At long last, the US Department of Defense Chief Information Officer has released the updated version of DoD Instruction 3222.01, the DoD Electromagnetic Environmental Effects (E3) Program, into the DoD Portal for formal stage 3 coordination, or in English, for official review and comment by interested DoD organizations. It’s actually been several years on the making, constantly pushed to the right (schedule-wise speaking) due to higher priorities, reorganizations, etc. It’s been so long in fact, that I’m not sure if I have seen the last draft that was under review. Suffice it to say that the original “final” draft has been tweaked (not twerked!) several times over the last few years. Overall, the updated Instruction will represent a strengthening of the requirement to impose and enforce E3 control and protection requirements into military system procurement. I’ll try to summarize what I believe are some of the important changes:
1. It’s an Instruction, not a Directive – both are “directive” in nature, that is, the DoD must follow the direction given in the document (not optional) but an Instruction is longer and provides more specifics on the requirements included. Directives tend to be very broad brush with a lot of “thou shalts” but not a lot of “how shalt I’s?”. The current version is 6 pages and the draft Instruction is 29…that’s like going from the Cliff Notes version to War and Peace.
2. The Policy list, i.e., the overall requirements imposed by the Instruction, specifically calls out the following (which weren’t included in the previous version):
a. Built-in design and mitigation measures to preclude EMI, rather than relying on “after-the-fact remedial measures”
b. Great detail on specifying E3 control requirements at various points in the acquisition process and in various acquisition and T&E documents
c. Validation and verification requirements in both developmental and operational T&E phases
d. Mandatory E3 awareness and training throughout DoD
3. A variety of Procedures are included such as E3 in Acquisitions (milestone reporting requirements), T&E, Standards and Training.
4. Specifying the Spectrum Supportability Risk Assessment (SSRA) as part of the acquisition reporting requirements (the subject of a lot of my posts). That shows another level of seriousness about SSRAs and a strengthening of the connection between E3 and Spectrum Supportability.
5. Incorporation of requirements for the installation of transmitting system on DoD sites, which used to be spelled out in a separate Instruction.
6. Greater detail on protection from the electromagnetic radiation hazards (HERO, HERP, HERF).
And there’s more, but I don’t want to ruin all the fun! It’s all that the E3 (and Spectrum) community could hope for and I think it validates the DoD/Contractor E3 engineering community that has been pushing for its release for these many years. Hopefully enforcement won’t be a big issue because it just reflects the way we’ve been trying to do business already.
-Brian Farmer
