Environmental Quality subareas include cleanup of contaminated sites, compliance with all environmental laws, pollution prevention to minimize Army’s generation of wastes, and conservation of our natural and cultural resources. Civil Engineering subareas include conventional facilities, airfields and pavements, survivability and protective structures, and sustainment engineering. There is a tri–service joint engineers management panel to oversee, direct, and coordinate this program. The joint engineers panel consist of the flag officer engineer material developer for each service and is currently chaired by the Air Force under a 2–year rotation assignment. Technology subpanels in each major program area ensure coordination and nonduplication of research efforts.

National and international laws and treaties demand the mitigation of environmental impacts resulting from normal operations and maintenance of Army training readiness and industrial activities. Base realignment and closure actions place an added urgency on bringing our sites into compliance while placing more activity on remaining installations, thereby creating greater demands on facilities and compliance requirements. Reduced budgets and increased regulatory requirements dictate the need for new or improved technologies to reduce the costs of contaminant cleanup, treatment, and disposal; reduce the generation of hazardous materials and pollutants; enhance compliance; and maintain natural and cultural resources in a realistic state to support training and operations. Payoff for investments in environmental quality technology is realized by reducing the cost of doing business while maintaining our mission readiness.

Civil engineering R&D provides the Army technologies to project and sustain U.S. Forces from CONUS and outside the continental United States (OCONUS) in the defense of this nation. The payoff in this area is threefold:

Unique Army civil engineering needs arise from the characteristics of the weapons and transportation systems. The requirement to counter the effects of advanced conventional weapons and saboteur threats is not found in the private sector and, accordingly, there is no robust civilian R&D effort. The need to rapidly establish, maintain, and upgrade or retrofit facilities and transportation infrastructure within a theater of operation is unique; the private sector has no like requirement and no significant R&D investment. Our aging CONUS infrastructure (the average age of Army facilities is 35 years) requires modernization on a scale not seen elsewhere.

The primary thrusts in the conventional facilities area are to develop technologies to revitalize and operate DoD’s aging infrastructure, to ensure effective strategic power projection platforms, and to maximize productivity of resources in acquisition, revitalization, operations, and maintenance and repair (M&R) management. The Army’s $162 billion physical plant requires $5.9 billion annually to operate, maintain, and repair its aging facilities. The annual energy bill alone topped $1.5 billion, while the backlog of maintenance and repair (BMAR) of facilities is $2.2 billion. The goal is to achieve a 20 percent reduction in facilities acquisition and M&R costs from 1990 levels and a 30 percent reduction from 1985 levels in energy consumption by FY05. Technologies developed are dual use and critical to DoD cost reduction goals. Delivery of mission–enhancing, energy–efficient, and environmentally sustainable facilities with scarce resources is a major challenge. Every dollar saved from infrastructure improvements can be a dollar earned for mission–critical activities.

In the subareas of airfields and pavements, the goal is to reduce costs by 20 percent ($72 million per year) and extend the life (5 to 10 years) of the Army’s military–unique roads, airfields, ports, and railroads by the year 2000. Potential payoff and transition opportunities include providing the U.S. military with a reliable launching platform to project mobile forces to support worldwide contingency conflicts. The Army’s pavement research leads the nation. Civilian airports, 26 states, and many municipalities use the Army’s airfield and pavement procedures.

For survivability and protective structures (S&PS), the goal is to provide reliable and affordable structural hardening and CCD that will increase survivability of facilities, equipment, and personnel against a broad spectrum of increasingly lethal modern weapon threats, ranging from terrorist attack through regional conflicts and up to limited nuclear warfare. Lightweight, highly ductile, and high–strength materials with enhanced energy absorption will reduce hardening costs. Retrofit of existing facilities will enhance survivability of large–length–to–diameter–ratio penetrators and blast and thermal weapons.

The sustainment engineering subarea is structured to provide the civil engineering technologies required by the Army for successful execution of strategic, operational, and tactical force projection, employment, and sustainment. Engineer troops will be able to support a deployed force in an austere theater with faster, lighter, less voluminous, and less manpower–intensive ways of executing mobility, countermobility, and general engineering missions. Transitions include technical and field manuals, guide specifications, and the Army’s facility component systems.

Challenges for the conventional facilities subareas include technologies for affordable automated condition assessment, integrated installation management tools, innovative revitalization technologies, and technologies to determine applicability and DoD–wide prioritization of energy conservation opportunities to reduce O&M costs. Technology challenges for the S&PS subarea include innovative uses of lightweight, high strength, high ductility materials in protective construction and retrofit of existing structures to increase hardness at low cost and improve numerical models for accurate vulnerability assessments. Challenges for sustainment engineering include methods to improve construction speed and reduce logistic requirements, methods to acquire and interpret data for infrastructure assessment, and methods to predict real–time sea–state forecasts and logistics over–the–shore throughput assessments.

Army research is currently working to overcome technological barriers in civil engineering by developing:

The primary thrusts of site cleanup R&D are to reduce cost and expedite cleanup programs while ensuring protection of human health and the environment. R&D is conducted in characterization/monitoring, remediation technologies, and fate and effects of environmental contaminants in all climates. Cleanup R&D will produce innovative and cost–effective site identification, assessment, characterization, advanced cleanup methods, and monitoring technologies. By 2001, advanced sensors and sampling devices will expand the capabilities and precision of these systems. Subsurface conditions will then be better understood, thus increasing the efficiency of composting, unexploded ordnance (UXO) detection, in–situ biological treatment, passive subsurface water treatment, and improved chemical immobilization concepts and methods. Techniques will be developed to more accurately and rapidly determine the fate, transport, and effects of key DoD contaminants in soil and groundwater in all climatic conditions.

Compliance R&D will provide numerous technologies for advanced "end–of–the–pipe" control and treatment of hazardous, toxic, gaseous, liquid, and solid wastes when pollution prevention is not possible. Army systems, operations, and processes will be developed to meet existing and anticipated air, water, land, and noise regulations. R&D is focused on (1) characterization of pollutant and waste behavior, (2) media–specific control and treatment technologies, and (3) monitoring and assessment tools. Pollution prevention R&D will provide the Army with alternative materials, innovative manufacturing processes, and enhancements to daily activities to enable the Army to operate current and future production plants as well as to use its weapons systems. Overall efforts are focused on minimizing compliance requirements through new systems and processes that prevent or minimize pollution, with attendant reduction in production and product treatment costs.

Conservation R&D will provide sustainable support for realistic training and testing operation through improved understanding of natural and military operations processes affecting biological, earth, and cultural resources. R&D is focused on developing cost–effective technologies to mitigate military impacts, rehabilitate damaged resources, comply with environmental regulations, and support sustainable ecosystem management. The goal by the year 2001 is to develop an integrated modeling framework linking land capacity, land rehabilitation, and species/ecosystems impact models.

Challenges include:

Army research is currently working to overcome technological barriers in environmental quality by developing technologies and applications such as:

The roadmap of technology objectives for civil engineering and environmental quality is shown in Table IV–24.

The influence of this technology area on TRADOC FOCs is summarized in Table IV–25.