Defense Environment Alert
June 17, 2003

OFFICIAL SAYS CHEMICAL PROGRAM WILL FOCUS ON DISPOSAL OPERATIONS

Michael Parker, the head of the Army's recently combined chemical weapons storage and demilitarization programs, said earlier this month that as more disposal facilities come on line the chemical weapons program is transitioning away from its previous acquisition focus and into an operations concentration.

"Operations need to be the driving force," Parker said June 5 at a breakfast meeting sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association. But he explained he has no plans to seek program efficiencies merely for the sake of efficiency, despite the chemical demilitarization program's long history of cost and schedule overruns. If the disposal sites are operating property, then "efficiencies will occur on the backside," he said. In the next few years, the Army plans to operate chemical agent disposal facilities at all eight stockpile sites in the continental United States; a ninth site located on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean has completed destruction operations and is going through the closure process.

Earlier this year, then-Army Secretary Thomas White removed the Army environment chief's oversight authority for the chemical demilitarization program and gave it back to the acquisition assistant secretary, consolidating demilitarization functions with chemical weapons storage management under a single director (Defense Environment Alert, Jan. 28, p4). The Army named Parker as the director of the new consolidated program, the provisional Chemical Materials Agency (CMA), Feb. 19 (Defense Environment Alert, Feb. 25, p5). Parker said his agency is expected to drop the provisional classification at the beginning of the new fiscal year, after receiving official congressional authorization.

The decision to combine the traditionally separate functions of chemical weapons storage and disposal "came out of a confluence of events," Parker said, including the Army transformation effort, Sept. I I and a desire for a more holistic approach to chemical weapons. CMA's structure recognizes the program is moving away from the acquisition of weapons destruction technology and into the operations phase of demilitarization, he said.

The agency's immediate focus is on merging the responsibilities of the disposal program, which had been headed by the program manager for chemical demilitarization, with the chemical weapons storage program, which was part of the Army's Soldier, Biological and Chemical Command (SBCCOM). Parker, who also continues to serve as SBCCOM deputy director, is helping to oversee the dispersal of SBCCOM's tasks to CMA and other Army organizations. And he continues to be the program manager for the Defense Department's non-incineration technology demilitarization program. That effort has moved beyond the research and development phase and is now known as the Assembled Chemical Weapons Applications (ACWA) program, he said.

One of CMA's challenges in the coming months will be to figure out how headquarters personnel can best support the individual sites, he said. If headquarters personnel have specific skills that may be of value to a particular site, CMA may transfer those personnel, on a voluntary basis, to work at an individual site, he said.

With CMA oversight, the transition for installation or chemical activity commanders from weapons storage to weapons destruction should be transparent and seamless, he said.

Parker said he sees CMA's structure remaining basically the same until "very deep" into the chemical demilitarization effort. Once the majority of disposal sites are approaching the facility dismantling and remediation phase, then the Army will probably restructure the agency, he said. At that point, responsibility for at least some of the facilities will transfer to the Army's Installation Management Agency, but Parker said it is still unclear how that will work exactly because the cleanup standards will differ among the sites. For example, the disposal facilities in Pueblo, CO, and Umatilla, OR, which are adjacent to facilities that are already undergoing base closure, will face different cleanup standards than the Blue Grass, KY, site where Army activities will continue, he said.

Within the next year, six of the eight disposal facilities are expected to be on line, he said. The Tooele, UT, incinerator has been operating for several years now, and the Aberdeen, MD, neutralization facility has been processing bulk mustard agent for several months. The Newport, IN, bulk VX neutralization facility is expected to start operations later this year, with the Umatilla incinerator anticipated to begin processing weapons later this year or early next year. And the Pine Bluff, AR, incinerator is on schedule to begin full operations next spring, he said. The Army is aiming to start operations at the Anniston, AL, incinerator in the next few months, although some hurdles remain, and Parker declined to estimate when operations would begin there (see related story).

Parker also discussed the status of the non-stockpile weapons and ACWA programs. The non-stockpile program stands alone, more or less, he said. It had been focused on disposing of items that the United States had declared as part of an international chemical weapons disposal treaty, and on former chemical weapons production sites, he said. But the Army realized that the numerous chemical weapons burial sites, some of which still are in unknown locations, are a significant legacy, he said. The Army is working to put "some serious money" into its future budgets to go look for these buried weapons rather than wait to find them, he said.

Congress originally created the ACWA program, then focused on research and development, as part of the DOD structure because of concerns that the Army was unwilling to explore non-incineration destruction technologies for assembled chemical weapons. Two sites -- Pueblo and Blue Grass -- will have their stockpiles destroyed under this program. Parker said that even with CMA's creation, the wall between DOD and the Army for oversight remains.

He said there is some congressional interest in moving oversight of Pueblo and Blue Grass over to the Army now, and while the Army would support this move, it is not asking Congress to do this.