Ed. Note: Dr. Barbara Price developed the following analysis based on general contract data made available to ASA throughout CY 2008. As always we would appreciate your comments and added information to share with our professional worldwide family.
Summary of Year 2008 CBR Contracts
Barbara Price Ph.D.
Publisher ASA Newsletter
In each issue of the ASA Newsletter, ASA lists the various contracts in CBR (or NBC) that have been awarded in the US, and sometimes in other countries as well. This is an imperfect listing for several reasons. There is no one place where all contracts are listed and certainly no particular government contracting agency that awards them all. There is often a delay between contract announcement and actual award. There also are differences in the way the total amounts of the contract dollars are expressed. For a five year contract, sometimes the total of the entire five years is announced and sometimes only one year is announced. The awards are often (cont. p.14 - Contracts Summary) augmented with a modification, which may or may not refer to the original contract award. Often the company or institution receiving the award announces it in a slightly different fashion than the government contracting agency. Sometimes the contract announcement does not provide the amount of the award. And finally, because of the time and intricacies of negotiating government contracts, many of the larger contractors have task order contracts with the US government so that tasks can be added and modified more easily. In the past, not all of these tasks were announced, but the GAO has recently ruled that each task can be considered an award so ASA expects the number of these announcement will be increasing this year.
However, despite these and other contract research obstacles, ASA has almost since its inception, tracked the contracts in CBR and collected these announcements (whether by government or industry or personal contact, often corroborating the amount of the award and description with the industry's PR announcement) in its Contracts section. Using the listings from ASA 08-1 though 08-6, ASA has analyzed the contracts awarded. The contracts listed in ASA 08-1 include some few contracts announced and awarded in November and December 2007. These had not been identified and listed in ASA 07-6. How much did the US government and industries and institutions announce were awarded last year, during the period from ASA Newsletter 08-1 through ASA 08-6, dated 31 December 2008? Approximately $5.2 billion.
ASA separated the contracts into eight areas:
- Bio detection O&M - Contracts issued for operation and maintenance of biodetection systems - primarily Port Shield.
- Bio doses - Contracts issued to purchase doses of vaccine or other treatments
- Bio R&D - Contracts for research and development of treatments, models, and countermeasures for biothreats agents and public health.
- Chem Demil - Contracts dealing with operations of and research in chemical demilitarization.
- Rad R&D - R&D pertinent to radiological threats, including modeling and medical countermeasures.
- CBR Equip - Actual equipment purchases in CBR defense from shelters to individual gloves, mask nose pieces, filters, and riot control weapons.
- CBR Services - Contracts requesting services for CBR analysis, training, technology, testing and evaluation, operations, modeling, management, award fees, etc.
- CBR R&D - Contracts specifically requesting research and development of CBR defense equipment, modeling, exploring emerging systems, etc. Admittedly the difference between CBR Services and CBR R&D could sometimes be debated, but ASA used the wording to distinguish between the two categories
Chemical Demilitarization.
In the last year, $16,550,000 was spent on chemical demilitarization (only 0.3% of the $5.2 billion in CBR R&D, products and services). This will undoubtedly increase as more of the old chemical weapons are destroyed. Because of the way the contract awards are announced, previous awards that may have been for two or three or more years of operations would not have been announced this year.
As of December 2008, the U.S. Army's Chemical Materials Agency (CAM) estimated that 56.3% of the total US chemical agent stockpile had been destroyed, including all VX stockpiles. All the stockpiles in Maryland and Indiana now have been destroyed. One of two contracts noted was for providing data acquisition, technical writing and librarian services to the Chemical Agent Munitions Disposal System Facility, Desert Chemical Depot, Utah, where an estimated 74% of the stockpile has been destroyed. The other contract was to perform laboratory operations for the destruction of the US Army chemical stockpile stored at the Newport Chemical Depot in Newport, Indiana.
CBR Equipment, R&D and Services
Last year quite a lot of money was spent on acquiring CBR equipment, from decontamination systems to gas masks and collective protection shelters. Still this was just over three quarters of a billion dollars, or 15% of the money spent. And, this did not include either the operation and maintenance contracts for the Portal Shield automated networked biological detection systems or the purchase of various biological countermeasures or public heath vaccines, such as anthrax and influenza vaccine. The biggest purchase of CBR equipment, $88,957,440., was for 288,000 integrated chemical protective suits or Joint Service Lightweight Integrated Suit Technology (JLIST), but many other components of the suit and mask were purchased under other contracts.
The largest portion of the $5.2 billion, 43.7%, was spent on CBR services and CBR R&D (not counting Bio R&D). Of that, $2.2 billion was spent on CBR services. These services included education, training, exercises, and logistics for various CBR defense programs, services for CBR protection programs at APG., etc. Among these programs there are at least two that seek to improve public health in the US and abroad; $125 million for scientific consulting in design and implementation of modern diagnostic laboratories throughout the Ukraine in support of DOD's Bio Threat Reduction Program and $215 million to assist CDC in preparedness and pandemic support.
Biological Research and Products
ASA grouped the R&D services specific to biological agents, biomarkers for disease, models, new biodetectors, new vaccine development, etc. Since biological R&D could be very broad, there are a few awards in that category that could be considered to go across CBR medical countermeasures. The amount spent in Bio R&D is approximately 13 % of the $5.2 billion, with three of the largest programs (a total of $179 million or 26% of the Bio R&D) to develop medical countermeasures and vaccines for Ebola and Marburg diseases and viral hemorrhagic fevers.
The US spent over $1 billion ($1,238,282,359.) or almost 24% of the $5.2 billion, to acquire vaccines for smallpox, avian influenza, seasonal influenza and anthrax. Some of the seasonal influenza doses were only for the armed forces. And despite the large amount of money, we bought only 29 million doses of smallpox vaccine; there are about 306 million people in the US. However the US has bought some of these vaccines in other programs in previous years, so it really is hard to know how much we really have. What are not included in the list of spending are other vaccine programs and the greater public health programs. We have listed only those with a defense department contract or which mention preparedness and pandemic. The combination of Bio R&D and purchase of vaccines and other medical treatments came to $1.9 billion or 37% of the $5.2 billion. Anthrax R&D and vaccines accounted for about 26% of Bio R&D and vaccines.
Radiation R&D
Research and development in the radiological part of CBR defense primarily involved medical treatment and countermeasures for radiation exposures, included developing and stockpiling a stem cell therapy for the repair of gastrointestinal injury resulting from acute radiation syndrome for about $225 million. Expect funding increases in radiation R&D in 2009; the DHS issued two different contracts for sensing dirty bombs, one for $2 million and another for $5.6 million and DTRA awarded $12.8 million for examining nuclear detection technologies to Alion via their IDIQ contract.
With 2008 as background, it will be interesting to watch how our CBR defense spending goes this year. Defense and budget analysts are predicting that DoD will need to tighten its belt and some of our R&D programs are likely to have cuts or be drawn out over several years instead of shorter times. Operations and maintenance of current equipment is likely to have priority over some of the longer-term research. Hopefully some of the public health related research and development does not lose too much ground, but certainly we could benefit with a pooling of resources and better cooperation between different departments and agencies. This situation is common globally, not just in the US. However, the contracts and award amounts for CBR spending are easier to find and document for the US.
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