Inside Camber's threat mitigation mission

A few months ago, the Army Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical and Biological Defense made 70 contract awards to 43 companies as part of a $495 million contract for chemical and biological defense.

Several contractors won in multiple areas, and one of those was Camber Corp. But even before the contract was awarded, Camber's strategy was focused on this kind of work with an entire division devoted to this kind of threat mitigation.

The company was in 1990 in Huntsville, Ala., and its key competencies include acquisition management, engineering, training, modeling and simulation, software development, operational expertise and information technology.

Camber provides these services to a number of government customers, including the Defense, Energy, Transportation, Education, Treasure and Veterans Affairs departments, and in this case, the U.S. Army Joint Program Executive Office.

Camber has been supporting the office since 1993, and therefore has a lot of incumbency within the work the group does, said KP Kilpatrick vice president and manager of Camber’s Threat Mitigation Division.

This helped the company win in the education and training, IT and logistics domains of the contract, but it was also the fact that the company has a skilled workforce with the right education and expertise, Kilpatrick said.

But the company isn't doing it alone. Camber is bringing over 30 subcontractors into the contract, most of which are small businesses with niche capabilities due to the contract’s high small business utilization requirement.

Camber is subcontracting, too; in addition to its three prime spots, the company is on other teams in all of the domains.

This contract, though, is just one example of how the company aims to mitigate threats.

“In addition to the program management support that we do, we run the gamut of installation protection, and we have a very exciting supply chain management and asset management program that we use throughout the Chem/Bio community, where we manage millions of dollars of equipment and thousands of lines of materials for the reserve component of the Army, for the National guard, and also for the United States Marine Corps,” Kilpatrick said.

Additionally, the Threat Mitigation Division provides training for firefighters, EMTs, police, search and extraction teams, and others.

“Anything you can think of to mitigate threats against personnel, chem/bio, [radiation], nukes, explosives – we’re involved with that,” Kilpatrick said.

He also touched on a relationship that the company has with the Pentagon Force Protection Agency that it’s enjoyed since the agency was created in October of 2001. Camber  was one of the first contractors on the ground to set up biological and chemical detection systems, Kilpatrick said.

There’s no mistaking the pride in Kilpatrick’s tone of voice when he talks about the work that his company does. “The mission of our customer comes first,” he said.

“The fact that we are a company supporting [the JPEO] is almost secondary to the mission itself,” he said.