DoD Offers Unique UXO Discrimination Incentive

UXO Discrimination is a term used in the industry to define the ability of a geophysical sensor or process to distinguish a UXO item from a non-hazardous piece of scrap or metallic debris. A significant portion of DoD's research and development (R&D) budget related to UXO over the past seven (7) years (or more) has been dedicated to improving UXO discrimination capabilities. The idea is that improved UXO discrimination will result in a savings to DOD (i.e., less holes to dig as only known UXO items will be removed and non-hazardous scrap will be left in place).

In a recent contract request for proposal (RFP) issued by the Army for a Remedial Investigation (RI) at Fort Monroe, Virginia, the Army has included a unique inventive award directly tied to the contractor's ability to discriminate UXO from non-hazardous scrap. The language used in the Fort Monroe RFP is provided below.

"In 1994, an investigation was conducted at Fort Monroe that consisted of digital geophysical mapping and follow-on intrusive work. This effort attainted a success rate of approximately 1 percent recovery of MEC versus anomalies excavated. The Army will provide a fixed sum of $25,000 for each percentage point higher than this baseline, up to a maximum of $100,000. The incentive will be calculated at the conclusion of intrusive wok by dividing the total intact MEC items recovered by the total anomalies chosen for excavation by the contractor."

This appears to be the first incentive award offered by the Army, which is directly tied to UXO discrimination at an actual UXO site (i.e. outside of technology demonstration efforts). It will be interesting to see if the Army or the other Services offer similar such incentives at other installations or munitions response sites.