Assessing the DoD's Chemical and Biological Defense Program
We need to get this back on track
In January 1991, I was an Army captain stationed at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. Because I was a chemical officer and (conceivably) could be of use during the Persian Gulf conflict that was about to erupt, I received two anthrax vaccine shots in preparation for deployment. My colleagues in the Army Chemical Corps were excited from the standpoint that we were sure that Saddam Hussein was going to use chemical weapons, and by golly, those combat arms units would appreciate us now. The conflict was over before I received any orders, and we all went back to doing secondary tasks other than chemical and biological defense training.
When the after-action reports came out, the armed services’ CB defense readiness scored pretty low. We had suits and masks built for a cold and forested European battlefield, chemical detectors that false-alarmed, and not enough decon or collective protection systems to sustain operations in a contaminated environment. We used German NBC recon vehicles and Canadian chemical agent monitors because we didn’t have any. Barely had enough anthrax vaccine for the troops on the front lines. This GAO report hits the Army hard, but to be clear, the other services were worse off. The Air Force and Marines borrowed gear from the Army, and the Navy just ignored the problem.1 After the war, the services were content to go back to their usual operating practices, but Congress decided they needed some help, taking their funds for chemical and biological defense and moving them to an OSD budget line for central management starting in 1996. This became one of the earliest joint acquisition programs within the Department of Defense.
The management of this program has evolved over the past 30 years, which I won’t get into here. I’ve written a book on the topic for people interested in this area. Today, the Joint Staff oversees the development of the services’ joint requirements, the Joint Program Executive Office for CBRN Defense is the acquisition arm, and the DTRA CB Technologies Department manages the science and technology efforts. OSD acquisition (Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Programs) has oversight and integrates the CBD budget plan into the DoD POM. The services must use this program to procure all of their chemical and biological defense needs. There’s a DoD Directive that spells this all out.
(Slightly dated graphic, but the usual suspects are present)
I worked in this world for several years and was involved in this program’s machinations and reform efforts. Ideally, the four services, the National Guard, and U.S. Special Operations Command would get together to develop validated requirements for new equipment and haggle over numbers for what they wanted to procure for warfighting needs. The JPEO would tell them what was in the art of the possible as far as cost and schedule, and the DTRA CB office would investigate new technologies that might prove out in a decade or two. Because the Army has the largest interest and infrastructure in this area, they (in theory) lead the discussions on chem-bio defense modernization. All OSD had to do was make sure that everyone was playing nicely and that the financial details were accountable and legal.
Things have changed radically over the past four years, and the rhetoric about COVID as a “biological threat” was a big factor in that change. The ASD office has increasingly used the claim of “other national security priorities” and “global health security” to move funds from service-validated programs to pet projects that they feel are justified as addressing “chemical and biological threats.” You can see this outlined in the OSD comptroller budget materials. They’re not hiding it at all.
Thirty years after its creation, the Chemical and Biological Defense Program (CBDP) is at an inflection point. Chemical and biological (CB) threats are metastasizing due to geopolitical and technological changes with profound impacts on how the CBDP must achieve its mission.
Senior Administration and Department leaders have now recognized the risks of novel CB threats, resulting in a new collection of strategic guidance and increased prioritization. It is the responsibility of the CBDP to translate this strategic direction into concrete action that ensures the Joint Force is equipped to fight and win in CB-contested environments.
To do so, the CBDP has launched an ambitious pivot that is transforming everything from how we are organized to the capabilities we pursue. The Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment has approved a new CBDP governance framework, which strengthens alignment to White House and Departmental strategic objectives, ensures warfighter needs are incorporated, and more tightly integrates the CBDP Enterprise. This new framework enables us to pursue a portfolio-based approach to identify and close capability gaps more quickly. The overriding priority is to shrink the time from concept origination to capability delivery. Although much work remains, business operation reforms are already having noticeable impacts, including improving first-year Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDT&E) execution rates.
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The CBDP also receives strategic guidance from the 2022 National Biodefense Strategy and Implementation Plan on Countering Biological Threats, Enhancing Pandemic Preparedness, and Achieving Global Health Security. This serves as the interagency playbook on biodefense, with the Department of Defense (DoD) as the co-lead for deterring biological weapons. The CBDP also supports DoD’s contributions to the NBS in many other areas, including early warning and rapidly developing medical countermeasures (MCMs).
It’s a Masterclass in bureaucratic doubletalk. The program does deliver new CB detectors and recon vehicles, protective suits and masks, and information systems, albeit slowly, like a half-opened water valve. Some decon and colpro systems get produced, but not enough. The record on delivering medical countermeasures to chemical and biological warfare agents has been mixed at best, in part because it takes decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to move them. But the program is increasingly not addressing military requirements for protection against CB weapons.
OSD acquisition leaders have increasingly taken over the direct execution of the CB Defense Program with an agenda to move funds from protecting warfighters from CB weapons to supporting the federal response to global security health challenges. I’m deeply disappointed with my Army brethren in the Army G8 staff and the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology who are supposed to lead the development and execution of this program, but instead are often complicit in following OSD’s direction to not fund warfighter needs.2 The Air Force action officers are either co-opted or are cowed into submission, and the Navy and Marine Corps don’t care as long as they can get something out of this budget.3
This makes it more important to explain what this CB defense program is doing to both the CBRN technical specialists and the national security community. Over the next month, I will put out some deeper analyses of what the CB defense program is doing based on the OSD comptroller budget materials and other sources for paid subscribers only. This is going to involve a lot of charts. We can look at the different colors of money in the program (science and technology, advanced development, procurement, and management) to identify general trends. General caveat, my numbers may not match official DoD numbers as well as those that Congress gets.4
Ideally, the services would like to see more money in procurement (fielding equipment to military units) and less in science and technology. This should not be a surprise, but this balance is rarely achieved. You can see some significant S&T/R&D bumps in the 2023-2025 because of the “enhanced funding” that former ASD(NCB) Roseblum obtained for biodefense and natural disease research. This includes a lot of medical biological research and infrastructure development, to include tens of millions of dollars for wastewater surveillance, fentanyl exposure post-treatments, 1.4 million N95 masks, and DoD biosafety practices. These are all public health issues appropriately addressed and funded by other military agencies.5
Moving down a level, we can also look at the spread of money across what the JRO and services call “commodity areas” - specific technology focuses such as chemical detectors and protective suits. This shows you what areas they think are important. You can see that about a third of the total funds are in the S&T area, with medical S&T funded at twice the level as non-medical S&T. R&D funding for medical biological countermeasures is almost equal to the combined funding for chemical and biological detection, information systems, and decontamination areas. A healthy chunk for individual protection because everyone loves getting suits and masks (just not wearing them). No real love exists for collective protection systems.6
The DoD CBDP leadership recently (within the past four years) reformatted the entire framework away from general commodity areas to broader concepts of “understand, protect, and mitigate,” which are the new terms for CB defense tactical concepts. It used to be “avoid, protect, decon” back in the day.7 My two cents only, this was a deliberate attempt to blur the medical/non-medical funding as well as mask the funds going to non-warfighting requirements. It took me a LONG time to unravel these budget documents to understand where the money was going. But we can again drill down to show how these commodity areas align under those concepts. They also use a new term “enabling research and development” for funding that isn’t obligated to any single technology area. I added this to emphasize the scale of “enable” costs.8 The Dugway cost shown below is actually only two of the five years, longer story there.9
Medical biological vaccine R&D leads in expended funds. It’s more expensive if you push this ridiculous idea of researching “broad-spectrum” therapeutics. You may note that there are no procurement funds in bio vaccines, the services are supposed to buy those instead. The DoD CBDP is not supposed to fund the procurement of consumable items in the program except for two caveats - first, they will cover the first two years of a consumable item for initial fielding (so that the services can build in sustainment costs to their budgets), and second, they are covering the total costs of procuring protective suits. This second item has some history to it. When the services initially bought the JSLIST suits to replace all of the aging Battledress Overgarments, no service wanted to shell out the significant costs of outfitting the entire force, even if they were “consumable items” that should have been funded out of their operating budgets. So they made an exception and had the program buy all the protective suits every year, until each services’ requirements were met, so this expense would not compete with respective service funds. The problem is, the next generation suit (UIPE) is going to cost a lot more and that will affect their ability to procure other desired hardware in a reasonable time.
I hope to demonstrate in more detail what the CB Defense Program is providing and not providing (again for paid subscribers only, because this is hard work). If you want a preview of my analytical style, see this paper that I wrote a few years ago about the allegation that the CBDP didn’t spend enough money on biodefense. I have tried to convince my colleagues working in the trenches that this drastic change of direction in the program is not a good thing to meet service equities. Without any general/flag officers or senior civilian executives willing to champion the cause, no mid-level analyst wants to argue with OSD civilians. The DoD’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office should be reviewing this program. Congress should be asking tougher questions as to why this program is diverting away from its stated mission in 50 US Code 1522. We ought to insist that this program address the real threat of actual CB weapons, understanding that other government agencies are covering the threat of illegally trafficked opioids and natural biological outbreaks.
The Navy ship forces have a concept that largely centers on being in a big body of water away from the shore and being able to turn into the wind to avoid contamination. The Marines weren’t too crazy about this so they insisted on some level of collective protection on the amphibs. Crazy stuff.
The Army was appointed as the DoD Executive Agent for Chemical and Biological Defense way back in 1976 when it was first revealed that the Soviet Union had supplied Egypt with chem-bio defense equipment and our troops were not as well prepared. Every now and then, but very rarely, the Army leadership will push back on the OSD agenda and submit its own POM budget, which it is authorized to do. But mostly its leaders don’t speak up, maybe because they’re getting lots of CBRN reconnaissance vehicles out of the deal.
The Navy has been particularly effective at demanding service-unique chemical and biological defense gear within this jointly-funded program. They remain masters of defense acquisition and departmental politics. The Marines excel at convincing the other services that they are just happy to be there at the budge table, while quietly ensuring that they get their gear up front due to their smaller requirements. I say that with all due respect and admiration.
The budget numbers change every year, programs start and merge and get cancelled with alarming frequency, I may miss a few details. I have to hand-jam the numbers on an Excel sheet and don’t have access to the CBDP’s archives.
The Army, Air Force, and Navy all have public health agencies who work (among other issues) surveillance of and response to natural disease outbreaks. They aren’t part of the DoD CB Defense Program. These funds duplicate their mission, but I haven’t heard the services’ surgeons general complain yet about the added funds to their programs. Yes, medical biological research is expensive, thus the importance of focusing on real problems and not the general pandemic preparedness landscape that HHS already handles.
The DoD’s failure to integrate collective protection equipment into its vehicles, vans, and shelters, ships, and aircraft is a long shortcoming that reflects a lack of imagination and the stubborn resistance of the other project managers (owning those platforms) to not allow chem-bio defense gear to slow down or increase the costs of their projects, despite the well-documented need for troops to sustain combat operations in a contaminated environment.
Long and well-known tradition that if a military officer tweaks the names of a concept but doesn’t fundamentally change the concept, you get a bump up on your annual evaluation. We went from “avoid, protect, decon” to “sense, shape, shield, sustain” to “understand, protect, mitigate” but it all means the same thing and they all use the same basic approaches. We’ve had the same CB defense equipment and concept for 70 years.
I didn’t include the tech base (S&T) funds here because no one cares about the S&T funds. They’re there to be spent without any guarantee of successful developments of technology. It is an inducement to academia, industry, and the Army lab at Edgewood to explore science that may be beneficial to the program and to better understand the behavior of chemical and biological agents that might be employed against U.S. troops. I can’t think of anything that transitioned from tech base to advanced development to a fielded product (not saying that it hasn’t happened, but I can’t think of anything). That said, OSD acquisition has done some significant manipulation of the program to advance their agenda, to blur any evidence of misdirection, and to not connect the science and technology to service capability gaps.
Dugway Proving Ground is (was?) a Major Range Test and Facility Base, which means it’s a particularly unique asset that requires funding from DoD sources in addition to Army funding for its infrastructure. For some reason, the funding for FY23-25 has been removed and the Army has to fund 100% of it now. Don’t know the details.