Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
San Antonio Express-News
July 11, 2008
By Sig Christenson, Express-News
The top commander and other dignitaries at Fort Sam Houston were a tad late breaking ground on the post's Medical Education & Training Campus, but the ambiance was about right.
As they dipped their stainless steel ceremonial shovels into a mound of dirt in a parking lot Thursday, a backhoe roared in the distance, laying the groundwork for a complex that will be about as big as the Pentagon and hold the military's largest mess hall.
Its mission will be even bigger: training Army, Navy and Air Force medics to save lives.
“This historic event marks the beginning of another chapter in ... the training of military medical professionals in whose hands lay the lives of our nation's heroes,” Maj. Gen. Melissa Rank, assistant Air Force surgeon general, told the crowd.
But as big and as important as that job is in a time of war, it promises a payoff for San Antonio as well. Former Mayor Howard Peak thinks the METC complex will help seed the city's growing medical sector.
“My hope is they will serve as the nucleus for more similar growth at Fort Sam but also complimentary medical growth off of Fort Sam that will provide even more medical and research capabilities,” he said.
METC, as it's called, will be home to all enlisted medical training when it opens in 2011, with 32,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen coming to San Antonio each year — 9,000 on any given day.
METC is part of $1.56 billion in new construction at Fort Sam that will add 12,100 new civilian and military workers to the post and bolster the military's economic impact on the city, which a task force last year estimated at $13.3 billion.
It is the heart of a new look at Fort Sam that comes courtesy of the 2005 Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission. The 2005 BRAC ordered 23 installations to shutter by 2011 and issued 2,513 closure recommendations, most of them mission realignments. Brooks City-Base will lose its missions, but some will move across town, one of them going to Fort Sam.
“It's really hard to fathom, it really is,” Maj. Gen. Russell Czerw, pronounced ‘surf,' Fort Sam's commander, said after the ceremony. “We're talking about the fact that we're going to put in 2 million square feet and then we're going to renovate another 1.2 million square feet. That's quite a project.”
Fort Sam was a big winner in the last closure round, landing 23 projects, 19 of them new buildings with four others to be renovated. But the Alamo City's oldest post, established in 1876, wasn't the only big winner. Randolph AFB and Lackland AFB will also get some of the $2.1 billion provided in the latest round of BRAC funding.
METC isn't exactly the cornerstone of all that construction in Peak's mind but a piece of the puzzle, a bold expansion of Fort Sam's prime mission — training Army medics and improving battlefield medicine.
“I'd rather think it's more like an important part of the whole, and I put it that way because Fort Sam already does have a significant medical infrastructure,” he explained.
“But there's going to be a lot more coming along in the base-closure process,” added Peak, a committee chairman on the Military Transformation Task Force, a city, county and chamber group trying to implement BRAC's many changes here.
“The teaching facilities will certainly be a part of that, but I see the other facilities where the work is getting done and people are being cured and rehabilitated as the critical components of the big picture.”
The METC complex will boast five instruction facilities when finished. It also will have six new dormitories, a health clinic, a gym, and the Defense Department's largest military dining hall, able to feed 4,800 soldiers, sailors and airmen.
The troops will come here with their own traditions and service-specific needs, but Rank told the standing-room-only crowd of 250 that the young medics training at METC would band together to reach one goal — the kind that transcends all others.
“There cannot be any greater reason than that for us to get this right, not only for those who are willing to put themselves in harm's way, but for the medics who will train here and go out to care for them,” she said.
July 11, 2008
By Sig Christenson, Express-News
The top commander and other dignitaries at Fort Sam Houston were a tad late breaking ground on the post's Medical Education & Training Campus, but the ambiance was about right.
As they dipped their stainless steel ceremonial shovels into a mound of dirt in a parking lot Thursday, a backhoe roared in the distance, laying the groundwork for a complex that will be about as big as the Pentagon and hold the military's largest mess hall.
Its mission will be even bigger: training Army, Navy and Air Force medics to save lives.
“This historic event marks the beginning of another chapter in ... the training of military medical professionals in whose hands lay the lives of our nation's heroes,” Maj. Gen. Melissa Rank, assistant Air Force surgeon general, told the crowd.
But as big and as important as that job is in a time of war, it promises a payoff for San Antonio as well. Former Mayor Howard Peak thinks the METC complex will help seed the city's growing medical sector.
“My hope is they will serve as the nucleus for more similar growth at Fort Sam but also complimentary medical growth off of Fort Sam that will provide even more medical and research capabilities,” he said.
METC, as it's called, will be home to all enlisted medical training when it opens in 2011, with 32,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen coming to San Antonio each year — 9,000 on any given day.
METC is part of $1.56 billion in new construction at Fort Sam that will add 12,100 new civilian and military workers to the post and bolster the military's economic impact on the city, which a task force last year estimated at $13.3 billion.
It is the heart of a new look at Fort Sam that comes courtesy of the 2005 Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission. The 2005 BRAC ordered 23 installations to shutter by 2011 and issued 2,513 closure recommendations, most of them mission realignments. Brooks City-Base will lose its missions, but some will move across town, one of them going to Fort Sam.
“It's really hard to fathom, it really is,” Maj. Gen. Russell Czerw, pronounced ‘surf,' Fort Sam's commander, said after the ceremony. “We're talking about the fact that we're going to put in 2 million square feet and then we're going to renovate another 1.2 million square feet. That's quite a project.”
Fort Sam was a big winner in the last closure round, landing 23 projects, 19 of them new buildings with four others to be renovated. But the Alamo City's oldest post, established in 1876, wasn't the only big winner. Randolph AFB and Lackland AFB will also get some of the $2.1 billion provided in the latest round of BRAC funding.
METC isn't exactly the cornerstone of all that construction in Peak's mind but a piece of the puzzle, a bold expansion of Fort Sam's prime mission — training Army medics and improving battlefield medicine.
“I'd rather think it's more like an important part of the whole, and I put it that way because Fort Sam already does have a significant medical infrastructure,” he explained.
“But there's going to be a lot more coming along in the base-closure process,” added Peak, a committee chairman on the Military Transformation Task Force, a city, county and chamber group trying to implement BRAC's many changes here.
“The teaching facilities will certainly be a part of that, but I see the other facilities where the work is getting done and people are being cured and rehabilitated as the critical components of the big picture.”
The METC complex will boast five instruction facilities when finished. It also will have six new dormitories, a health clinic, a gym, and the Defense Department's largest military dining hall, able to feed 4,800 soldiers, sailors and airmen.
The troops will come here with their own traditions and service-specific needs, but Rank told the standing-room-only crowd of 250 that the young medics training at METC would band together to reach one goal — the kind that transcends all others.
“There cannot be any greater reason than that for us to get this right, not only for those who are willing to put themselves in harm's way, but for the medics who will train here and go out to care for them,” she said.