Defense Environment Alert
September 23, 2003

PENTAGON IG SAYS DOD SHOULD ADDRESS BURIED CHEMICAL MATERIEL

The Defense Department's inspector general (IG) is calling on the department's acquisition head to require the military services to tackle the disposal of buried chemical warfare materiel located at active and BRAC installations. In a Sept. 4 report, the IG found information related to this materiel was lacking, making it impossible for the program's manager to reliably estimate the cost and schedule to dispose of it.

The IG also probed management of the Army's chemical weapons stockpile program, finding several key factors, such as delays in environmental permitting, that have hindered the military's ability to control costs.

The IG detailed his findings in The Chemical Demilitarization Program: Increased Costsfor Stockpile and NonStockpile Chemical Materiel Disposal Programs, the third and final in a series of reports examining the management of the chemical demilitarization program. This final report looked at DOD's plans for destroying U.S. non-stockpile chemical weapons, and the Army's ability to control cost growth in the stockpile disposal program. The report is available on InsideEPA.com. See page 2 for details.

While the non-stockpile chemical materiel product manager cannot yet produce a reliable estimate of the disposal cost for buried chemical warfare materiel, the report says the manager did develop a rough estimate in 1996, which in current year dollars amounts to $11.7 billion.

During the IG's review, DOD's installations and environment office agreed the department should provide toplevel direction that orders the DOD components to prioritize a schedule for assessing and excavating sites with potential buried materiel, the report says.

"A destruction schedule that prioritizes the remediation of chemical warfare materiel burial sites needs to be established so that the DoD Components will plan and estimate costs for excavation, removal, destruction, and treatment procedures for each burial site," the IG says.

Specifically, the IG recommends that the DOD under secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics (AT&L) "issue direction to the environmental offices of the DoD Components to identify, schedule, and fund the disposal of buried chemical warfare materiel from active installations and base realignment and closure installations previously identified."

The IG cites a 1996 report that identified 224 installations where chemical warfare materiel may be buried, and of those, a preliminary analysis found that 168 may require remediation. While the Army Corps of Engineers has begun addressing those dubbed formerly used defense sites, the DOD acquisition office has not asked the components to conduct similar assessments at active or BRAC bases, the IG report says.

The DOD acquisition office commented on other aspects of the report, but it did not respond to this recommendation, the IG notes, renewing its request. The IG would like an answer by Oct. 6.

Also, the IG asks the non-stockpile product manager to update the plan and cost estimate for the disposal of buried weapons, once the first recommendation is implemented. The Army's Chemical Materials Agency (CMA) concurred with this recommendation, although the DOD acquisition office refuted it by saying the product manager currently does not have that level of responsibility.

Costs likely to spiral, IG predicts

The IG also concluded that the cost of the chemical demilitarization program, now at $25.1 billion, will likely continue to grow. "This program cost growth may also lead to additional program baseline cost breaches that will require the Under Secretary of Defense (AT&L) to recertify the program's cost and schedule to the Congress," the report states.

Similar to a recent report from the General Accounting Office (GAO), the IG found several key factors have hindered the ability of CMA to control the costs of the chemical weapons stockpile disposal program. Specifically, CMA "has been affected by costly delays in reaching public consensus with obtaining State permit modifications needed for beginning disposal operations, the decisions on the type of technology to be employed at two Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment facilities, the escalation of costs and safety incidents at operational chemical disposal facilities, and rising cost estimates for closure of disposal facilities."

For example, the Army was forced to delay operations at the Anniston, AL, chemical weapons incineration facility due to a dispute between the military and state and local officials over emergency preparedness requirements necessary for the startup of the facility. CMA estimates operation and disposal costs at Anniston are about $287,000 a day, regardless of whether the facility is actually operating, the IG says.

The report goes on to say that many of the issues affecting cost and schedule are due to the demilitarization program's complex structure and coordination requirements that impact program management. Outside influences on the program office come from state and local governments, which can affect the timing of environmental permit decisions, and special interest groups, who have, for instance, filed litigation to challenge permitting decisions. And as noted by GAO reports, "the complex program structure had hindered program management," the IG says. But the Army believes a recent realignment of functions and responsibilities will improve oversight of the acquisition process and contractors' management of the disposal facilities, the report says.

Unlike the recent GAO report, though, the IG does not make any recommendations to address cost growth problems. GAO had called on DOD to develop an overall strategy with long-term goals and objectives, near-term performance measures, and delineated responsibilities for all DOD and Army offices (Defense Environment Alert, Sept. 9, p7).