3) for support. Future pandemics could be even worse.
Rapidly accelerating technological advancements open up new pathways for deliberate misuse and increase the potential to cause harm, signalling a need for fundamental transformation in how the UK approaches biological security. The widening breadth and complexity of the biological threat landscape demand that military and civil defence embrace new ways of working together to deliver biosurveillance capabilities. The next pandemic may not be so easy to deal with.
This article proposes an innovative civilian-military (civ-mil) fusion framework, along with new governance and funding proposals, to deliver integrated early warning. The framework aims to leverage AI-driven threat detection, multi-source intelligence integration, and threat-agnostic platforms to create a unified biological intelligence architecture. By harmonising siloed ways of working, the UK can establish its place as the global leader in anticipatory biological defence.
Geopolitical Imperative
Historically, UK homeland security and UK defence have been siloed in their approaches to developing, procuring and operating their counter-biological threat capabilities. There has also been a history of misaligned procurement cycles and disparate funding commitments to achieve common goals. While departmental differences in risk appetite, concepts, tactics, techniques and procedures are understandable up to a point, this fragmented system has created fragilities in our national security.
A variety of strategic documents released by the UK Government (e.g., the National Security Strategy, Strategic Defence Review (SDR), and the Industrial Strategy) over the course of 2025 have elevated the strategic imperative to address national biosecurity. The SDR explicitly states that the central, dominant effort of defence research should be on: “chemical and biological defence. This is the essential and urgent activity.” (4) and calls for a joined-up ‘whole-of-society’ approach to delivering deterrence. This recognition aligns with global trends as biotechnology developments democratise access to powerful new tools and adversaries seek to develop advanced biological capabilities.
A Future-Facing Approach
By lifting our eyes toward the future threat landscape and embracing a fusion approach, we may better leverage the revolutionary advances in biotechnology and AI, and emulate the whole-of-society response. The next-generation biosurveillance NG-BSV framework proposed here, built on the fusion of civilian-military defence, represents a fundamental departure from current practice. NG-BSV creates a unified and integrated biological intelligence system that identifies novel biological agents before they reach critical impact thresholds, underpinned by multi-source information and AI-driven threat detection and surveillance.
Nations who achieve early-mover advantage in predictive biological intelligence will establish strategic superiority in the defining security challenge of the 21st century.
Fusion doctrine already functions in discrete pockets, e.g., the Military Aid to Civil Authorities (MACA), which has been incredibly effective when called upon, as demonstrated during COVID-19 (e.g., building Nightingale hospitals) and other major incidents. However, MACA is invoked when the military supports civil authorities during times of crisis.
Biosurveillance
Biosurveillance is the process of gathering, integrating, analysing and communicating information related to biological hazards and threats that may affect human, animal, plant and environmental health.
Next-generation biosurveillance represents a paradigm shift from conventional pathogen monitoring to comprehensive biological intelligence – integrating multi-source data streams (e.g., genomic, environmental, behavioural, and signals intelligence) with AI-driven analytics to detect biological anomalies before they manifest as health crises. Unlike traditional surveillance systems that rely on clinical presentation or known pathogen libraries, NG-BSV creates a unified civilian-military intelligence architecture capable of identifying novel biological signatures across the full spectrum of threats – from naturally emerging variants and laboratory accidents to sophisticated bioweapon threats designed to evade conventional detection.
Moving away from traditional threat lists and libraries (which cannot always be easily shared) toward threat-informed, threat-agnostic methods of biological surveillance and sample analysis will be necessary to cope with the increasing volume and variety of data.
The current state of the art for biosurveillance is heavily weighted toward metagenomic sequencing, which, in theory, can detect any prevalent pathogen with a DNA or RNA sequence. The U.S. Nucleic Acid Observatory (NAO) has been developing and testing pathogen-agnostic metagenomic surveillance technology since 2021 that can detect both known and novel pathogens from wastewater alone by identifying a common feature of all outbreaks: exponential growth of the causative agent. However, metagenomic sequencing is not a panacea for biological surveillance, and the NAO has not yet deeply integrated new AI technologies, which could dramatically improve both speed and performance.
Future Biosurveillance
A future biosurveillance system must integrate multiple-source feeds beyond metagenomic sequence data, harmonise data pipelines and analytical methods, and rapidly scan for concerning signals or trends. A recent paper(5) showed that when laboratories apply different bioinformatics databases and analytical methods to the same DNA reference sample, they yield different results. This is suboptimal for confidently detecting disease-relevant signal changes in the environment. Having different departments, agencies, and laboratories using different workflows across an increasing number of data types only amplifies this problem. This divergence in approaches and results strengthens the case for rigorous harmonisation of data frameworks, housed under a single biosurveillance fusion approach, to improve both the accuracy of results and cross-validation confidence between different analysis centres.
A precedent has been set in utilising open-source intelligence to build a picture of trending diseases and their patterns of spread in near-real time (UK Biothreats RADAR) (6). Next-generation biosurveillance aims to move beyond this, providing earlier alerts across the civ-mil spectrum to enhance situational awareness and decision support.
So NG-BSV must integrate multiple types of data feeds, from a much wider range of analytical techniques (e.g., ‘omics, mass spectrometry, nuclear magnetic resonance technologies) and integrate their analysis with advanced AI tools using harmonised workflows to produce validated results that provide intelligent warning and reporting. By doing so, NG-BSV systems may also enable automated sifting of biological samples to flag, investigate, and escalate concerning trends or suspicious signals for more targeted, expert human review, before widespread harm occurs.
Examples of specific AI tools to consider for adoption include AlphaFold 3 and RosettaFold 3 for protein structure prediction and functional annotation, as well as the development of custom algorithms for predicting sequence function and genomic threat assessments. Using these tools may enable rapid hazard evaluation (and medical countermeasure development), thereby transforming response times to emerging biosecurity threats.
Such a system, supported by various intelligence feeds, could reduce the burden on human resources and shorten the time to detect and identify newly circulating pathogens by days to weeks earlier, compared with conventional biosurveillance methods. Sequencing costs have fallen by more than 100-fold (7) over the past decade, whilst AI capabilities for analysing genetic sequences have improved dramatically in the last two years. Coupled with advances in orthogonal biological detection and identification technologies (e.g., mass spectrometry), this trajectory makes the proposed Civ-Mil fusion approach for NG-BSV a compelling prospect.
The Civilian-Military Fusion Approach
Diseases spread beyond borders and do not remain in discrete boundaries, confined to either civilian or military domains. It is critical to adopt a biosurveillance approach that matches up against this threat, even if no imminent crisis is obvious. Embracing a joint civilian-military concept for BSV demolishes existing silos between government departments, eliminates waste in duplicative research efforts or multiple efforts that pull S&T organisations and industry in different directions, and better leverages available funds to deliver strategic effect at pace.
Generating joint capability requirements ensures that integration and interoperability between civilian and military biosurveillance systems are built in by design; they harmonise the ask across science and technology organisations, industry, and academia, creating a single, clear demand signal to which they can work and deliver solutions.
Whilst not all biosurveillance data needs to be shared between civilian and military entities, the capability remains in place should the need arise (e.g., the emergence of a new epidemic that could quickly escalate into a pandemic).
Critical Infrastructure Foundation
Implementation begins with surveillance at dual-use, civ-mil critical national infrastructure nodes, e.g., aerial ports of debarkation (APODs), sea ports of debarkation (SPODs), nuclear facilities, hospitals and strategic headquarters. Fixed site surveillance can also be complemented by mobile sampling and monitoring. This layered approach would create a valuable national early warning network whilst demonstrating capabilities that can scale globally. It would also inform defence planning activities despite any threat, presence or use of biological agents.
Governance Revolution
To further operationalise this concept, existing governance structures will need to be tailored. The 2023 Biological Security Strategy (8) (BSS) established a new governance structure to provide authoritative oversight of cross-cutting biosecurity challenges. This brought together the Government's Chief Scientific Advisor (GCSA), the Cabinet Office (as a central coordinating function), and departmental CSAs to work on these complex challenges.
Modifying this governance structure to include either the National Security Council (Resilience) or a new Director General of National Biosecurity within the Cabinet Office, holding ultimate oversight and, importantly, financial authority for joint capability – potentially through a Shared Outcomes Fund (9) type model – would simultaneously direct and empower departments to generate joint capability requirements and concepts of use.
Joint procurement has the added advantage of expanding the total addressable market for industry partners, sending a stronger signal to the private sector that biodefence is a national imperative that must be served.
Leveraging Funding
Lessons from COVID-19 and initiatives like the CHIPS Act demonstrate that markets respond to clear government signals. National Biodefence and biosurveillance must be treated with the same urgency and importance, and properly positioned as a critical sector for growth, supported by financial incentives and faster government procurement. The National Security Strategy, Strategic Defence Review, National Risk Register, and Biological Security Strategy all place biosecurity high up on the priority list. Now is the time to take action in accordance with these strategic imperatives.
There are clear economic benefits to be realised in improving health protection measures, with the UK’s Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology (10) acknowledging that every pound spent on public research and development generates £8 in benefits for the country, over the long term.
The Government has allocated significant monies to several initiatives which could be leveraged for national biosecurity purposes. The UK’s Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) will have £400 million ring-fenced for innovation activities next year. The National Wealth Fund stands at £27.8 billion (11) and UK Research and Innovation has a technology missions fund of £320M, “designed to accelerate technology development, adoption and diffusion”. Engineering biology is one of the five eligible technologies for this funding. At the UK Innovation for Growth Summit in November 2025 (12) it was announced that £8 billion will be allocated for R&D targeted towards the UK's national priorities, including defence and health. A further £7 billion was announced for business scale-up, and a doubling of R&D investment in critical technologies such as engineering biology and AI to £4 billion over the next four years. This funding could be smartly targeted to support biodefence and biosecurity as a national strategic priority. To do so, we must make a clear investment case, directly linking biosurveillance to tangible outcomes and strategic benefits, better enabling policymakers to make informed choices.
An audit of government-funded initiatives spearheaded by a Biodefence Director General could advise the government on funding course corrections or new allocations to accelerate and scale up national biosurveillance capabilities. Doing so would directly help address the biological threat component mentioned in the strategic frameworks.
Speed of Innovation
Government procurement should be transformed through a UK Bio-Defence Challenge, modelled on successful U.S. Chemical-Biological Operational Analysis (13) (CBOA) programs. This approach provides industry direct access to government users for real-world testing of their prototypes, accelerates prototype development cycles (from months to days) while ensuring solutions are developed to meet clear operational requirements.
Key principles of a UK CBOA would include:
- Clear government demand signals for industry investment
- Rapid prototype-to-procurement pathways
- Joint civilian-military requirements expanding addressable markets
- Performance-based contracting, rewarding outcome delivery
The UK should create a Civ-Mil CBOA defence model and use it as a feeder system for scaled-up production of capabilities, which the Government can then procure.
Business Scale-up
A critical barrier to the growth of the UK life sciences sector and bioeconomy is the lack of investment for business scale-up. As outlined previously, billions of pounds in Government investment already exist in funding allocation for the life sciences and defence industrial strategies, and national security. Moreover, the Government has recently announced a £7 billion investment (14) specifically for related business scale-up. These resources must be better leveraged in support of national biosecurity initiatives.
By utilising the proposed governance system in this article and coordinating across Whitehall (e.g., the MOD, the Home Office, Department for Business and Trade, Department for Science Innovation and Technology), investment into national biosecurity efforts in the order of £150m+ for business scale-up, would move the Government beyond strategy and into meaningful implementation.
Summary
The convergence of technological capability, strategic necessity, and economic opportunity creates a unique moment for transformational change. The UK possesses world-class scientific institutions, proven civilian-military cooperation, and advanced AI capabilities – positioning it to lead the global shift toward predictive biological intelligence. The question is not whether biological threats will continue evolving – they will. The question is whether the UK will seize this strategic inflection point to establish global leadership in the technologies that will define 21st-century security. The cost of delay is measured in lives and economic devastation. The benefit of decisive action extends far beyond prevention – creating new technology sectors, strengthening international partnerships, and ensuring the UK remains at the forefront of biological security innovation. The time for incremental improvement has passed. The time for transformation is now.
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