CBRN Defense

Written by Kenya McCullum

Q: How is the Joint Requirements Office for CBRN Defense meeting the multi-faceted objectives for force protection?

A: This has been a topic that over the last six to eight years has gotten increasing attention, not just in the Department of Defense but throughout the government. Shortly after September 11th, a national strategy to combat weapons of mass destruction was approved by the president, which really established the initial importance this problem set for the government. Subsequent to that, there’s been a variety of national and Department of Defense level strategic guidance on the direction that we’ve been charged to go in, trying to defend ourselves against weapons of mass destruction.

Most recently, there’s a June 2008 National Defense Strategy document that reinforces the importance and challenges of weapons of mass destruction, the concerns about preventing the spread of the weapons and their use, the need to anticipate and counter these threats, and the notion that should all of those other things fail and an adversary used one of these weapons against us—either in the homeland or overseas— there’s a need to have the capability to survive and sustain following an attack and then mitigate the consequences.

Within the area of chem/bio/radiological/nuclear defense, the Joint Staff established an operational concept that’s based on four operational elements, which we call “the four “S’s”—sense, shape, shield and sustain. These four complementary operational elements serve as the intellectual foundation for how we approach building and fielding capabilities to the Department of Defense.

Q: How does sense play a role in your agency’s mission?

A: Sense is, simply put, our ability to detect and identify CBRN hazards in all of their varieties of forms throughout the operational environment. There’s chemical detection, biological detection, radiological detection, and in each of those categories we have at least two variations on the detection capability. One is a point detection, when the hazard is where the detector is and so you’re operating at that point. We’ve also established the idea of standoff detection, when the detector and the hazard are a far distance from each other to give the user of that detector or that capability some warning time about a hazard that’s at some distance.

Q: What role does shape play?

A: Shape is much more about the integration of information to help decision-makers make better decisions, so it tends to be a bit more like information technology software. A detector that gives us an indication at one point can then send that information across a network to a decision-maker, and we’re interested in how we take all of those pieces of information and accelerate the synthesis and analysis of that information to make decisions more accurate and timely when it comes to a CBRN hazard.

So what that gets you then within the shape domain are things like integrated early warning, battle management systems that help you analyze a problem, and other kinds of software and modeling systems that give you the ability to do “what if” drills, anticipate future problems, and do deliberate crisis action planning.

There’s also a medical component to this as well. We want to be able to not just take the result of a detection with a point detector, but also be able to integrate that with information that’s provided through a medical information system where doctors are putting in diagnostic kinds of information about patients they’ve seen, and use that whole collection to better form the judgments and decisions of commanders and decision-makers for whatever environment they happen to be working in.

Q: How do the last two S’s—shield and sustain—fit into this picture?

A: Shield is any kind of capability that prevents the CBRN hazard from having a debilitating effect on our military forces, our civilian personnel and our equipment. When we talk about shield, we’re talking about protective masks and suits, and vaccines that would prevent the effects of exposure from causing a death or an injury.

And last there is sustain, which has two components. One is a medical component and the other is a non-medical, or physical, component. It’s about recovering and restoring combat power and functions following the introduction of CBRN hazards. The medical aspect of it includes the medical countermeasures that get used following exposure, so if someone gets exposed to nerve agent, they have medical countermeasures to treat those symptoms. And the physical piece of it is typically associated with decontamination—what we do to clean up people, equipment, terrain, vehicles and buildings that have some contamination residue from CBRN attacks.

Q: What are some of the advances in the area of standoff detection?

A: We continue to pursue a variety of capabilities in that area. Probably the one that’s been most recently the area of emphasis has been the idea of nuclear standoff detection—or more to the point, radioactive materials. One of the things we’ve been thinking about is detecting radiation on battlefields after an attack has occurred, but we’re worried about being able to detect at a distance the presence of uranium or plutonium that might be stored inside a container without having to actually get inside the container to find it.

Q: Is your agency investigating new medications with a protective capability?

A: In the medical preventive category, we’ve been looking for the ability to get away from needing a different vaccine or a different pill for every single possible hazard that’s out there. Right now we’ve got an anthrax vaccine that was engineered for a particular strain of anthrax, and there are other vaccines for other kinds of diseases. We want to know the possibility of moving away from this and toward the theoretical extreme of one vaccine for every kind of possible bug. This idea of broad spectrum, or broader spectrum, protection is really a key feature that we want to try to achieve in the next few years, probably by fiscal year 2013, and the folks that are developing these medical technologies are telling us that there’s really good progress being made toward that end.

The practical matter is that the Food and Drug Administration approval and certification is still a challenge. We’ve got to do the right thing in terms of making sure that these medications are safe, and that takes time. However, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Food and Drug Administration have been talking a lot about ways to move that process along a bit more expeditiously, without taking any shortcuts that could potentially bring risk into the equation.

Q: What is on the horizon in the area of handling the aftermath of a CBRN attack?

A: Decontamination continues to be a real challenge for the technology community and part of it is because we set the bar so high. We said a few years ago that we want a single kind of decontamination solution that’s environmentally friendly, non-toxic and will kill all the bad stuff that’s out there—whether it’s biological or chemical. And I think by setting those criteria, what we did was make it virtually impossible for somebody to come up with that.

So those sorts of tactics, techniques and procedures are the things that we’re now having a lot of discussion about. But the whole idea is really to reduce the hazard—it’s a sort of hazard mitigation strategy.

Q: How important is it for these decontaminants to be green?

A: For purely pragmatic purposes, we don’t want to leave behind a toxic hazard that somebody else will then stumble upon. What we want is something that really does make the hazard go away and completely neutralizes the hazard, leaving no toxic residue behind. For the last 40 or 50 years, our decontamination solution was pretty caustic and toxic all by itself—it was pretty nasty stuff. We took it out of the hands of soldiers because it was corrosive and was eating through the cans it was stored in.

We’ve got to find something that’s environmentally safe. Clearly we have a role to play in being environmental stewards like everybody does, and from a purely pragmatic, practical point of view, this stuff can’t be toxic and dangerous to people or equipment. Otherwise, it’s really not doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s got to truly be safe to use and the result of its work has got to be safe at the other end.

Q: What role should medical therapeutics play when dealing with the aftermath of a CBRN attack?

A: In the area of medical therapeutics, we’re looking to build the kind of therapeutic capability that would be able to treat a variety of exposures, viruses, or hazardous chemicals. The other thing is the challenge of therapeutics and from a battlefield perspective, therapeutics are tough because they often have to be refrigerated, and the most effective therapeutics are only administered through IVs. The challenge is to make a therapeutic that’s not just effective, but that is in fact the kind of thing you can have in a deployed battlefield situation that would operate in that environment, that wouldn’t necessarily have to be refrigerated, and that would be able to be applied and dispensed effectively.

One good example of a therapeutic is the current nerve agent antidote that’s out there. It’s a spring loaded syringe that the soldiers carry, and if they think they’ve been exposed to nerve agent, they take that and slap it against their thigh and that spring injects the nerve agent therapeutic without them having to squeeze a syringe.

The other piece of that from a therapeutics point of view is this idea of better, more reliable and more rapid diagnostics that would help us more quickly identify what virus or contagion a person has with minimum invasion. We’re looking for things as simple as swabs or tongue depressors that could quickly identify when someone has been exposed to anthrax before they know they’ve been exposed to anthrax. One of the things that people use as an illustration of that is if you could line up at the chow hall and take nasal swabs of all of the people in the chow line and be able to quickly take each of those swabs and get some kind of a rapid diagnostic when someone’s been exposed to anthrax. It would be therapeutic in that they’ve already been exposed, but not therapeutic in that they were already symptomatic. The idea is to make this medical treatment business anticipatory, and a key to enabling this is through rapid and accurate medical diagnostics. ♦

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