White Sands missile range & fort bliss: A unique partnership to support the Army's acquisition needs

Army, Aug 2003 by Engel, William F, Hicks, Daniel C

Army Transformation to the Objective Force is on a challenging course. Success will depend on all Army commands, centers and installations redefining their roles and potentially changing traditional ways of doing business. This article illustrates how a research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) installation and a Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) installation have combined their resources to provide unique capabilities to Army and DoD customers. This partnership is an example of how two installations can work together to provide the exceptional research, development test evaluation, training and fielding capabilities necessary to achieve Army Transformation.

Efficient strategies and utilization of the Army's test and training facilities will be critical to ensuring successful transition to the Objective Force as defined in The Objective Force in 2015 White Paper. These same efficiencies will also be important as services downsize and consolidate infrastructure while still maintaining the required acquisition capability for modernization. White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) and Fort Bliss have historically provided a tremendous proving ground for the acqui-sition of air and missile defense and field artillery systems. The capabilities of these systems have spanned the domains of interoperability, deployability, mobility, sustainability, lethality, survivability and command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Operationally realistic and suc-cessful demonstrations of these domains have required, and will continue to require, large amounts of land and air space. White Sands Missile Range and Fort Bliss make up the Army's largest continuous land and air space, over 7,100 square miles of land, covering a distance of 183 miles.

The WSMR/Fort Bliss land and restricted airspace, with its instrumentation and unique facilities, provides an ideal platform for supporting the development, test, training and fielding requirements of complex military systems. The various terrain conditions, from desert to mountains to forest, can support almost all operational requirements found in TRADOC operational and organizational plans. The posts' central location, combined with some of the largest and newest rail, truck and air facilities, is perfect for receiving and shipping multiple large military units and their equipment from across the country. The area also has the Army's newest, state-of-the-art deployment facility and a major Army medical facility to provide exceptional soldier support. The innovative partnership of WSMR/Fort Bliss has already greatly supported the acquisition process of military systems. The combination of WSMR and Fort Bliss capabilities can provide an efficient, cradle-to-grave approach for getting new hardware into the hands of the soldier.

White Sands Missile Range has a long history of supporting the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the resulting advanced concept technology demonstrations (ACTDs). A recent success was the Mountain Top experiment in the mid-1990s, in which engageable track data was transmitted from an Army Patriot air defense system to a Navy Aegis destroyer. The technical feasibility of this concept was proven at WSMR. This successful research led to improved interoperability among the services. Another recent ACTD was the successful integration of the Air Force's advanced medium-range, air-to-air missile into a ground system, providing for an enhanced ground air defense capability.

As concepts make the transition into programs, budgets and schedules have historically limited the number of prototypes available for development, which in turn has resulted in a high dependence on simulations, models and surrogates to provide critical data for production and fielding decisions. This trend will continue as systems become increasingly complex and expensive. Tight schedules will require systems to be simultaneously developed and integrated at disparate locations across the country. The Army Test & Evaluation Command is leaning forward to ensure all of its test centers are positioned to support Army Transformation.

WSMR is committed to this effort and is ideally suited to support distributed testing. The utility of conducting distributed events across facilities throughout the country has been critical to many of WSMR's customers, and so WSMR has a great deal of experience in distributed testing, having conducted efforts like Combat Star in 1996-97 and routinely sending real-time data to and from multiple locations. WSMR's instrumentation development capability and future wireless LAN capabilities can provide critical support for customers like the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), and WSMR is currently developing new mobile telemetry vans for testing MDA's missile intercept programs.

WSMR's instrumentation and simulation capability have also been a huge success in the integration and interoperability testing of key DoD systems-and interoperability is a key performance parameter for almost every new system in the military. WSMR has integrated range, commercial and tactical data into existing simulators that can replicate high-dollar tactical assets to help reduce the overall cost of doing business.