Defense Environment Alert
an exclusive biweekly report on defense policies for cleanup, compliance and pollution prevention


Vol. 11, No. 22--November 4, 2003


MILITARY CLAIMS SOME GAINS IN STREAMLINING CHEM DEMIL PROGRAM

The Army and Defense Department are slowly "making progress" in addressing shortcomings in their management of the chemical weapons destruction program, but further changes will likely be needed, the Army's top acquisition official told a House Armed Services subcommittee Oct. 30. The chemical demilitarization program has long been criticized for spiraling costs that are now expected to exceed $25 billion and schedule slippages that are now pushing the final destruction date past that allowed under an international treaty.

"Given where we were a year ago, and given the cultures and the disparate organizations that we were dealing with, this is not a bad first step in trying to consolidate this [program]," Army Assistant Secretary for Acquisition, Technology & Logistics Claude Bolton said with regard to recent changes undertaken by the military. " I believe in the future there will be some additional changes."

In a hearing before the House Armed Services terrorism, unconventional threats & capabilities subcommittee, Bolton and other Army and DOD officials testified to the program's many challenges, which have caused costs and the destruction schedule to greatly increase. The officials told the committee they are acting to address these.

Lawmakers asked DOD and the Army how they might reduce the cost and shorten the timeline of the program, and whether the program's current organization was really the most efficient setup. And one lawmaker, subcommittee Ranking Member Marty Meehan (D-MA), questioned the Army and DOD's commitment to the destruction program given the exorbitant growth in cost and schedule.

". . . I feel compelled to mention that politics, indecisive management, and a lack of true commitment to funding has led to the current state within which we find ourselves," Meehan said in his written opening statement. "I am frustrated that 'other DoD priorities' have repeatedly won out in the resource game. I am frustrated that the Army has transferred program management from one office to the next."

"And I am frustrated with political opportunism -- both within the Pentagon and throughout our nation's communities -- and recognize that its fallout has led to one delay after another," Meehan said.

The United States so far has destroyed 26 percent of its stockpile. But one DOD official noted that little had been destroyed in the last 18 months, triggering the United States' need to request an extension to an interim deadline under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) (see related story).

The hearing in part highlighted the General Accounting Office's (GAO) recent findings of continuing management and organizational problems plaguing the program.

GAO's Henry Hinton Jr. told the subcommittee that the Defense Department has been "very receptive" to GAO's recommendations on the issue. GAO in September warned that the program continued to face increasing costs and schedule delays and told DOD and the Army to develop an overall strategy and implementation plan and to employ a risk management approach that would anticipate potential problems, rather than continue in crisis mode (Defense Environment Alert, Sept. 9, p7). At the hearing, Hinton cautioned that unless the program is fixed, it is at risk of missing even the allowable five-year extension under the CWC, which mandates destruction of stockpiled chemical weapons by a certain date. Under a five-year extension, the United States would be required to destroy these weapons by 2012.

"Overall, we have not been able to move destruction along as quickly as originally envisioned," Michael Parker, director of the Army's Chemical Materials Agency (CMA), told the committee. But earlier this year, the Army and DOD created a new cost and schedule baseline for the program, one that Parker said he believes is achievable, provided Congress supports the president's budget request for the program. This places destruction completion at between 2008 and 2011, except for the Blue Grass, KY, site, for which schedules are under development, he said. And the Army has put in place risk mitigation measures to address probable risks related to future cost and schedule growth, he said.

At the same time, Parker noted the uncertainties tied to any timelines for the program. "Due to the technical complexity of chemical disposal operations and constantly evolving regulations and new interpretations of existing regulations that impact our program, we will always face unforeseen challenges that sometimes make a schedule extension hard to avoid." In the past, lengthy environmental permitting issues, plant safety issues, emergency preparedness concerns and funding shortfalls have caused delays and increased costs.

Early this year, the Army once again reorganized its oversight of the program, shifting top Army oversight back to the acquisition office from the environment office, and creating CMA, which merged demilitarization and storage functions.

Bolton, who heads the Army acquisition office, said he originally resisted assuming responsibility for the program when first approached more than a year and a half ago. "And I resisted until I was assured that were I to take leadership of this, that we could put some things in place. The chemical demilitarization program needs to be run as a program. It needs to have a streamlined management. It needs to have a clear focus. It needs to have goals and objectives, and it needs to measure each and every one of those. Once I had those assurances, I took the responsibility."

He later noted some dysfunction within the current organization, saying metrics to determine whether the new organization really functions will allow "me to grow to the next iteration of this organization. But right now, it requires the personalities to work very closely together. I'm aiming for an organization that works well regardless of who's sitting in the boxes."

The organizational structure needs to make sense, he said. And the plan for this structure should identify roles and accountability and how to reach the goal of safely and quickly eliminating the weapons. This will allow the department to get a handle on cost, and how to address cost areas, he said.

"I'm pleased to say that we are making progress, not as fast as I would like, but we are making progress," Bolton said. Further, he said he advocates relying on outside agencies such as GAO, the Army Audit Agency and Defense Contract Management Agency to conduct assessments of the disposal sites.

That said, he noted, "If we don't bring this all together in a comprehensive program with a strategy, with a vision, then I'll be up here next year and the year after, or my successors after I'm fired, trying to explain why we didn't make it."

While one DOD official said the department was not yet prepared to ask Congress for changes to make the program more efficient, Pat Wakefield's opening statement did ask the subcommittee to support a proposal to merge the Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives (ACWA) program under CMA. Several years ago, Congress specifically mandated ACWA be kept within the Office of the Secretary of Defense chain of command because of concerns that the Army was unwilling to explore non-incineration destruction technologies for assembled chemical weapons. But Wakefield, deputy assistant to the secretary of defense for chemical demilitarization & counterproliferation, said merging ACWA with CMA would further streamline management of the program.