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'We have to be careful what we are eliminating and what works and what doesn’t'
Responding to the revelation that the White House is calling for eliminating further funding for new technologies to detect nuclear weapons and radiological materials at US borders and ports in his 2010 budget, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano stated at a press briefing last Thursday that “this simply represents that we have a significant amount of funds already appropriated for the programs, and it's not a change in direction [in policy] at this time.”
“It's really more of an understanding that it would be more prudent not to ask for more funds when we have a delay in the new technology coming forward, and we really think it's just a chance to take a pause in asking for more money at this time while we get the certification complete and then start rolling out and asses our plans, then come back and see where our funding needs are after that,” Napolitano stated.
Obama budget documents state that in 2010, “unspent funds will be drawn down as DHS transitions to a different model to fund the purchases of radiation detection equipment within the department in future budgets.”
The administration has requested $366 million for the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO), which is $148 million less than the amount DNDO received in 2009.
A DHS official told reporters the decision is not a policy shift. It’s "prudent to take a pause" to work through technical problems and redirect DNDO's work to individual agencies that use the equipment.
DHS spokesperson Amy Kudwa has told reporters that the unspent funds would be used to purchase advanced Spectroscopic Portal Monitors (ASPs) as soon as they are certified as effective, in addition to other nuclear materials detection equipment in the future.
Technical flaws and concerns over the reliability of scientific testing have delayed DHS plans to buy ASPs and automated cargo radiographic imaging systems, or CAARs, that scan vehicles, trains and cargo entering air and land ports for nuclear materials.
In response to questions raised by DHS and Congress’ own investigative branch, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), lawmakers put a halt to DNDO making any new purchases of equipment. In his 2010 budget, Obama also declined to request funds to buy any more equipment under DNDO beyond the $153 million that was appropriated last year under Bush.
GAO reported last September that “ASPs cost significantly more than current generation portal monitors, and testing of ASPs' capabilities needs to be more objective and rigorous. Due to concerns about ASPs' cost and performance, Congress has required that the Secretary of DHS certify that ASPs will provide a significant increase in operational effectiveness before obligating funds for full-scale ASP procurement.”
Continuing, GAO reported that “DNDO's cost estimate of $2.1 billion to implement its project execution plan is unreliable because it omits major project costs, such as maintenance, and relies on a flawed methodology. For example, although the normal life expectancy of the standard cargo ASP is about ten years, DNDO's estimate considers only eight years.”
“According to DNDO officials,” GAO told lawmakers, “the agency is now following a scaled-back ASP deployment strategy rather than the 2006 project execution plan, and a senior DNDO official told GAO the ASP deployment strategy could change dramatically depending on the outcome of ongoing testing.”
Elsewhere, the White House also is seeking to end the $90 million Securing the Cities (STC) program that was launched last September with the awarding of $29 million in grants “to prevent a radiological/nuclear attack in the New York City metropolitan area by enhancing regional capabilities to detect and interdict illicit radioactive materials.”
This purpose of this pilot program was to test whether it is possible to secure an urban area against nuclear terrorism by encapsulating it with an integrated system of handheld, aerial, vehicle-mounted and waterborne sensors.
STC was launched by former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff in July 2006 as way to protect a high-risk urban area from a potential radiological or nuclear attack. A previous cooperative agreement for $3.2 million was awarded to the New York Police Department in September 2007 to build a regional enterprise architecture for the NYC region that will allow real-time sharing of data from fixed, mobile, maritime, and human portable radiation detection systems,” according to DHS.
But with Obama’s 2010 DHS budget, "this is the end of the program as far as requesting new funds," the DHS official told reporters last week.
The desire to end the STC program has baffled not just a few authorities, who wondered out loud in interviews with HSToday.us whether the nuclear materials scanning technologies – many of which have been miniaturized – that are used by the nearly 35-year-old Nuclear Emergency Support Team, or NEST, have been incorporated, tested or used in the STC initiative. The miniaturization of nuclear materials detection technology has long been a priority of NEST, whose primary mission is detect and deactivate a nuclear weapon in the hands of terrorists.
HSToday.us Online Editor and Homeland Security Today Senior Reporter Anthony Kimery wrote the first in-depth report on NEST, which included the first ever on-the-record interview of a NEST director, in 1995.
Other authorities have asked “what’s up with” nuclear materials detection technologies that have been under development and study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Purdue University, and foreign private sector companies like American Science & Engineering's radioactive threat detection, Germany’s Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt … and even Israeli research enterprises.
DHS officials did not respond to requests for comment.
"If there's a reason why all the technologies - and there's a lot of them, believe me - that have been in development or have already already fielded that [DHS] can't use, then they need to be explaining why, instead of offering these blanket comments that so far the technologies it's looked at or are working on just aren't workable," said a former DHS official involved in port cargo security operations. "Have they really looked at everything that's already been developed or has and is being worked on?"
Former CIA National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) WMD terrorism chief Charles Faddis, president of Davidsonville, Maryland-based Orion Strategic Services, told HSToday.us that the DNDO cuts can be viewed either one of two ways by the Intelligence Community.
“If this means that we are shutting down massive, unreasonably expensive programs that have shown little promise of producing and shifting our focus to more realistic, more practical and more effective measures, then I am all for it,” adding, “I think a lot of what has passed for homeland security has been ‘corporate pork’ anyway.”
“If, on the other hand,” Faddis said, “this means that we are now convinced that we are safe and that we can stop worrying about massive WMD attacks on our soil, then we are in real trouble. This stuff is not science fiction or fantasy. It is reality, and, unfortunately, every year we get a little closer to the day when somebody will detonate a dirty bomb or set loose a biological weapon on our soil.”
Former DHS Deputy Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Jack Thomas Tomarchio, president of Wayne, Pennsylvania-based Agoge Group, LLC and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Center on Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Homeland Security, told HSToday.us that he “totally concur[s]” with Faddis, saying, “certainly wasteful and unnecessary funding of programs that do not work, is ludicrous.”
“But,” Tomarchio stressed, “we have to be careful what we are eliminating and what works and what doesn’t.”
Tomarchio said “I feel that any reduction to DNDO, or in this case, no additional funds being added to DNDO in the current budget, could be troubling. I think all of us who served in the Intelligence Community are concerned about the risks associated with nuclear proliferation.”
“In a time when we are faced with an unstable Pakistan (a known nuclear state), a bellicose North Korea and an Iran seemingly intent on acquiring a nuclear weapon and the delivery devices to deploy it,” Tomarchio said, “any reduction in the budget which will adversely effect our ability to detect, deter and defend against this - the ultimate threat to our national security - seems to me very potentially problematic.”
As the Washington Post reported critics as having told it about Obama’s proposed cuts in DNDO nuclear materials detection technologies, critics also complained to HSToday.us that the administration would rather invest in a “goal-line like defense against nuclear bomb-wielding terrorists” by spending money to secure nuclear materials at their source and to coordinate a government-wide counterproliferation strategy – and … to bolster preparedness capabilities to respond to an attack using a nuclear weapon or radiological dispersal device.
But critics and authorities told HSToday.us that programs since the collapse of the Soviet Union nearly 20 years ago to secure nuclear weapons and nuke weapons construction materials have failed to completely lock them all down at their sources. Meanwhile, nuclear weapons and ballistic missile delivery systems has unrelentingly continued to spread for more than 15 years despite the increase in counterproliferation activities that were launched under President Clinton and carried through under the administration of George W. Bush.
As for preparedness to deal with the mass casualties that would result from a nuclear bomb detonation, White House funding levels either aren’t enough, have been cut in crucial preparedness areas, or aren’t even on politicos’ radar screens – this as mass casualty emergency medical preparedness capabilities have continued to deteriorate for at least the last five years, as HSToday.us and Homeland Security Today have repeatedly reported.
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