Analytical results and tradeoffs are reported for an aerosol lidar system that is intended to serve as a referee during testing of standoff bio-aerosol detection systems. The lidar system is still under development by Dugway Proving Grounds -- results from the operational system are not included in this paper. The recommended configuration of the lidar system is to use a 1064 nm lidar in elastic mode to measure the concentration of the aerosol, and a 355 nm excitation to measure the fluorescence of the bio-aerosol. Both of these measurements are important in scoring the performance of the systems that will be tested at DPG. Performance tradeoffs and predictions are presented primarily for the elastic mode lidar. The elastic mode lidar is designed to make measurements out to ranges of approximately 15 km. The UV fluorescence mode of operation is intended to support discrimination of bio-aerosols from non-biological aerosols, and is only required to operate at a range of 1 km. The optical design of the proposed telescope supports dual wavelength operation, allows for effective TV camera imaging for test and alignment support, and tailors the optical overlap function for the UV and near IR lidar to optimize the performance of both subsystems.