Under Secretary of the Army visits

by USARAK Public Affairs staff report

11/26/2014 - JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska -- Under Secretary of the Army Brad Carson, who also serves as the Army's chief management officer, got an eyeful of Alaska's vast training areas during an aerial tour of the Interior, Tuesday.

After flying over the Joint Pacific Alaska Range Complex, Carson ended his tour at Black Rapids Training Site, 130 miles south of Fort Wainwright, the home of U.S. Army Alaska's Northern Warfare Training Center, or NWTC.

At NWTC, the Army's premier training center for cold-weather and high-altitude operations, Carson rode in a small-unit support vehicle to the top of a nearby mountain in the middle of NWTC's training area, where he received an orientation of the training area, followed by a demonstration of Alaska's cold-weather and survivability gear.

Carson also received a sand table brief of USARAK's recent successful Mount McKinley expedition from May on the actual training sand table used by the USARAK McKinley teams to plan for the expedition.

Alaska and the Soldiers stationed at JBER made quite an impression on Carson.
"Amazing," he said. "It's beautiful and a great place for the Army to train. There are a lot of great facilities here that allow us to train a lot of important skills that will be essential for the future. As the arctic becomes more important to us, and as the Pacific becomes more important to us, Alaska's going to be an important place for the U.S. Army, too."

Alaska's massive Joint Pacific Alaska Range Complex training areas offer varied terrain and extreme weather conditions and are widely used by other branches of service and partner nations. The JPARC consists of all the land, air, sea, space and cyberspace used for military training in Alaska, providing unmatched opportunities for present and future service, joint, interagency and multinational training.

"This is my favorite part, coming out here and seeing the training ground has been really amazing, and the chance to fly over a lot of the other training areas here in Alaska," Carson said. "It's impressive to see how vast it is and all the great training ranges we have here that the whole U.S. Army can take advantage of."

The JPARC is composed of approximately 65,000 square miles of available airspace, 2,490 square miles of land space with 1.5 million acres of maneuver land, and 42,000 square nautical miles of sea and airspace in the Gulf of Alaska.

The Alaska visit was the final stop in Carson's trip to the Pacific region, which included stops in Washington, Hawaii and South Korea.

His stated goal during the trip was to gain a better understanding of each command's mission and capabilities. He also sought to learn current and future requirements of the units he visited.