	Background

In 1985, Congress required the Department of the Defense to destroy the U.S. stockpile of chemical agents and munitions and to establish an organization within the Army to manage the agent destruction program. The Nonstockpile Chemical Materiel Product was added in 1993 to destroy any chemical weapons or materiel not included in the stockpile disposal program. Lessons Learned Program Has Made Positive Contributions but Needs Improvement

The Lessons Learned Program has made valuable contributions in support of the Chemical Stockpile Disposal Project’s efforts to safely destroy the chemical stockpile. It has generally operated consistently with knowledge management principles and lessons sharing best practices and has successfully captured and shared thousands of lessons. However, the program does not apply or incorporate all knowledge management principles and lessons sharing best practices. For example, the program does not provide needed guidance for senior managers; it does not have formal a validation procedure to determine whether a problem has been fixed; and the database of lessons learned needs improvement. The Lessons Learned Program remained primarily focused on the five incineration sites. The Alternative Technologies and Approaches Project does have access to the Lessons Learned Program’s database, and it plans to develop its own separate database that it will share with the Lessons Learned Program only at “key milestones.” The project’s information, however, could be very valuable to other components of the Chem- Demil Program, especially the Assembled Chemical Weapons Program, which also researches alternative technologies. As a result, fragmented or duplicative efforts continue today, and the Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment Program in particular lacks access to important data maintained by the Chemical Stockpile Disposal Project and the Alternative Technologies and Approaches Project. Recommendations for Executive Action

To improve the effectiveness and usefulness of the Chemical Demilitarization Program’s Lessons Learned Program, we recommend that the Secretary of Defense direct the Secretary of the Army to  develop guidance to assist managers in their decision making when making exceptions to lessons learned,  develop procedures to validate, monitor, and prioritize the lessons learned to ensure corrective actions fully address deficiencies identified as the most significant, and improve the organizational structure of the database so that users may easily find information and develop criteria to prioritize lessons in the database. The incineration process and the releases and construction incidents are described below.
What GAO Found

The Army has been tasked to destroy 31,500 tons of highly toxic chemical agents by April 2007, the deadline set by an international treaty for the elimination of all chemical weapon stockpiles. To destroy the weapons, the Department of Defense (DOD) established the Army Chemical Demilitarization Program. The Army has destroyed over one-quarter of the U.S. stockpile as of March 2002. Originally, the Chem-Demil Program consisted only of the Chemical Stockpile Disposal Project, which was initiated in 1988 to incinerate chemical weapons at nine storage sites. In response to public concern about incineration, in 1994 Congress established the Alternative Technologies and Approaches Project to investigate alternatives to the baseline incineration process. The Chemical Stockpile Disposal Project operates a Programmatic Lessons Learned Program whose aim is to enhance safety, reduce or avoid unnecessary costs, and maintain the incineration schedule. This program has successfully supported the incineration project's primary goal to safely destroy chemical weapons and has captured and shared many lessons from past experiences and incidents. However, the Lessons Learned Program does not fully apply generally accepted knowledge management principles and lessons sharing best practices, thereby limiting its effectiveness. The program's management plan does not provide policy guidance for senior managers to help them in decision-making or daily operations. In addition, it does not have formal procedures to test or validate whether a corrective action has been effective in resolving its deficiency. Finally, the lessons learned database is difficult to search and does not prioritize lessons. The Lessons Learned Program has been effective in sharing knowledge among the different stakeholders within the Chemical Stockpile Disposal Project. However, as new components were created to destroy the stockpile, the scope of the Lessons Learned Program remained primarily limited to the incineration project. As a result, some components that could greatly benefit from timely and full sharing of lessons learned with the incineration project are not doing so.