Inside the Pentagon

House bill would shift ACWA to Army

CONGRESS MAY VOTE TO CONSOLIDATE OVERSIGHT OF CHEM DEMIL PROGRAMS

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Date: June 3, 2004

Congress may move to consolidate Defense Department oversight of efforts to destroy the chemical weapons stockpile by transferring responsibility for the Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives (ACWA) program to the Army.

A provision in the House version of the fiscal year 2005 defense authorization bill would set a deadline of Jan. 1, 2005, for the transfer. The House passed its defense bill May 20; by press time (June 2), the Senate had yet to vote on its version. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s mark-up of the bill, however, also expresses concern about ACWA’s oversight and management and calls for a joint Army-DOD strategic plan for future activities of the entire chemical demilitarization program.

ACWA, tasked to destroy weapons stocks at the Pueblo Chemical Depot, CO, and Blue Grass Army Depot, KY, by means other than incineration, reports to the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. Congress stipulated in the FY-99 Defense Authorization Act that ACWA be independent of the Army’s chemical demilitarization program.

Since then, however, the Army’s chem demil program has been reorganized into a new entity called the Chemical Material Agency, which is headed by ACWA’s program manager. Accordingly, although one person is responsible for chemical weapon destruction, he must report to separate DOD entities depending on the method used to dismantle and neutralize the chemical agents. Numerous General Accounting Office reports have criticized that management division. In January, GAO stated the division of responsibility has “contributed to ineffective coordination and communication [and] inefficient efforts, and obscured accountability.” DOD officials, too, have pushed for a change in management structure. “Consolidation of all chemical weapons elimination efforts into a single organization will create economies of scale and will allow us to unify the program during a time of much activity,” Dale Klein, assistant to the secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs, told the House Armed Services terrorism, unconventional threats and capabilities subcommittee April 1.

Removing the USD(AT&L) from the authority chain would ensure “elimination of duplicative management overhead and support, and ensure more efficient management of the total program,” the House Armed Services Committee stated in a report accompanying the defense authorization bill. Both the Colorado and Kentucky facilities could continue to neutralize chemical weapons with alternative methods, the bill language states.

The move does have its critics. “ACWA needs to remain somewhat independent within the Army so it can continue to function in the unique way that it does,” Craig Williams, director of the Kentucky-based Chemical Weapons Working Group, told Inside the Pentagon in late May. Part of ACWA’s success, Williams said, involves its community outreach and collaborative decision-making process. But if it is transferred to the CMA, the program could be “gobbled up into [the Army’s] way of doing business, which in our opinion has been a total failure.”

Williams wants to ensure that the program manager of ACWA would report directly to the CMA director, not to a lower level of management. His group has put together authorization language it hopes Congress will consider.

“It all depends on who’s paying attention,” he said. -- David Perera