For years the value of biodiversity has been questioned as to its efficacy and usefulness. Its value as a natural resource has been clouded due to market economics reliance on natural resources immediate productive capacity. However a post industrial convergent technology world is rapidly approaching a point where the national security value of biodiversity will outweigh any other; as genetic engineering and synthetic biology become part of a prevailing technological paradigm that will utilize the genome as the raw material for technological innovation. The lack of control of biodiversity will bring into focus the precarious nature of our current world order, due to the physical location of such biodiversity resting in the Global South where the most pronounced security threats are likely to emanate in the future when coupled with other more traditional peer competitors. In addition, exacerbating this physical location threat will be the threat posed from the emergence of a partnership between the nations that hold this resource and those that hold the technology to transform it. Unfortunately while the US has the technology to transform it, the US lacks the visibility to understand the threat, while others such as India and China likewise increasingly have the ability to transform it and understand the threat much more than the US. . This scenario has all the makings of a nascent Great Game as originally coined by Arthur Connolly, an intelligence officer of the British East India Company s Sixth Bengal Light Cavalry in describing the strategic enmity between the British Empire and Russian Empire for the conquest of Central Asia and thus its access to its natural resources in the run-up to the original Industrial Revolution which subsequently had repercussions with Middle East oil and the proxy wars between the US and former Soviet Union.
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