The Department of Homeland Security’s high priority technology needs for countering vehicle and suicide bombers are focusing on stand-off detection, the chief of the Science and Technology branch says.
“We need the ability to deter, predict, detect, defeat and destroy IEDs (improvised explosives devices) at range; I say 50 yards,” Jay Cohen, under secretary for DHS S&T Directorate, says at a homeland security conference sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA). “Whether it’s under your clothes or in a car. At 55 miles per hour, 50 yards gives you about 1.5 seconds before that car is on you. So we’re not looking for the better dog’s nose to sniff around the car and we’re not looking for the better swipe that you can do on the car door handle. We’re looking at how do you detect this at range.”
Cohen, who took over the S&T shop at DHS in August 2006, has emphasized meeting his customer’s requirements and to a lesser extent exploring high risk, high-payoff technologies. Calling it his “legacy,” Cohen says his number one priority is helping to find stand-off solutions to Counter-IED.
Solving this detection challenge will take at least five years and in the meantime there will probably be attacks, Cohen says.
This month DHS S&T published its High-Priority Technology Needs: Version 2.0 report, which gives a high level overview of each of the representative technology needs of the Capstone Integrated Product Teams (IPT) established by Cohen over a year ago so that his organization could better meet the requirements of its customers such as Customs and Border Protection and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The new report shows that a Counter-IED IPT has been created separate from the Transportation Security IPT, which is lead by TSA.
The Counter-IED IPT is led by the DHS Office of Bombing Prevention and the U.S. Secret Service. TSA is focused on the checkpoint, an area where “we are doing well,” Cohen says. Counter-IED is focused on “Times Square, the Super Bowl, the Olympics. You get the idea. There’s no checkpoint,” he says.
Originally Counter-IED basic research was administered by the Defense Department’s Joint Improvised Explosives Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) but the money for these efforts went unspent. Now the basic research in countering IEDs is being managed by DHS S&T. Cohen say he has already told Congress that he’ll need between $50 million and $100 million annually for years to work this challenge.
Cohen says S&T is leveraging JIEDDO for his efforts but will also put resources into the national laboratories, universities, industry, international partners and interagency partners to help find a solution.
About 60 percent of the funding that goes into Counter-IED is for basic research, where “I am looking for fundamental phenomenologies that will change the calculus, that will move us to the left of the boom, will put the suicide bombers on their heels, on the defensive,” Cohen says. “They may blow up. There may be fratricide. There may be death but it will be when we want not when they want. So they don’t get to their target. They don’t get to heaven. Their picture doesn’t go on the wall of martyrs and their family doesn’t get a $30,000 stipend from Hezbollah or from whomever. And all of a sudden they have a recruitment problem. That’s how you win wars. You don’t win wars on the defense. And right now I need those breakthroughs.”
S&T is taking a systems, and even a system of systems, approach to solving the Counter-IED challenge, Cohen says. Those systems include human factors, such as determining hostile intent, technology to detect explosives, explosives forensics, and blast mitigation materials and models.
Jim Tuttle, the director of the Explosives Division within S&T, says he’ll be focusing resources not so much on making incremental improvements in a particular vendor’s system but rather understand why certain technologies, whether they be millimeter wave, terahertz or something else, “is not doing what it needs to do.” And then invest in the components to make those technologies better.
Under the Counter-IED effort S&T will also be exploring open architectures so that various types of sensors can plug and play into any network, Joe Foster, a program manager in the Explosives Division, says at the NDIA conference. The architecture needs to be adaptable to different environments such as train stations and airports and others, he says.
Upcoming Pilot Test
As part of its effort in the Counter-IED area, S&T is planning to conduct a pilot test this summer using different types of stand-off sensors–possibly millimeter wave and thermal infrared–to screen people for weapons and explosives who are entering an “event” with the goal being to fuse the sensor data to increase the probability of detection and decrease false alarms, Tuttle says. This will not be a typical checkpoint application but rather one where people are just walking along to the event, he says.
“The future where we are trying to go is [where] there is no checkpoint,” Tuttle says. That future system might have sensors built into the walls, he adds.
“And you’ll be walking down a corridor and it is analyzing whether there is a plume going off your body or various other things that is making the determination if you go to secondary screening or not,” Tuttle says. “And we want to do this not only for aviation but for a mass transit environment too.”
One of Tuttle’s briefing slides depicts a scene in which people are headed through a corridor that is segmented by the types of sensors monitoring a particular section along the pathway. In this case, there were two millimeter wave and two thermal infrared imagers–with one of each sensor on either side of the corridor–as part of the layered screening concept. Tuttle tells TR2 that the types of sensors to be used in the pilot haven’t been finalized although the millimeter wave and infrared systems are the “most mature.” He says the limits on these technologies are known and the goal is to see what will happen when the sensor inputs are fused to hopefully produce a stronger result.
However, Tuttle cautions that, “We have a long, long way to go. Every technology, whether its millimeter wave or terahertz or whatever it is [has] too many false alarms, too many false positives. We have to figure out a way to improve those technologies and also figure out how we’re going to fuse the technologies because it’s going to have to be an integration approach.”
TSA will partner with S&T on the test.