This article considers the imbrication of war-time logics with the ideational and institutional development of public health surveillance. It suggests that, as the Cold-War–era gave way to the ‘age of globalization’, public health discourse became less concerned with ideological enemies, and more concerned with ontological enemies. The discourse of emerging infectious disease exemplifies this preoccupation and illustrates how public health surveillance, dominated by war-time logics, is both globalized and predisposed to marginalized local orders of concern. However, at the same time that militarized configurations of public health surveillance set certain tendencies in motion, local orders of concern deconstruct, contest, resist, and negotiate these tendencies. Hence, this article concludes with a call for further empirical attention by Surveillance Studies scholars to the multiplicity of local sites that enact public health surveillance.