FORT HOOD, Texas - Fort Hood’s 407th Army Field Support Brigade officially reopened their upgraded Deployment Ready Reaction Facility with a ribbon-cutting ceremony here, Nov. 15.
The DRRF is the final staging area on Fort Hood that provides deploying units a site to stage and make final preparations for their vehicles and equipment for strategic deployment by air, land or sea. As part of the remodel, the facility was closed last fall while the multi-million-dollar repairs and improvements were performed.
The new concrete pad enables Soldiers to efficiently prepare their vehicles and other equipment for rapid deployment and the changing requirements for foreign missions, such as European Command agricultural washing requirements. This upgraded area is reducing deployment time by 20 percent according to Lt. Col. Troy Johnson, commander of Army Field Support Battalion-Hood. The 924,000 square-foot pad can hold up to one brigade combat team, or approximately 4,500 Soldiers, deploying.
“This location is now fully-capable and has the capacity of handling the heaviest pieces of lethality in the Army’s arsenal,” Johnson said. “These upgrades, along with the weigh-motion scale, allows this location to support large-scale mobilization without delay. It provides accurate weight data and supports secondary load for vehicles.”
“Even though the space is currently empty, it will serve a significant role in getting troops from ‘The Great Place’ to locations around the world,” Greta Buccellato, deputy to the garrison commander, U.S. Army Garrison - Fort Hood, said. “This DRRF paving project had a huge undertaking to provide a critical deployment capability for America’s armored corps.”
Buccellato said that moving armored vehicles and equipment across oceans to where it is needed is no small undertaking. It requires a combination of rail, line haul and ports. She noted that any logistician will tell you that speed matters when moving armor.
“Right now, our team of people combined their passion for improving the readiness of our armored corps to make staging and marshalling easier and faster,” Buccellato explained. “The upgrades for the DRRF took a lot of resources, (more than) 50,000 labor hours and (more than) $18 million to make this DRRF possible.”
The ceremony also served to celebrate and recognize several individuals from the Fort Hood Directorate of Public Works and AFSBn-Hood for their contributions to this significant undertaking.
“We’re very excited about the opening of the repaved DRRF," Johnson said, "and all the hard work that everyone has done, which is so important to America’s armored corps.”
Social Sharing