Ground, AZ, a weapons, equipment and vehicle test
site in the desert, comprising approximately one mil-
lion acres (404,700 ha). The Army’s largest installation
dedicated to large-scale, mechanized, force-on-force
exercises is Fort Irwin, CA, covering approximately
755,000 acres (305,548 ha) in the Mojave Desert (Doe
and Palka 2011). Other notable concentrations of major
active Army installations exist in the Southeast (Fort
Benning, GA; Fort Bragg, NC; Fort Gordon, GA; Fort
Jackson, SC; Fort Polk, LA; Fort Rucker, AL; and Fort
Stewart, GA), and the Rocky Mountain region (Fort
Carson, CO; and Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site, CO).
Additionally, the Army has three major installations
(Fort Greely, Fort Richardson, and Fort Wainwright)
in Alaska and two major installations (Schofield Bar-
racks and Pohakuloa Training Area) in Hawaii.
From a readiness perspective, these training and
testing lands, and their associated physical attributes
(e.g., terrain, vegetation and climate), can be viewed
as “operational analogs” for potential areas of conflict
where the Army may be deployed to fight a major
theater war or participate in security, stability and
support operations (Doe and Bailey 2007). There is
a synergistic relationship between the Army’s train-
ing to fight in varied operating environments in the
United States, and its success once it is deployed to a
particular region of the world. In Table 1, the Army’s
U.S. land inventory depicts analogs to potential ar-
eas of conflict where the Army may be deployed to
conduct real-world missions (Doe 2011). Figure 2 il-
lustrates the locations of 31 major Army installations
superimposed upon a map of ecoregions in the United
States, as described by Robert Bailey’s World Ecore-
gional Classification System (Bailey 1998; Doe and
Bailey 2001). Bailey’s system delineates and describes
contiguous areal extents with common climate and
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