Photo By Julie Shoemaker | Army personnel building an observation platform in the Middle East using a materials...... read more read more
The Transatlantic Middle East District (TAM) is known for providing engineering, construction and support services throughout the CENTCOM area of responsibility. For most of its nearly 70 year history, the district has focused on large scale foreign military sales and U.S. military construction projects in the Middle East. Over the past several years however, TAM has developed several specialized capabilities designed to provide more flexibility and better respond to contingency construction environments.
One of the most recent developments on this front was TAM’s standing up its own Army Facilities Component Systems (AFCS) branch. According to Tara Paxton, the AFCS branch chief, standing up the new branch at TAM made a lot of sense due to the District’s expertise in contingency construction.
“We have a lot of experience in that area as well as nearly 70 years construction experience in the Middle East which is where many of our contingency requirements come from. This made our district a natural fit,” said Paxton.
Currently, the district is only one of four AFCS design agents in the Department of Defense. AFCS design agents work underneath the Engineering Research and Development Center’s Construction Engineering Research Laboratory.
“The AFCS program helps us support combatant commands the Army Service Component Commands by providing them with theater construction planning,” said Martin Jung, the AFCS program manager. “It’s especially useful in contingency construction because it focuses on troop or small contract construction and it’s limited to initial and temporary construction standards.”
According to Jung, the AFCS program and design agents work together to keep the Joint Construction Management System (JCMS) up to date with each designated design agent specializing in certain areas.
JCMS is a computer database program that allows those working a project to pull lists of materials, cost and labor estimates, construction standards and construction schedules for a given facility. The JCMS program will also allow you to build a base design and roll up all these quantities and develop a construction schedule.
“The JCMS is a very useful tool but it’s only as good as the data in there. That’s where the AFCS design agents come in. We make sure the data is good data,” said Paxton. “The Middle East District’s specialty is utilities infrastructure, things like power, sewer and water,” said Paxton. In our terminology, each individual piece of something is a “facility”, those pieces would go together to form a “component”. Components can be rolled up to be a complex, such as a base camp.
“The AFCS is an awesome program where you can quickly provide information to the warfighter so they know exactly what they need so that when they need to construct something anywhere in the world, they can go out and do that quickly,” said Jung.
| Date Taken: | 07.01.2019 |
| Date Posted: | 09.09.2019 12:19 |
| Story ID: | 329982 |
| Location: | VIRGINIA, US |
| Web Views: | 18 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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