Nuclear Security & Deterrence Vol. 18 No. 48
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Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor
Article 9 of 17
December 19, 2014

INTERVIEW: Anne Harrington, NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation

By Todd Jacobson

The following interview about the NNSA’s Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation’s reorganization and coming move was conducted by Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor Editor Todd Jacobson.

This reorganization has been in the works for some time. What was the overarching strategy that you sought to implement and what were the general principles you were going after?

This is an effort that the entire DNN management team has been involved in for well over two years at this point. It started with our response to the Over-the-Horizon study that we did in 2012 that focused on what are the emerging and future threats that we anticipate that our organization will need to face. As part of that analysis we looked at what the threat environment is going to look like and what are the capabilities we need to have as an organization in order to meet those threats? What are the core competencies and what are going to be the enduring missions within the nonproliferation space?

This organization grew up really piecemeal: the two core offices, the Nonproliferation and Arms Control Office and the R&D Office have been part of the structure in one form or another since day one. In the new organization chart, they’re pretty much unchanged. Those still are solidly core functions within the organization. Then we started looking at what are the other things that we predictably are going to be doing for a very long time.

That was actually a very interesting set of discussions that crystallized around two new organizations: M-cubed as we already are calling it, Material Management and Minimization, and GMS, Global Material Security. So within those two spaces, all of the rest of our core requirements are covered. And more importantly, when we were doing the cross-organizational analysis, one of the things we saw was that we had multiple offices doing very similar things. We were doing some aspects of HEU down-blending in three different offices. We were doing some aspect of physical protection in three different offices.

We really went down the organization component by component to see where we could increase our efficiencies and increase the synergy among the members of our incredibly talented staff. Of all the jobs I’ve ever had, this one really is my dream job because of the people who work here and they are so talented and so dedicated and they understand the critical security importance of what they do on a daily basis. What we’re trying to do with the structure is actually give them a better place to do that work and a structure that is stronger and reinforces the various functions in a way that wasn’t the case before.

Had the previous structure held the organization back in any fashion with duplicate functions and inefficiencies?

It’s fair to say certainly that when Andrew Bieniawski was up here as acting deputy and then Rhys Williams who came after him, and now with Dave Huizenga back, the DNN Front Office has consistently driven collaboration within the organization. We expect people to reach out to each other and we ask whether they are. But when similar functions are dispersed within the organization, it simply takes more time to coordinate. Sometimes you forget to engage colleagues and then have to go back and make the links—it’s not a smooth way to operate. We reached out to the labs on this and one memorable conversation involved several of them turning around and going, well, it’s about time you organize along functional lines, that’s how we’re all organized. The way you’re chopped up right now makes it really difficult for us to figure out which is the right office to connect to.

The goal was to streamline and group the correct areas under titles that make it easy to understand what each group does. Even though it became a very strong brand, the Global Threat Reduction Initiative title doesn’t actually say very much about what happens. Global Material Security is pretty precise. Under the structure it will deal with nuclear, it will deal with radiological, it will do domestic and international and it’s a whole package. And it is easy to look at the skeleton and figure out which office is the one you are looking for.

At the same time, Nonproliferation is moving out of its former home at L’Enfant Plaza. How will that complement the reorganization?

I think this is going to be something that will be very helpful. It is by coincidence, but I think also real serendipity that not only are we re-aligning the structure of the organization, we’re actually moving the entire organization. We will be moving from the L’Enfant Plaza offices to the new offices in the Portals office building, which is only about two minutes farther away from the Forrestal Building by foot than the current L’Enfant Plaza offices.

We all walked off the distance several times because proximity of the staff is very important, not only for me but for the Administrator and the Secretary. We have been able to design all of this in a way that will really reinforce the objectives of the realignment.

We have specifically designed the new space to stimulate collaboration. There will be a lot of small collaboration spaces, many conference rooms, and the entire NN staff will be on a floor-and-a-half of the new building with an internal staircase that connects everyone. You don’t even have to go outside the security perimeter to find your colleagues, which is the current case.

How does the reorganization position the office for a potential slow-down in work with Russia in the coming years? And how does it reposition the office to better deal with non-state-based threats?

I don’t want to get into specifics of any particular country. The primary thought is flexibility and responsiveness. Within any particular group, we will not be structured around countries, we will be structured around functions. Within any particular office if work with a country goes up or down, work with another country could correspondingly go up or down. It gives us a lot more flexibility in how you can make adjustments and accommodate changes.

The Global Threat Reduction Initiative has been one of your signature programs and has received a lot of well-deserved attention. Splitting it up and changing the name, do you worry about the impact that might have on support for the program?

We discussed this for a long time and we realized there might be some deep emotions internally in the organization in part because that program has worked so intensively, particularly over the last four or five years on the four-year effort and has performed just an enormous global service in terms of nuclear security.

Every year we pick one or several programs for a kind of bottoms-up review and a re-baselining to see if we are still addressing the right threat? Are we still scoping the work correctly? Are we still the only available funder?  Have more opportunities emerged because of the Nuclear Security Summit series or through G7? Can we partner with other countries, with other international organizations, et cetera? It’s just good program management to do this periodically.

It had not been done for quite a while within the GTRI family. So, we sat back and took a look at what was still really on the books. For example, the Russians several years ago had stepped up and said they were going to work together with us on their first six reactor conversions, and said they would take responsibility for the rest. So if you take plus or minus 70 reactors out of the work-scope for reactor conversion, what does that do in the context of the rest of the program? What impact does that have on planning and so forth?

Similarly with the removal and protect programs. Those bottom-up reviews were already going to change the dynamics within the GTRI program. But that is something you expect as a program manager. It is actually what you want to have happen. Programs mature over time and one of our goals is to work with partners and stimulate them to step up and take responsibility and to share work with you. Program transitions like this are a reflection of success and we feel very good about that. But it also meant that, if there were going to be shifts within GTRI, then let’s take the opportunity of the reorganization to bring certain components together with the large protect program under the International Material Protection Cooperation program and strengthen the overall function.  In the new structure, we’re going to consolidate the material protection for nuclear, radiological—defense and civilian. We’re going to have all the people who know how to do this working in the same part of the organization.

You asked before how does this affect being able to adjust to changes with different countries and so forth. When you’ve got these consolidated in one place—let’s say we have fewer opportunities in the nuclear security area, and maybe a major new emerging opportunity in radiological. It’s all in the same organization now. So the ability to ramp up and ramp down within the organization becomes a much more manageable thing to do.

It allows you to be more responsive to new situations as they arise. If you had asked anybody a year ago whether we would be getting requests from the Ukrainian government for urgent assistance on border security because they’re still fearful that the Russian military is going to come rolling across, nobody was thinking in those terms. We don’t know what’s going to happen next March or May or September. Building this kind of flexibility into the program structure just seemed to make a lot of sense.

How will the work be divided?

The Office of Fissile Materials Disposition, the MOX and HEU disposition and so forth, and the following elements of GTRI are now Material Management and Minimization, M-cubed: HEU reactor conversion, nuclear material removal, and what we call emerging threats nuclear material removal, so that’s the gap program. In addition, the down-blending of Russian HEU to LEU that used to be in IMPC went into M-cubed because that’s also a material disposition program.

The Office of Global Material Security takes the old International Material Protection Cooperation Office plus international radiological material removal, domestic radiological material removal, international radiological material protection, and domestic radiological material protection.

There was a discussion about whether to put the radiological material removal in Global Material Security or in M-cubed? Because the removal and the protection are so closely linked, it was really hard to pull those two pieces apart. So the decision was to leave them together because we really aren’t disposing of sources in the same way that we’re down-blending HEU or disposing of plutonium. We’re really just doing long-term security.

On the MOX program and the Fissile Materials Disposition program more broadly, are you concerned that such a big program could take up too much bandwidth in Material Management and Minimization program, overshadowing other elements of the program?

No really, because with the transition of the actual execution of the MOX plant to the Office of Acquisition and Project Management, the amount of work in the Fissile Materials Disposition office was significantly reduced. In fact a lot of the staff in South Carolina moved over to work for APM because they were more execution than they were policy and oversight.

This actually helps that office in a lot of ways by grouping similar activities within the same program structure. There will be some very strong leadership moving into that box from GTRI.

There has been some concern raised from Congressional staff that without GTRI, the NNSA Nonproliferation program no longer has a signature program and it could affect support broadly for NNSA proliferation work. Do you share those concerns?

One of the reasons I am so excited about having Dave Huizenga back in the office is because brought fresh views into this discussion. In our first discussion with him on the reorganization, his first challenge was, ‘Explain to me why you guys are doing this.’ And so we did that to his satisfaction. And then when we came around to talking about GTRI, he sat back in his chair and he said, well, I remember back when we had MPC&A, and we had the MPC&A taskforce and then GTRI was spun off of that and then IMPC was created and the Second Line of Defense program was put into that. And then the MPC&A name went away and a lot of people were really sad, but for a very short time. 

His point was, we do get used to certain names. We like the way it rolls off the tongue. But in the end it is just a name and what we want to educate people to think about is not this year’s initiative, but what are the long-term enduring missions of this organization? I think M-cubed is going to catch on as perhaps one of the new bumper stickers. We’ve tried to pick names that are really descriptive of what we do and what constitutes the highest nonproliferation priorities.

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