17 minute read
HUNTSVILLE CENTER
Engineering solutions for USACE’s toughest challenges and the evolution of an adaptive organization
BY CATHERINE CARROLL, U.S. Army Engineering and Support Center, Huntsville
I recently had a conversation with Albert “Chip” Marin III, who has been the programs director for the U.S. Army Engineering and Support Center, Huntsville, for two-and-a-half years, and asked him what seemed like a simple question: “What does Huntsville Center do?” The answer turns out to be rather complex and constantly evolving.
Ask 20 people what Huntsville Center does and you may get 20 different answers. Huntsville Center is more often than not defined comparatively by what it doesn’t do. Because what it does is – everything else. The center is often defining its mission as it goes, innovating in order to get the job done when the job has never been done before. Simply put, Huntsville Center “Revolutionizes.”
What does Huntsville Center do?
Albert “Chip” Marin III: Huntsville Center is the backup for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ 43 districts and centers. The districts and centers all do new construction, and they do civil works. We do neither. We are the folks who come in behind what all the other districts do to sustain and maintain existing facility, utility, and infrastructure. So, if it’s already out there, already built, it now needs to be maintained. It will need to be upgraded. It will need to be repaired or renovated. Often, needs change and a facility needs to be repurposed or the codes have changed, like the national electric code or cybersecurity compliance, and the facility needs to be updated. Most of what we do is cutting-edge technology. And we are creating solutions for challenges that may not have existed before. That’s what we do.
If I’m in a district, I’ve got one project that’s going to take five years, and maybe in a career I have four or five projects and that’s all I see. If I’m doing civil works projects, I might work on the same project for an entire 20- or 30-year career. That’s how long those projects take.
If you work in the Huntsville Center, you’re going to have 25 to 30 projects as a project manager, and they all last 18 months to two years at the most, and then you’re on to the next years’ worth of 25 to 30 new projects. So, it’s challenging. It’s something different each and every day. You don’t know what crisis is going to come in the door at any given moment. You have to be prepared and you can’t be afraid of change because change will occur each and every day, so you have to be flexible.
You have to be knowledgeable of what we are doing and why we are doing it. Without the work we do, the warfighter could not do the work that they have to do. Without the work we do, there would be thousands and thousands of Americans affected by storms or floods that would not get help.
A good example is Puerto Rico. A complete power loss on the island. People were without power for up to a year. And Huntsville Center was the only organization with existing contracts to respond quickly. We had contractors on the ground on day 10 starting to repair that power grid. So, it’s challenging, but it’s something new each and every day. It’s cutting-edge technology. That’s what makes Huntsville Center so great. And we couldn’t do any of that without our people.
Field personnel perform digital geophysical transect surveying in Afghanistan, March 23, 2015, after a surface clearance had been completed.
Courtesy Photo
We have great people from all walks of life. Huntsville Center has a very diverse culture. We have engineers, technicians, lawyers, resource managers, and project and program managers. We have folks trained in installation support, public affairs, and internal review. It’s this whole grouping of diverse people and talents that come together and help solve these challenges.
We can’t just solve a challenge technically. You have to figure out how you’re going to acquire the services that will actually solve that issue. We can come up with the technical solution, but someone has to implement it, and you have to have a contract that has to be legally sound. You need to consider the money, the resource management piece. So, it’s these project delivery teams that are absolutely essential to coming up with, first and foremost, a holistic, executable solution to whatever the challenge may be.
But then we also have to be savvy enough to over watch the project and make sure it’s being done in compliance with standards. And then to be even savvier enough to figure out that sometimes there are no standards: We are doing something new that no one has done before. So not only are we doing the project, we have to write the standards as we go and then proliferate them across the Corps of Engineers and the Army and the DOD [Department of Defense] and the federal government. In the two-and-a-half years I’ve been here, I’m still learning about things we are doing. It’s just so much to wrap your head around. What Huntsville Center does – it’s huge.
How has Huntsville Center’s mission evolved over the years?
Huntsville Center is located in Huntsville, Alabama, for a reason. NASA is located here, as well as the Missile Defense Agency [MDA]. So, we began as their engineers, building the infrastructure they needed to execute their missions back in the ’60s. Still today, we are MDA’s central program manager. We coordinate and collaborate with MDA and then coordinate with the Corps districts to execute that work. We do some of NASA’s facility maintenance and facility demolition, and we do all of their access and control entry work, but not as much of the technical engineering that we started with back in the ’60s.
Over time, as that work ebbed and flowed depending on national command authority, Huntsville Center had to look for other things to do to pay its labor force. The literal direction given from headquarters was “go find other work.” So, the entrepreneurial spirit of Huntsville Center took over, and we went out and found 41 other programs of work.
The center began to shift from NASA work to chemical demilitarization work. As the strategic arms limitation treaties took place between us and the Soviet Union, the reduction in nuclear weapons and chemical munitions was a big deal. In order to get rid of them, you had to build the facilities that would actually destroy those munitions.
So, Huntsville Center was given the central program management to build those facilities so those chemical and nuclear munitions could be rendered safe and/or destroyed. And we are now the Chemical Demilitarization Center of Expertise for the Army, not just [for] the Corps of Engineers.
Albert “Chip” Marin III, the programs director for the U.S. Army Engineering and Support Center, Huntsville, listens to project updates during a monthly Project Review Board, in Huntsville, Alabama, Dec. 12, 2018.
U.S. Army Photo by Catherine Carroll
In the late ’80s/early ’90s, we began to pick up the unique, technically complex missions. The center became known by the Corps of Engineers and the Army as the test bed for new innovation for things like cybersecurity compliance. Nobody had ever done it before. We knew we had to do it, but no one knew how to do it. So that type of work was sent to us. We were the folks who had the technical expertise to figure out what to do and how to do it, and then we would share those lessons learned across the Corps.
And then in the early 2000s, we started getting into technologies – electronic technologies, electronic security systems, utility monitoring, and control systems. Everything building automation. Today, we are big into automated building systems and their ability to operate alongside each other. Each system on its own is very innocuous, but when you put 20 or 30 systems in a building, it becomes difficult to integrate them. And they are often in conflict with one another. So having the technical prowess to include the IT folks, the communications folks, to figure out how to deconflict all these systems really allowed us to innovate how buildings function as a holistic unit.
And then, also along the way, we picked up the Defense Logistics Agency Fuels worldwide mission to do recurring maintenance and minor repair on all of their capital fuels equipment globally – [a] huge mission because the Department of Defense can’t move if it doesn’t have fuel. So, all of these power projection platforms that launch people and equipment to the sounds of the guns wherever needed, we maintain those. Veterans Affairs medical facility design and review and assist on the quality assurance during the construction.
By 2010, more than 400,000 tons of captured enemy munitions were destroyed and munitions work continued throughout the decade as forces drew down in Afghanistan and surged in Iraq. The center maintains a global mission footprint in support of munitions-related operations. Our Global Operations Division, within the Ordnance and Explosives Directorate, provides global support for unexploded ordnance and minefield clearance, munitions disposal, environmental services, and facilities electrical safety maintenance and repair services.
Then there is the still growing Installation Support and Programs Management Directorate. Along with the goal of reducing an estimated 132 million square feet of excess building space through the Facilities Reduction Program, the directorate continues to grow in support of Base Realignment and Closure decisions. Increasingly every year, stakeholders require more child and family services facilities, sports and fitness centers, training ranges, and fire and emergency facilities.
Energy is another big part of our evolving mission. How do we reduce the carbon footprint and use renewable energy? How do we motivate DOD installations to become energy efficient? These are areas where we are innovating new solutions like coordinating third-party financing. Congress does not appropriate any money for these energy projects. Private industry comes in and pays the capital investment. And they are paid through the harvesting of energy savings and the dollar value associated with those savings over a long-term contract of 15 to 25 years. So, we have become the Corps’ go-to third-party finance Energy Center of Expertise as well.
The chief [Lt. Gen. Todd T. Semonite] often says the Corps of Engineers is the organization that solves the nation’s toughest engineering challenges. Within the Corps of Engineers, he says Huntsville Center solves the Corps of Engineers’ toughest engineering challenges.
Who are Huntsville Center’s main stakeholders?
We are an Army organization, so our primary stakeholder is the Department of the Army and all of its installations globally and the support to those installations and the facility, utility, and infrastructure on them.
But our missions and capabilities are so unique that the Air Force and the Navy and the Marines don’t have the resources to do a lot of this technically complex stuff that we do. So, the other DOD services more and more rely on Huntsville Center to help them solve these challenges. And as you do a good job, good work begets more work. As we become renowned for solving technically complex challenges, the whole of federal government taps into the Huntsville Center as well, for things like these third-party finance contracts, electronic technology, security systems, utility systems. The Defense Logistics Agency is also a huge stakeholder because not only do we manage their fuels, but we do a lot of their minor O&M [operation and maintenance] construction, as well as renovation and demolition of their facilities. The Army Medical Command is another huge stakeholder for us, as well as the Navy and Air Force medical commands. They all have medical facilities globally that need to be upgraded, maintained, and sustained. Those medical services are now under the umbrella of the Defense Health Agency and are becoming more and more dependent on Huntsville Center to do their tough technical work.
We do a lot of work for the State Department, particularly outside the continental United States, helping them on small infrastructure and small facilities they use in the aid to developing nations as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development [efforts]. Those are the big stakeholders for Huntsville Center services.
What types of indirect support does Huntsville Center provide?
Huntsville Center provides three main areas of indirect support in addition to the direct mission. One, we provide technical support to the geographic districts when needed. The districts reach out for support with unique projects or technical issues that may come up only once or twice every decade. For instance, the Omaha District was building a huge command and control facility, and they didn’t have anyone on hand who understood low-voltage building systems – the electronic security, the HVAC, the utility monitoring controls systems, the building access systems. We sent technicians out there for about four months to support that district from a technical perspective. This type of indirect support allows the districts to get the expertise they need in these unique situations from Huntsville Center without having to maintain personnel in each district who may not be needed but once every 10 years or so.
No. 2 is support to the warfighter. Since early 2001, the warfighter has been deployed into some pretty austere locations like Afghanistan, Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Philippines. They need engineering technical help as well. So, we have contracts and people who are skilled in helping the warfighter do all things environmental inside their area of operations wherever that war fight is.
We do all of the land clearance. Quite often the land has mines or unexploded ordnance, some of which has been in the ground for decades. Somebody has to go out there and clear that land. Huntsville Center provides the contracts, and we actually do that land clearance.
When facilities need to be occupied, they don’t just go to these austere areas and build all the buildings they need to do the work; they occupy existing facilities. And those facilities were not built to international building code standards, nor were they built to U.S. standards. When we put Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, DOD civilians, and contractors in there, we quite often put them at risk because the electrical system might not be grounded, might not have any bonding in it, probably doesn’t have any ground fault circuit interruption capability. It might be structurally unsound. It might have mold in it. So, we don’t want to put U.S. people or coalition forces inside these facilities. Huntsville Center has the contracts and the technical prowess to send the technicians and experts out there to repair and upgrade these facilities to keep people safe.
During a visit April 1, 2019, three members of the Huntsville, Alabama-based U.S. Army Engineering and Support Center checked on the progress of a project to modernize the facility communication distribution systems in the Conference Center of the Americas at the U.S. Southern Command Headquarters in Doral, Florida. From left are Tracy Phillips, chief of the Facility Technology Integration Branch; Chris Harvel, project manager with the Communications Infrastructure and Systems Support (CIS 2 ) program; and Stacy Freeman, CIS 2 program manager.
USACE Photo by Stephan Baac K. Huntsville Center Public Affairs
And then there’s support to FEMA. If there is a man-made or natural disaster in a region, like we are having all across the Midwest, with record flooding, record tornadoes, and mass devastation, we send – on a volunteer basis, for the most part – people to each of those affected areas to help them out with housing, debris removal, environmental restoration, blue roofs – putting a tarp over houses so people can continue to live in their [homes] – distribution of food and water.
We assist with critical infrastructure and critical public facilities assessments. So, if a school was knocked down or a fire station was damaged, we go out and look at those facilities, determine if they are structurally sound – can they be operated in – and if they can’t, here’s what you need to do to get it to an operable condition.
We do the initial design and then we either assist the geographic district, award a contract to fix it, or we bring the work back to Huntsville Center and award the contract here and then pass it back to the district for execution. That’s called Emergency Support Function #3. This is a huge part of how Huntsville Center provides indirect support above and beyond the scope of our mission.
What are Huntsville Center’s challenges as it continues to evolve?
We are a large organization – 1,100- plus people. So communication is always the most significant challenge. How do we communicate and educate our own people on what the technological advances are? How do we share lessons learned ourselves?
Just because we learned something at one project doesn’t mean it’s proliferated across Huntsville Center in every project that we touch. Our ability to communicate what we are learning, how we are performing this work, what is the threat – that is our No. 1 biggest challenge.
Second-biggest challenge, I think, is just getting the technical expertise. Getting the specific technical expertise needed at Huntsville Center can be a challenge. In many cases, we are training our own experts. Most of what we do is cutting-edge technology. There are no technical schools or universities that teach a lot of what we do. So, what we try to do is take mechanical engineering graduates and electrical or structural engineering graduates and teach them the handson component. We are giving them the technical boots-on-ground experience and expertise. So, the mission isn’t just evolving, we are also evolving people.
What are the biggest areas of growth for Huntsville Center in the next five years?
I think we will continue to evolve in the building automated systems arena, because it changes daily. Where we used to have a building that maybe had a doorbell on it and maybe had a thermostat on the wall, now everything is automated and it is all tied into a network. And the protection of those network systems is huge. This will continue to be a huge growth area over the next five years.
And secondly, base operations. Someone on every installation – Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, Reserve components, National Guard – someone has to maintain the facilities. Someone has to cut the grass, plow the snow, and do the pest management. All of this equates to base operations. The installations used to have a blue-collar workforce and they could do these things themselves in the public works directorate or the base civil engineers. Those people have all been cut out of the organizations to save money. And so the only way the installations can get that work done now is to contract for it. So more and more of the base operations support is coming our way.
The Installation Support and Programs Management program started about six years ago and executed maybe $2 million or $3 million a year. Right now, it’s up to $30 million a year. And I project that in the next five years, base operations support will be up over $100 million worth of projects a year, because the demand continues to increase on a global scale. So, base ops and technical control systems are the two biggest areas Huntsville Center will evolve more and more into over the next five years.
We are a unique organization. We have a unique mission, a unique charter. We are doing stuff that no one else in the Corps of Engineers does, so if you want a challenge from a unique perspective doing technically complex cutting-edge technology, facility, infrastructure stuff, that’s what Huntsville Center does. It’s a challenge. Every day is something new.
Huntsville Center has grown exponentially over the past half a century. As the threat changes, our technology changes commensurate with that threat. Revolutionizing has been at the heart of the Huntsville Center mission from the beginning, and it will continue to be for many years to come.
BY THE NUMBERS
Through partnership with Defense Department agencies, private industry, and global stakeholders, Huntsville Center delivers leading-edge engineering solutions in support of national interests around the globe.
$3.78 billion in FY 18 annual obligations
PROGRAMS AND PROJECTS
• 5 lines of effort
• 43 programs
• 4,500-5,000 ongoing projects
• 8 Mandatory Centers of Expertise
• 6 Technical Centers of Expertise
Huntsville Center’s workforce of professional, highly skilled, technical experts is committed to providing innovative engineering solutions to unique, complex, global missions to meet the needs of stakeholders and the nation.
1,113 employees in three locations: Huntsville, Alabama; Omaha, Nebraska; and Alexandria, Virginia
PROFESSIONALS:
• 115 professional engineers
• 51 project management professions
• 20 Ph.D.s
• 17 registered architects
• 10 LEED-certified professionals
• 24 registered interior designers
• 660 acquisition workforce personnel
• 11 certified energy managers
• 6 cybersecurity professionals
U.S. Army Engineering and Support Center, Huntsville P.O. Box 1600 Huntsville, AL 35807 (256) 895-1694 www.hnc.usace.army.mil www.facebook.com/HuntsvilleCenter twitter.com/CEHNC
