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

Training is one of the key dimensions in successful fielding of new hardware, and the WSMR and Fort Bliss land area, air space and facilities support this clement in exceptional style. These facilities are also ideal for supporting a one station unit fielding (OSUF) concept, having one location where units rotate, receive their hardware, complete crew, squad, company, battalion and collective training up to the brigade level and then deploy to training facilities like National Training Center (NTC) and Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) for a certification exercise before returning to their home station. The necessary land, airspace and training facilities required for units to become cohesive fighting forces are all located at WSMR and Fort Bliss.

The infrastructure and land space at WSMR and Fort Bliss can support the facilities required for one station unit fielding of future systems, and water, electrical and sewer resources and land space can accommodate any construction required beyond the existing facilities. There are many facilities already in place that could directly support one station unit fielding. Fort Bliss has one of the Army's major medical facilities, the William Beaumont Army Medical Center, and also one of the Army's newest and most modern deployment facilities, recently built because of the intense deployment cycles of Air Defense units to Korea and the Middle East. Fort Bliss recently started construction on a state-of-the-art rail facility.

Fort Bliss and WSMR have multiple airstrips that will ef-ficiently support the training, fielding and deployment of newly equipped soldiers. Most notable is Biggs Army Airfield, with the third largest runway of any civil or government airport in the country. Numerous tests, experiments and training events have been supported by Biggs over the years, for either the staging of joint air assets or the air shipping of critical equipment. WSMR has two active paved airstrips (Stallion and Condron), and numerous inactive paved and dirt airstrips that provide additional capabilities, and of course there are the excellent runways of Holloman Air Force Base nearby.

The OSUF concept allows for efficient standardization among trainers, equipment handlers and inspectors, and also the efficient buildup of equipment sets as they come off the various production lines across the country. This efficiency in itself has ramifications for the success of future programs. For instance, adjusting effort at a single site will allow for efficiencies that can offset potentially unpredictable production schedules, and there are cost savings realized by not having multiple teams of fielding personnel and redundant infrastructure at different locations.

With today's technologies, units should be able to complete a large part of their new training using computers, simulators and distributed training. The units would then arrive at the OSUF site with some familiarity with systems and concepts, allowing for shorter training cycles to get fully trained. It is envisioned that to support multiple fieldings, one unit would be receiving hardware and conducting detailed platform training at the ranges while the second would be finishing collective training in the maneuver area and getting ready for the final event -a deployment to either NTC or JRTC for a certification exercise.