With the need to recapitalize and replace some existing equipment, the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) expects its acquisition budget to continue increasing for the next several years, an agency official says.
DNDO’s acquisition funding has been going up the past few years after suffering from no funding in 2010, Todd Pardue, principal deputy assistant director, says at the agency’s Industry Day on Feb. 28. Between 2011 and 2014 funding was relatively stable at around $20 million to $30 million and then climbed to $53 million in 2016, he says.
Going forward the funding will continue to increase given recapitalization plans, Pardue says. Those plans include a competition for new Radiation Portal Monitors and procurement for new Personal Radiation Detectors. The agency also continues to award contracts for exploratory research and the small business innovation research program.
The agency is still a ways from having annual procurement budgets in the $90 million to $100 million range it enjoyed in the late 2000s. But, says, Pardue, we “were in a bathtub and we’re finally getting out of that bathtub.”
Wayne Brasure, acting director of DNDO, at the Industry Day outlined his priorities for the agency this year. One is the need to reengineer the agency’s approach to technology transition and to update its “commercial first” approach, he says.
It’s difficult to understand the right metrics for tech transition between research and development, and acquisition, Brasure says, adding he doesn’t know what the right percentage is “but I know we need to get better at it.”
DNDO’s R&D and acquisition divisions are teaming to get better at this, Brasure says.
The second priority is implementing the modeling and testing of a new threat matrix into all new detection programs.
“For the first time this gets beyond just bulk detection standards and puts the requirement out there for us and our interagency partners to look at threats that we actually expect we would see coming through the pathways to do harm to the United States America,” Brasure says. “So this is a large group of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons materials that we require our detection capability to be able to detect at some level of effectiveness.”
The Radiation Portal Monitor Replacement program will be a “flagship opportunity” to apply the threat matrix to, Brasure says.
The solutions development process, the third priority, is well aligned with the Department of Homeland Security’s procedures, Brasure says. But, he says, with changes at the department level such as the joint requirements process, DNDO needs to modernize is processes here as well.
The final priority is better messaging of all the good things DNDO has been doing in combatting nuclear terrorism through detection and forensics, Brasure says. The agency is looking into better using social media tool, he says.
Brasure says the agency’s Grand Challenges are unchanged over the past couple years because they are hard to do. Those challenges include cost effective equipment, enhanced wide area search capabilities in urban and heavily cluttered environments, monitoring along challenging pathways, detecting special nuclear materials wherever it is encountered, even if heavily shielded, and predictive capabilities to determine the origin and provenance of nuclear materials.