Army Ordnance School relocates to Fort Lee

FORT LEE — After nearly a century at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, the Army Ordnance School has officially begun its relocation to Fort Lee.

The Ordnance School campus at the Prince George County base welcomed its first group of students in September, and last week, the Army held the official dedication and ribbon-cutting of the school's largest training facility.

The move from Aberdeen — part of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission plan — signifies one of several additions helping to turn Fort Lee into a premier sustainment training site for the Army.

"It is the best ordnance training school available in the world," Lt. Gen. Mitchell H. Stevenson, deputy chief of staff for Army logistics and a former commanding general at Fort Lee, said recently at the newly opened campus. "Here, the next generation of ordnance soldiers will learn . . . a very important skill set, especially today in support of our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan."

The Ordnance School Campus, which is under construction, will have a total of 30 buildings on a 380-acre parcel bounded by state Route 144 to the north, state Route 36 to the south and the Petersburg National Battlefield to the west.

A bridge over state Route 36 links the ordnance campus to the rest of the base.

The campus, estimated to cost just over $700 million, will have 11 maintenance training facilities, six barracks, a dining facility, a medical building, a chapel and a gymnasium. There are seven active construction projects under way and four projects to be awarded, base officials said.

"Everybody in this area has seen construction, if they have driven by here," said Brig. Gen. Lynn A. Collyar, the chief of ordnance. The result of nearly two years of building, he said, is a campus that "provides the type of training that we owe soldiers today when we expect them to leave out of here and in a very short time deploy to a combat situation. This is the type of training that those soldiers deserve."

Approximately 500 ordnance soldiers from the 61st Ordnance Brigade, 16th Ordnance Battalion's Bravo and Charlie companies arrived at the school in early September for an official start of training at the campus Sept. 29.

Ordnance students will be gradually moving to Fort Lee over the next two years. A second large group from Aberdeen, about 1,000 students, is expected to arrive in the spring. Once the BRAC process is completed in 2011, the Ordnance School will train about 26,000 students annually.

Last week's ribbon-cutting and dedication of Rozier Hall, a $47 million building that houses the tactical support equipment department, marked the beginning of the historic transition, Collyar said.

At the 6.5-acre site, soldiers and Marines will be trained on the skills needed to operate, maintain, troubleshoot and repair ground-support equipment such as air-conditioning units and smoke generators.

Rozier Hall is consolidating training from eight different buildings at Aberdeen. It is the largest training facility at the new Ordnance School campus, with state-of-the-art equipment worth $13 million and 25 large classrooms that can be partitioned into 50 classrooms.

About 3,300 will train at Rozier Hall, which has capacity to have approximately 750 students daily. It will be staffed with about 100 people, including military, civilians with the Department of Defense and contractors.

The Ordnance School campus also houses the largest Army-owned and operated dining facility, a $29 million, 75,000-square-foot hall that opened last month, and can feed more than 3,500 soldiers in 90 minutes, three times a day.

"It took us 92 years to get kicked out of Aberdeen Proving Ground, and we expect to be here at Fort Lee for at least that long," Collyar said.

Luz Lazo is a staff writer at the Richmond Times-Dispatch