Facilities and the Army Mission
Soldiers Deserve Quality Facilities
With the 1973 end of conscription and transforma-
tion to the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) in the United
States came major cultural changes in many facets of
the military. Among those was the way in which Army
facilities came to be viewed as critical to national secu-
rity. In the years following AVF, it became clear that
the key to success in creating a truly outstanding force
was to re-enlist the most capable members. But these
new careerists were basing their decisions, in part,
on the Army’s willingness to meet their quality-of-
life demands for decent housing, child care facilities,
health benefits and social services, religious faith sup-
port, morale, welfare, recreation, and other amenities
enjoyed by mainstream Americans.
Today, from the initial pockets of leadership striv-
ing to meet those demands, the Army has done a
complete about-face not only by becoming a national
champion of sustainable facilities, but by putting
words into action in a very significant way. Pivotal to
its cultural change in facilities delivery have been the
Army’s adoption of Leadership in Environmental and
Energy Design (LEED) and unprecedented follow-on
initiatives, including those to achieve 25 net zero in-
stallations (energy, water, waste) by 2030. The com-
mitment of a large bureaucracy to completely revamp
a conventional business model in just a few short years
is nothing short of remarkable.