This technology area focuses on critical environmental and civil engineering problems related to training, mobilizing, deploying, and employing a force at any location at any time. The goal is to provide an environmentally sustainable, military–unique infrastructure at the lowest possible life–cycle cost.

The problems of meeting national and international environmental standards and of engineering affordable and sustainable facilities and infrastructures in a climate of reduced funding are common to all of our potential partners. Remediation of environmental pollution and maintenance of infrastructure are areas of considerable importance to the civil sector as well, and most industrialized nations have active programs in techniques, materials, and in M&S to support requirements analysis and design.

Table E–14 and the following paragraphs summarize the significant environmental and civil engineering capabilities and opportunities.

Environmental quality subareas include cleanup of contaminated sites, compliance with all environmental laws, pollution prevention to minimize Army use and generation of wastes and to minimize adverse affects on the environment, and conservation of our natural and cultural resources. Technical challenges include a host of issues related to these areas. Items of current focus include developing technologies and applications such as:

Among notable highlights, the United Kingdom has been a leading force in the development of international standards for environmental management systems. Many of the current draft International Standardization Organization (ISO) standards are patterned after existing British standards. Japan, the U.K., Germany, France, Israel, and the Nordic Group all have significant efforts in bioremediation (the use of biological organisms or their products (enzymes) to breakdown or neutralize a wide range of contaminants). The French in particular have had a longstanding interest and strong effort in biodegradation and demilitarization of energetic materials. Internationally there is growing concern for clean up of organophosphate insecticide contaminated sites. An effective enzymatic treatment for this purpose might also be adopted for decontamination of nerve agents. We can anticipate that growing awareness of environmental effects as regional and global issues, and the emergence of international standards for their effective management will lead to opportunities for increased cooperation to improve pollution prevention, environmental protection, techniques for monitoring and compliance, and remediation, particularly with EC countries and Japan, which are moving rapidly towards adoption of the ISO 14000 standard.

Civil engineering subareas include conventional facilities, airfields and pavements, survivability and protective structures, and sustainment engineering. The primary thrust of technologies for conventional facilities is to revitalize and operate DoD’s aging infrastructure at an affordable cost. In airfields and pavements, the major effort is to reduce life–cycle costs. Survivability and protective structures address reliable, affordable structural hardening, retrofit hardening, and camouflage, concealment, and deception (CC&D), to increase survivability and force protection from the foxhole to the deeply buried command structure against threats from conventional munitions, terrorist threats, and advanced precision penetrators. Sustainment engineering provides the civil engineering technologies required for successful execution of strategic, operational, and tactical force projection, employment, and sustainment.

Technical challenges in civil engineering cover a wide range of technologies and need. Developments of current interest include:

Foreign capabilities of most interest are in the areas of high performance construction materials (France), material systems and response of conventional structures to blasts (United Kingdom), and response of hardened structures to conventional weapons (Germany).