Guardian Program Faces Challenges
Written by KENYA MCCULLUM
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AFTER MASSIVE CUTS IN FUNDING, FIRST RESPONDERS ON MILITARY BASES RECEIVE SCALED DOWN IPP EQUIPMENT.
The Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical and Biological Defense (JPEOCBD)— which handles the Army’s acquisition efforts in the areas of biological, nuclear and radiological detection, as well as vaccine and medical diagnostic—is currently in the process of making improvements on military bases that will allow first responders to do their jobs in a more efficient and timely manner. However, in the face of over $500 million dollars in budget cuts, the department has found the need to scale back the resources bases receive.
One program that has been hit by shrinking funds is the Installation Protection Program (IPP), also known as the Guardian Program, which is an effort to provide all first responders on military bases with the equipment they need to handle chemical, biological and radiological hazards. Some of the equipment the Guardian program supplies to bases includes chemical sensors, external monitored sensors, medical surveillance equipment, strategic pharmaceuticals and decontamination equipment.
“Medical first responders on military bases need special equipment to be able to hope to operate in an all hazards environment, so what we’re bringing to them is the special equipment—the ensembles, the different suits, and some hand-held detectors that allow them to get into the hot zone and start emergency medical treatment or the evacuation of casualties back to a medical treatment facility,” said Colonel Camille
Nichols, who is the project manager for IPP and two other programs in the Guardian Project Office—the unit that handles the Guardian Program, as well as several others. Nichols said that JPEO-CBD’s goal was to supply 200 military bases around the world with IPP technologies, which costs about $10- 15 million per base to implement, depending on its size and the amount of critical missions taking place on it. Unfortunately, the JPEOCBD lost about $530 million of its funding before all of the bases could be supplied with IPP equipment. As a result, the unit is currently conducting a study to determine what equipment will be supplied to bases, and which bases will receive those tools.
However, Nichols said that these decisions will not be made for several months. In the meantime, however, first responders on military bases still need equipment in order to perform their duties. As a result, the Guardian Project Office has created IPP Lite, a scaled down version of IPP that supplies military bases with some of the equipment they need for about $1.5 million per base.
Nichols said that as JPEO-CBD waits for the results of its evaluation of what each base needs, it plans to supply 100 military bases with IPP Lite equipment—which includes first responder equipment such as the Big Voice System (a mass notification system also known as Giant Voice) and a reverse 911 system.
“We’re doing a subset of the equipment that was in the overall installation protection program,” said Nichols. “We know that first-responder equipment is necessary at these military sites and so that’s what the Lite program is all about—focusing on the first responder capability mass warning systems. Every base needs this all-hazard response capability. What we’re doing with the first responder equipment in Lite is that piece.”
Nichols added that the Guardian project office would like to upgrade much of its equipment in order to help first responders work more efficiently so that they can make better informed decisions more quickly. One such technological advancement that the unit hopes to implement is the use of wireless technology on each base, which is a costeffective alternative to the fiber optic equipment currently being used.
“You only can do so much level of detection right now because of the technologies available,” she said. “Encrypted, standard wireless technology would allow us to not have to bury cables all over a base because all this is done by fiber optics. Clearly having to dig up and lay cable on a base is expensive and time consuming, so from that end it costs us more of our money to do that. If we could have encrypted radio relays instead of this hard-wired stuff, we’d be able to do more bases potentially because our costs of execution and implementation on a base would go down.”
Nichols noted that at this time, the Guardian project office does not have the funding to upgrade these technologies, so it is seeking private industry to make investments that will help the unit meet its technological goals. She said that she is confident that the unit will receive the funding from companies it needs to implement these changes.
“We’ve monitored where they’re investing right now and they’re investing in the same areas we feel there are challenges,” said Nichols. “For instance industry is creating radio frequency encrypted devices that allow us to sensor data back much more rapidly in a secure way without having to hard wire. We’ve already proven that we can do it, we just have to make sure it’s affordable.”
Despite the loss of a significant amount of funding, Nichols said the Guardian Project Office is dedicated to ensuring that first responders on military bases get the equipment they need.
“We are trying to ensure that the medical personnel on a base are able to respond to any hazard and be best prepared to handle chemical, biological, radiological contaminated casualty personnel and get them into the medical treatment facility as quickly as possible. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it is an area that isn’t worked on very much,” said Nichols. ♦