Historically, naturally occurring endemic diseases have significantly affected military personnel and impacted operations.18,19  Specifically, diarrhea and respiratory infections have resulted in the most morbidity and lost days of work during deployments.20,21  The totality of the potential biothreat environment is summarized in Figure 2. Medical intelligence can provide situational awareness of biothreats for the operational environment. Given the unique problem set and due to space constraints, this documents’ focus will primarily be on biowarfare agents directed at humans as a base, but including endemic and emerging diseases. Biowarfare agent characteristics will be summarized to aid understanding in later sections. For more detailed information, see the references for this section.