EFFICIENT AND EFFECTIVE FORCE
MIGHTY MINIATURE BUT
DEVCOM Chemical Biological Center continues miniaturizing chemical agent destruction technology.
by Brian B. Feeney, Ph.D.
facility. Te U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Chemical Biolog- ical Center (DEVCOM CBC) has been steadily miniaturizing destruction technology to make that increasingly possible.
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According to DEVCOM CBC’s Field Response Team Operations Director Timothy Blades, chemical agents found in the field present unique challenges to warfighters and commanders. “Because of the risk of transport and mission timelines, it’s almost always better to destroy these items on site,” Blades said. “Part of our mission at DEVCOM CBC is to identify and develop technologies that make that possible.”
A BIG START IN MINIATURIZATION MAKES HISTORY DEVCOM CBC’s effort began in 2012 when the U.S. Defense Treat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and National Security Staff approached DEVCOM CBC’s field response team, the Chemical Biological Application and Risk Reduction (CBARR) business unit, with an urgent need to destroy Syria’s chemical warfare agent stockpile. Te national team was considering incineration of the stockpile in or near Syria as a possible solution. Based on decades of experience, Blades told them that destruction using hot water, a method known as neutralization, would be a much better solution. An incinerator would take too long to build, require too many people to operate and involve too large a logistics train.
Until then, neutralization had only been used to destroy the U.S. chemical agent stock- pile in the early 2000s in large factory buildings covering acres of land. Blades and
https://asc.ar my.mil 27
hen chemical agents are found in the field, either as legacy waste from prior conflicts or recently produced by bad actors, there are advantages to destroying them at or near the place of discovery rather than pack- ing them up and transporting them to a brick-and-mortar destruction
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