Defense Week
September 30, 2002
Pg. 1
Chem-Bio Protections Fall Short, Panel Told
By John M. Donnelly
Eleven years after the Gulf War showed shortcomings in the U.S. military’s chemical and biological protective gear, and with a similar conflict apparently on the horizon, the United States has made insufficient progress in fielding systems to help soldiers survive and fight amid germs and gas, an internal congressional memo says.
The Sept. 26 briefing memo prepared by the House Government Reform national-security subcommittee staff cites “much progress” in this area, then adds: “However, the sluggishness in the development and procurement of [chemical and biological] defense items in the area of contamination avoidance, protection systems and decontamination still poses a major challenge for the Department of Defense.”
U.S. forces may face chemical and biological weapons if they are involved in a war with Iraq. But as one U.S. official knowledgeable about the troubled efforts to improve U.S. defenses against such weaponry said, “I’d hate to be one of the poor servicemen who finds in battle that his equipment is flawed or not available.
The protective-gear issue takes on added urgency as the world focuses on Iraq’s reported stocks of anthrax, botulinum, mustard gas, sarin and VX; and its reputed delivery means: 20 Scuds (some of which can reach U.S. troops and allies in Kuwait, Israel and Saudi Arabia) and shorter-range missiles, artillery shells, rockets and some aircraft.
Many of the shortfalls in defensive equipment have been disclosed by Defense Week over the last few years. The problems include:
a 1999 Pentagon report that half the gas masks in the U.S. inventory were not in working order, because they couldn’t withstand the rigors of training or were misused by soldiers;
an internal Navy audit in 2002 showing that many Marine Corps battalions were not training for mission scenarios while wearing their protective gear, as required;
the Defense Logistic Agency’s continued acquisition of 780,000 “battle dress overgarments” in the late 1 990s after criminal investigators had told officials the suits were being intentionally produced with flaws by a company called Isratex;
the Pentagon’s inability to this day to prove it has located a quarter of a million of those potentially defective Isratex suits.
Now, the subcommittee memo reveals how numerous other programs to detect agents, protect individual warfighters and their units, or decontaminate people and equipment are either behind schedule or not working.
At press time, the Pentagon could not make an official available to respond to the criticisms.
The Pentagon is spending $1.3 billion on chemical and biological defensive systems in fiscal 2003. Those initiatives fall into four main areas: contamination avoidance; protection; decontamination; and medical systems.
Missing chemical suits
One of the problems is inadequate inventory systems to track the available assets. Referring to the quarter of a million missing Isratex suits, the report says: “The subcommittee has received information indicating there are unresolved doubts about the quality and utility of [Army and Air Force battle dress overgarments] in the Middle East.”
The same statement could be made about Korea and elsewhere, two U.S. officials said.
While there appears to be no evidence that defective suits are on pre-positioned ships or at forward operating bases, there is also no evidence that they are not. The Defense Logistics Agency told Defense Week a year ago that an extensive search was made for the Isratex suits. Although the suits remain “unaccounted for,” the agency said it believes they have been consumed in use.
However, the agency acknowledges it can’t prove that, and so worries abide.
The suit that replaces the Isratex suit is called the Joint Service Lightweight Integrated Suit Technology, or JSLIST. The General Accounting Office testified to the House panel in June that the military has an incomplete picture of its JSLIST and other inventories. In fact, the military was accidentally declaring as excess—and selling on eBay—many JSLIST suits for $3 each, even as officials were simultaneously buying hundreds of thousands of them from the contractor for $200 a copy.
Besides the quantity of JSLIST suits, the quality has also been questioned. Last year, Defense Week disclosed that the military has already begun to look for an improved version of JSLIST (itself an upgrade), because it does not protect its wearer when the suit is soaked with sweat or seawater. This is particularly a concern for Navy SEALs and other special-ops teams.
However, the military may have already bought most of the 4.4 million JSLIST suits it plans to purchase by the time it makes a decision on the upgrade, which is still being tested; that decision is not expected until 2007, officials have said.
Procurement goals unmet
Besides the suit problems, the military is having difficulty meeting its procurement goals for several new “contamination-avoidance” systems. A U.S. official said the problem is not so much lack of funding but misdirected funding, combined with engineering setbacks and, in some instances, a lack of industrial capacity.
The Joint Chemical Agent Detector, or JCAD, is expected to automatically detect, identify and quantify the presence of chemical agents, including with a pocket-sized alarm system. In fiscal 2001, the Pentagon was supposed to buy 216,126 of them. Instead, the panel’s memo says, “the JCAD target performance was zero of 216,126.”
Because of the delays, the memo says, “some have questioned what detection capability will soldiers have that they did not have in the Persian Gulf War.”
In that conflict, alarms and decontamination kits suffered glitches due to mechanical problems and a lack of training in their proper use. Moreover, there were problems with the “availability, durability and suitability of protective clothing,” the memo said.
Another new detection apparatus developed since then, the Joint Biological Point Detection System, is supposed to alert forces to the presence of germ agents. The Pentagon intended to buy 143 of 1,997 in fiscal 2001—but it bought only five.
The goal of transitioning the program to procurement “will be delayed at least two years again raising capability concerns in the event of a biological weapon attack,” the memo said.
Medical shelters unbuilt
Another initiative, the Chemical Biological Protected Shelter, or CBPS, is supposed to provide a mobile, safe place to perform medical operations. As of fiscal 2001, the Pentagon has procured 138 shelters— versus a target of 779.
That is significant, it turns out, because the old shelter, the M5 1, does not work, the memo says: “All of the Army’s M5 1 protective shelters were coded as unserviceable in fiscal 2001” because of “filtration and transportation problems. As a result, there is a question of whether DoD has a sufficient supply of CBPSs to provide a hazard-free enviromnent for forward tactical medical treatment to meet surge requirements.”
In addition, this summer U.S. Central Command, responsible for the Middle East, requested a new type of foam to decontaminate equipment because the existing foam, Decontamination Solution 2, is “a corrosive liquid proven harmful to soldiers and only marginally effective against biological agents,” the House panel briefing said.
Finally, a new Modular Decontamination System has been developed to rinse off trucks, tanks and armored personnel carriers. But the Pentagon is not buying these quickly enough either: The fiscal 2001 goal was 130 of 465 units, yet the Pentagon did not buy any, the memo said, “which raises questions whether U.S. forces will have available decontamination equipment on-hand and are properly trained on the use of that equipment in the event of a [weapon of mass destruction] attack.”
The House panel will hold a hearing on chemical and biological protection tomorrow morning, at which
witnesses from the Pentagon, military services and independent audit agencies will probe the issue. A closed, classified session will follow in the afternoon.