Linda Bauer, former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory deputy director, will lead a new effort to write a “blueprint” for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) production and science and technology infrastructure.
NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby announced the campaign to “keep pace with the dynamic global environment” in an internal email seen by sister publication the Exchange Monitor
on Monday. She appointed Bauer to begin a “detail assignment.”
The “enterprise blueprint” campaign will begin immediately, Hruby said, without providing a timeline for the completion of the blueprint or details of what exactly it will entail.
“This Blueprint will help us achieve the responsiveness we need for mission success and provide a vision for the production and science & technology infrastructure,” Hruby said. “Since our enterprise is expansive and interconnected, the Blueprint will also encompass some aspects of future business systems and integration of new technologies and processes.”
The NNSA is many years and billions of dollars into a program to modernize and revamp the U.S. nuclear arsenal and its ability to produce nuclear weapons from raw materials, Hruby recognized. The new enterprise blueprint will take that into account and “aim to reflect today’s reality as well as an ambitious future vision,” Hruby said.
“We have ambitious programmatic activity and have made significant investments in recapitalizing and evolving our infrastructure,” she said. “In speaking with people across the Nuclear Security Enterprise and stakeholders throughout the government, I realize we do not have a unified and well-communicated future enterprise blueprint.”
Bauer has spent at least three decades working for the NNSA in various capacities, including managerial positions at the Pantex Plant in Texas, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee.
She will shepherd the agency through what Hruby said would be a third reimagining since the NNSA was birthed from the Manhattan Project, formed during the Cold War and solidified in the modern era.
This story first appeared in Defense Daily affiliate publication Exchange Monitor.