other capability it was no longer an IARPA programme and became a HSARPA one, for example. She stated that what defined an IARPA program was mission driven, but that mission did not necessarily need to be unique. “How we derive the ultimate


sensitivity for things like size, weight and power, is that we take a look at the intelligence mission partners and ask: ‘What do you need to be useful?’ That sets the high bar for what we require, but then we say: ‘If I had this device who could use it?’ That is a much broader community, and once we have set the metrics for the smaller community with specific use cases, and some of the use cases tend to be sensitive, then we roll them up and say: ‘We can help these five agencies if we meet these metrics’ but once you have developed those metrics you say: ‘What else could this do?’ “Things like Maeglin and Silmarils


are applicable in areas like food quality and environmental monitoring, so there are a lot of uses outside the intelligence community and so we engage with the states and the Department of Agriculture for example, that could use the capability once it has been developed. It’s a two sided thing, we base the metrics for the prototype we demonstrate on what that intelligence community needs, but when we transition the core technology it will be adapted to what the various users need, and we can also transition system components for some use cases, or new algorithms, or spectral library data. I have 20 agencies in my transition tracking document are interested in different components of the chemical detection equipment, many of them are not in the intelligence community, but that’s who drove the creation.” The Maeglin and Silmarils projects


are the limit of IARPA’s work in chemical detection for now (though projects like Ithildin touch on it). While it is a collaborative approach, in terms of capturing requirements from the community, it is the vision of the programme manager, Dr DeWitt. “I was the first chemist to work at IARPA and have the majority of the chemical detection portfolio for now. There is an


MAEGLIN and SILMARILS are aimed at intelligence agencies, like the FBI ©CBRNe World


overarching vision [above mine] as we took a look across the board at where the biggest holes are and started programmes to address those gaps. All the government programme managers running these programmes are experts in their fields and part of that is knowing what is being done in government, academia, industrial and early stage conceptual research. “You need to know everything that is


out there, but especially what government is doing. As an organisation that does fundamental and early applied research we don’t field things, we look for transition partners to take things to the point of being ready to field. We do the early high risk, high payoff development, so in finding mission partners we need to be sure that if we build something then someone could use it. We transition a lot of components of programmes, as well as final prototypes. For example a lot of data that has been collected as part of Silmarils is already being used by mission partners for library signatures and things, we are planning on having the open portion of the data posted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for use by the general public.” That partner approach makes


projects like Maeglin an intriguing mix. They are shooting for the stars for the intelligence community, in terms of


SWP and detection levels, yet if they only reach the moon that might be ok for other partners. “We develop a brassboard level prototype and demonstrate a kitchen sink capability. Yet we are looking for full spectra and laboratory quality identification out of a portable system, and that is a hard bar to cross. A lot of applications don’t need such a system, they are looking for a screening sensor, or a smaller library, that you could put priors in the system [rather than trying] to detect 500 different compounds. Those are all things that make the problem easier and make it smaller and cheaper to build.” “What we will demonstrate is the


kitchen sink capability and get as far as we can to meet the hard programme metrics. It may be that a 50% solution is all that some other applications need, if we can get to 90% we did better than they needed. We are not building low- rate production prototypes so the output of the programme is the demonstration, the data that showed what happened and all the drawings and the capability. Any agency that wants to sign a memorandum of understanding we will transition all the info to them and they can go back to the different performers and say: ‘This is the prototype that I need…’ We don’t typically go far enough into the development chain to have a full bill of materials, or define what casing or


www.cbrneworld.com CBRNe Convergence, Orlando, USA, 6-8 November 2018 www.cbrneworld.com/convergence2018


February 2018 CBRNe WORLD


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