Rep. Beto O’Rourke: Unique mission makes Fort Bliss valuable for Army and El Paso
Last week I joined Mayor Oscar Leeser, the leadership of the Greater Chamber of Commerce and key community stakeholders to meet with representatives from the U.S. Army who are conducting what is officially known as a Supplemental Programmatic Environmental Assessment.
Essentially, this is part of a formal analysis for a possible military force reduction that could bring the size of our Army from 562,000 in 2012 to 420,000 by the end of the decade.
Fort Bliss and White Sands Missile Range form the largest military installation in the country. At 3.3 million acres, it is larger than the state of Connecticut, and can easily fit eight other military installations within its footprint, including Fort Hood (215,000 acres) and Fort Irwin (768,000 acres).
It’s one of only two places in the country where the airspace is restricted all the way to space (the other being the White House). And in addition to the 30,000 soldiers stationed at Bliss, 50,000 more trained here last year and 43,000 were mobilized in 2013 — half the Army’s entire load.
This makes Fort Bliss the Army’s best platform for power projection worldwide.
The benefits of Bliss are clearly of great value to the Army — they can test any weapon, train any formation, and mobilize for any mission at Fort Bliss. It explains why DoD has invested nearly $7 billion in Fort Bliss over the last ten years and why we are confident that if the Army is forced to make tough decisions about where to cut, it will continue to see value here.
But of course Fort Bliss generates significant value to El Paso as well. The missions, the leadership, the soldiers and families, all bring pride and distinction to this community.
They also create an annual economic impact of $6 billion that generates 60,000 jobs in El Paso. These conditions help explain why this community, not one of the wealthiest, has funded billions in infrastructure, transportation and quality of life investments and why we continue to provide financial support for the operations of the installation.
But perhaps most exciting for the future of both the Army and El Paso are the Brigade Modernization Command exercises that are held here each year, like the Network Integration Evaluation which tests all new communications equipment for the Army.
Soon Fort Bliss will also host the Army Warfighting Assessment where the Army will evaluate new technology beyond just communications equipment. For the foreseeable future, the Army will continue to take advantage of the testing infrastructure it has already invested in Fort Bliss.
This is an unparalleled opportunity for El Paso to begin to add greater value to the significant systems being tested and deployed here.
With El Paso/Juarez comprising the seventh-largest manufacturing platform in North America; with UTEP’s Keck Lab a national leader in additive prototyping and manufacturing; with the significant number of engineers who graduate from El Paso each year; with the business, community and political leadership we have today — we should seize this opportunity to create more value in design, research, engineering, testing and marketing of the military technologies that are first fielded at Fort Bliss.
In other words, let’s work hard to preserve the gains made by Fort Bliss over the last decade during this time of cuts in force size.
But let’s also capitalize on this unrivaled opportunity to add more value to the flow of federal dollars and private technology coming through the installation. It’s a chance for El Paso to maximize its investment in Fort Bliss and help define the future of military technology.
Rep. Beto O’Rourke of El Paso represents Texas’ 16th Congressional District.
Originally published at www.elpasotimes.com on March 29, 2015.
