The Army is overhauling its approach to military construction by turning to prefabricated structures for faster upgrades as it faces a $140 billion backlog of projects.
The service wants to move away from erecting traditional brick-and-mortar facilities over many years to embrace more modern commercial construction practices. It will look for opportunities to put up more affordable, repeatable buildings that are designed to last 25 years rather than 50, and to replace failing facilities wholesale rather than spending time and money on repairs.
Officials hope the changes will get new infrastructure finished up to 50% faster and 30% cheaper — numbers the Army’s installations boss called “very audacious” and “slightly crazy.”
“Even if we don’t make those goals precisely, the fact that that’s our target we’re shooting for is going to deliver some results,” Jordan Gillis told reporters Monday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in Washington.
To make progress, the Army is rethinking requirements it says lead to unnecessary costs and slower timelines. It has ended the requirement that Army facilities receive LEED Silver certification for eco-friendly design, which Gillis said were well-intentioned but led officials to waste money for the sake of earning points toward that designation, like putting a “bike rack at a building [that is] … only accessible from the highway.” That alone can save the service around $45 million, or 6% of military construction costs, each year.
The service wants to do more planning up front for a better idea of what projects entail and how much they could cost. Gillis told reporters contracts will be awarded earlier in a project’s design so that the firm selected can have a greater say in the final product and offer more potential cost efficiencies.
The Army is also narrowing the scope of its environmental impact reviews and delegating historic preservation work to local installations, eliminating “redundant state-level reviews” for more than 110,000 structures that date back to World War II or the Cold War.
David Dentino, a deputy assistant secretary under Gillis, reforming review processes is “meant to get after being able to be flexible enough as the Army has to pivot as we learn new ways to fight.”
“What was a requirement five years ago isn’t a requirement now, but we had such a rigid process that we were making our senior leaders extremely frustrated with our MILCON when they would want to try and pivot those projects,” he said.
And it wants to expand the “repair by replacement” authority it received from Congress from a pilot program into an approach used for projects across the Army. That may be particularly useful as the service accumulates a host of new equipment under the Army Transformation Initiative. The service’s flagship modernization effort, championed by former Secretary Dan Driscoll, has invested in tools the Army believes are critical to modern war but hasn’t kept pace with the infrastructure upgrades needed to wield them.
“I don’t go to an installation, hardly, where they don’t walk me into some 60-year-old hangar and say, ‘You know what, the new aircraft doesn’t fit through this door,’ or, ‘You know what, the new vehicle that we’ve got, the new tank, the new version of the Stryker, the cranes and the doors on this are too small for that vehicle,’” Dentino said.
Replacing outdated or ill-fitting structures with 3D-printed or tension fabric structures, for instance, could be easier and less costly to maintain, while better meeting the needs of a particular mission.
Though the Army has identified more than 40 barracks it wants to replace rather than repair, it’s unclear which of them Congress will approve. Lawmakers allocated nearly $4 billion to the active-duty Army for military construction in 2026, including $1 billion through the first reconciliation bill. The service is asking for about $2 billion for active-duty construction in 2027.
The service says it will consider which facilities beyond barracks could be replaced by a more temporary or cookie-cutter structure, like maintenance areas or firehouses, and which should be purpose-built from scratch, like administrative buildings.
Congress must ultimately broaden the facility replacement authority to include structures other than dorms for the Army to move forward.
The specter of previous efforts to modernize military construction still looms over the service’s ambitions. The Air Force is embarking on a $1.4 billion effort to replace dormitories for military medical students at Fort Sam Houston, an Army-run component of the Air Force-led Joint Base San Antonio. The original prefabricated wooden dorms suffered from such severe structural defects, heating-and-cooling system failures and mold that their occupants were forced to evacuate in July, less than two decades after they were built.
Dentino said the Army doesn’t expect to encounter the same issues now because the offerings for prefabricated facilities are “light years ahead in terms of quality and durability,” made with steel rather than wood, compared to Fort Sam.
The Army will ensure it’s happy with what one ready-made building delivers instead of repeating its mistakes, Gillis added.
Dentino pointed to success the Army has already seen in handling recent barracks projects differently. The service saved $90,000 per bed — about 25% off the usual cost — in new dorms at Fort Stewart, Georgia, and awarded the construction contract in about three months.
More memos are coming to further revise Army construction practices. Dentino said those deal with the paperwork involved in congressional review of projects that cost more than $7.5 million, budget justifications and how projects are prioritized.
“We’ve really focused on things like quality of life,” he said. “I think we need to look at expanding our definition of quality of life for a soldier, because it’s not just where you live, it’s also where you work.”
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