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Instruction is a never-ending process in the U.S military. War on terrorism or not, initial skills training and professional development for service personnel continue without pause.
"Even during peacetime, these things have to be done," said Lt. Col. Joe Dickey, an Army National Guard administrative officer at Camp Shelby, Miss. "We train thousands of soldiers a year and we need the facilities to do that."
Located just south of Hattiesburg in southeast Mississippi, Camp Shelby is the largest state-owned and operated field training site in the United States. The camp annually hosts as many as 100,000 personnel, active and reservist, from all branches of the military.
During Desert Storm operations in the early 1990's, more than 5,000 troops were processed there.
Dickey said Camp Shelby is now heavily involved in mobilizing units for deployment and is now being officially referred to as Mobilization Center Shelby.
But providing any kind of training in an efficient manner when resources are scattered can be problematic. So several years ago, a multiphase construction project was developed to bring the camp's instructional facilities together in one place.
In Phases one and two, new classrooms and barracks were completed. Now under construction is Phase III, a new administrative office building. Altogether, the three components comprise the Regional Military Education Center.
"The initial plans were probably drawn up 10 years ago, so we've needed this for a while," Dickey said. "Right now, we're operating out of cinder-block buildings built in the 1960s that were meant to be temporary."
Matt Haike, an architect with Barlow Eddy Jenkins of Jackson, said the current phase of the project is a two-story structure with administrative offices on the second floor and other support spaces on the ground floor. The building has two wings.
"It's real straightforward construction but with custom-designed details," he added. "And they're not just standard details. They are distinctly different in some ways, but they blend in with the form of the other buildings in the area."
Haike said the basic elements of the RMEC buildings are fairly standard and include metal roofs, concrete foundations, steel infrastructures and brick exteriors.
"All the buildings in this group are built with brick that was chosen at the beginning of the project, so we have a unified palette of material," he said. "We've been designing the whole group of buildings since the beginning, so it's a unified complex."
The contractor on this nearly $5 million phase of the RMEC is Mac's Construction Company of Hattiesburg. The project manager is Andy Simmons.
But not only do new buildings figure into the instructional process at Camp Shelby, so do runways - in particular, an $8 million runaway project now underway. A joint effort of the Army National Guard and Air National Guard, the new strip is designed to accommodate eight C-17 transport planes that have been assigned to Mississippi.
These large planes are specially designed for operations that provide only limited landing space. But landing 500,000 pounds of operating weight on less than 5,000 ft. of runway takes practice.
"We periodically have to qualify and maintain our currency in short field landings, and in the U.S. there are only five runways that meet those training requirements," said Lt. Col. Buster Swinney, a pilot with the 172d Airlift Wing out of Jackson. "To be efficient in our training, we needed to have a runway on which to maintain our competency close to home, and Camp Shelby was the obvious choice. It's only 90 mi. away and has the flexibility to accommodate what we needed. That determined the site for us."
Swinney said preparing to place a runway on the site took some doing, particularly after the engineering battalion assigned to clear the land was deployed to Iraq and the project had to be re-bid. But once that hurdle was cleared, a lot of dirt had to be shifted.
"We basically moved a hill to a valley," he added.
In more exact terms, about 600,000 cu. yds. of dirt was moved.
"We also built an access road into the site, and some drainage work was involved," said project manager Preston Tootle of APAC's Mississippi division.
The runway itself consists of a granular base topped by a 12- to 13-in. stone base, topped by 6 in. of asphalt. The east and west approaches have a stone sub-base topped with 13 in. of concrete. Tootle said the entire project has required 28,000 sq. yds. of concrete.
When finished, the airstrip will provide 3,500 ft. of runway with paved overruns and underruns totaling 600 ft., Swinney said. Altogether, it will provide 4,100 lin. ft. of available landing space on a 90-ft.-wide expanse. The current phase of the runway project also includes a parking apron with parking for two C17s, runway lighting, message panels, a crash rescue station, storage areas and utilities.
Originally scheduled for completion in January, the project suffered delays from Hurricane Katrina of about six weeks in August and September.
"The storm destroyed the electrical power access to the future building," Tootle said. "We'll probably need a time extension due to the weather and the scope of work involved."
Swinney said future plans for the runway area include a fire station with offices, a three-story tower, a taxiway and additional concrete parking areas for the planes. This multi-million dollar addition is set to bid in January.
Other Camp Shelby projects, in varying stages of completion, include:
* A nearly completed $35 million multi-purpose range complex.
* A just completed $1.8 million range control project.
* A recently awarded approximately $2.7 million wastewater treatment facility.
* Two weapons cleaning facilities at a cost of just under $1 million for both.
* A Military Operations Urban Terrain Training Facility at just under $5 million.
* Ongoing sewer collection system repairs at approximately $3 million.
* Repairs, large and small, to hundreds of buildings damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
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