U.S. Army Collaborates With Austin, Texas
Austin, Texas is the chosen finalist for the new U.S. Army Future Command Headquarters with hopes of bringing fast and innovative ideas from the intellectual community around them.
Austin, Texas is known for its annual ACL (Austin City Limits) Festival, the city that keeps it weird, SXSW (South by Southwest), and being home of the Texas Longhorns.
As of July 6, Austin will also be known as the home of the U.S. Army Future Command Headquarters. The city was chosen after competing with 15 others for the spot which later came down to Boston, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Raleigh, North Carolina.
U.S. Army Secretary Mark Esper stated Austin wasn't chosen only because of its vivid spirit but also "because it offers the quality of life our people desire and the cost of living they can afford."
The new headquarters will be placed at UT Systems building downtown where scientists and other researchers will work on modernizing current military weapons and technology.
More specifically, they will be making upgrades to "...long range tactile missiles, combat vehicles and helicopters, air-and-missile defense and "soldier lethality", which includes the Army's next rifle," according to David Tarrant at Dallas News.
There will be 500 civilian employees working under a four-star general a few blocks down from UT's campus, but the placement isn't all that surprising.
UT Austin was also chosen as the site for another Army based initiative called ARL or U.S. Army Research Laboratory in 2016.
Like its counterpart in California, UT experts and the U.S. Army partnered together to "accelerate discovery, innovation, and translation of science and technology in support of the Department of Defense's Third Offset Strategy and the Army of 2050," according to UT News.
Although the announcement for AFC Headquarters was only publicized a month ago, Under Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy stated the workforce is already in Austin and have begun to work.
While the establishment has only begun its beginning stages of what seems to be a long and optimistic journey, it won't be fully up and running until the summer of 2019.
