Miriam Rodriguez
WSMR Public Affairs
The Research and Analysis Center at White Sands Missile Range celebrated their 35th anniversary with a range of events during the months of April thru September.
The Research and Analysis Center celebrates 35th Anniversary
The Research and Analysis Center at White Sands Missile Range (TRAC-WSMR) celebrated their 35th anniversary with a range of events during the months of April thru September.
TRAC, a tenant unit on WSMR and formerly under the Training and Doctrine Command, was established on October 3, 1986.
Director Garry Lambert said the organization celebrated the milestone with several events to include a culminating event on September 17 that was attended by several alumni, to include former directors.
Lambert, who acted as interim director from 2009 to 2010, said he was appointed as the director on April 2010. The organization currently has about 170 employees, to include contractors. Their structure is almost exclusively operations research and systems analysts with a small footprint of support staff. TRAC’s mission is to produce relevant, objective, and credible operations analysis to inform decisions.
Beginnings
When TRAC was first inaugurated in 1986, it was under the Training and Doctrine Command.
The acronym TRAC has had three different meanings over the history of the organization’s existence.
From 1986 to 1993, TRAC stood for the TRADOC Analysis Command because it was commanded by a general officer.
In 1983, it became the TRADOC Analysis Center, and was directed by a Senior Executive Service (SES) executive.
A few years ago, TRAC became a direct reporting unit to Gen. John M. Murray, Commanding General, Army Futures Command. As ‘TRAC’ is a well-known agency in the Department of Defense analytic community, it was important to retain its name amidst the organizational restructuring. “We wanted to keep the brand, so we became The Research and Analysis Center,” Lambert said.
Celebrating 35 Years
Lambert said the organization started celebrations in the month of April and continued with a series of successful events to end with a culminating event on Sept. 17, 2021.
“My goal was to deepen the workforce’s understanding of our history,” Lambert said. “It is hard to know where you are going if you don’t know where you’ve been.”
Lambert said the support from various WSMR organizations over the past few months facilitated a successful celebration of TRAC’s organizational milestone. “Like any other organization, we have a lot of new employees, mostly new college graduates with little firsthand experience with the military or the Army, so it is always good to teach them what TRAC is about, where we have been as an organization, and where we are going.”
One major TRAC 35th Anniversary effort was the production of a Podcast series, entitled “Staring at Other People’s Shoes” –a nod to a well-known joke that many analysts are self-professed introverts, and that’s what a lot of introverts do on occasion in a crowded room – stare at other people’s shoes.
Lambert said they interviewed six distinguished alumni, to include former WSMR TRAC Director Donna Vargas, who was a trailblazer in many ways as a female leader at TRAC over a career spanning from the 1960s through 2005.
“That was one way to get some history from people who lived it and then share that with the workforce,” he said.
The team also partnered with WSMR’s Visual Information staff to create a professional commemorative wall composed of seven, six-foot panels, showcasing the 35-year history of the organization.
The seven-panel wall spans the organization’s 35-year history over five year increments and will be an enduring historical piece within TRAC-WSMR for decades to come.
“Throughout the series of celebrations, we wanted to maintain a continual dialogue that highlighted the full spectrum of the organization’s identity and its contributions.” Lambert said. “We also wanted to focus on the people, the culture, and their contributions over time.”
To maintain the momentum, Lambert instituted “Three Bullet Thursdays”, a method by which he succinctly presents top priorities, shares what is going on in the organization at the time, a list of books he recommends, and the third bullet is usually a quote. Starting in April, he began to include a weekly TRAC trivia question to foster competition and build awareness leading up to the 35th Anniversary culminating event.
They also incorporated other fun and educational activities that allowed folks to come together, such as a trip to a motor pool at Fort Bliss, Texas, where some of TRAC’s civilian employees got a chance to tour the facilities and gain an appreciation for some of the things the organization has worked on in the past. They also got an opportunity to see Soldiers working with the equipment and had a chance to talk to them about their experience.
In order to increase organizational appreciation and pride, TRAC-WSMR also hosted several team events to include a golf scramble and bi-weekly disc golf outings with the help of Outdoor Recreation employees, who helped organize the events.
They also organized an up range tour, a Dripping Springs Hike, and a 3.5 mile Run/Walk in partnership with the folks at Bell Gym. WSMR Arts and Crafts also helped produce the finisher medals for the event.
As part of the culminating events on Sept. 17, they sealed and buried a time capsule, to be opened on TRAC’s 50th anniversary in 2036. “A lot of folks contributed predictions and mementos to go in the time capsule.”
The celebration on Sept. 17 was the final event, concluding nearly six months of activities organized to celebrate the organizational milestone. The final celebration brought together 150 people with many alumni in attendance. Three former directors attended, to include Roy Reynolds, Donna Vargas as well as Pam Blechinger, the current Director of TRAC at TRAC Headquarters, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
TRAC at WSMR
TRAC-WSMR is certainly an organization with a unique origin.
Lambert tells the story that back in the 70s, across the street from TRAC’s current location (Martin Luther King Blvd), there is a series of buildings that used to house a large number of rocket scientists. Those scientists were involved in a Safeguard Program which was basically monitoring the Soviet Union and all their capabilities. With the advent of the SALT I and SALT II treaties, they stood them all down collectively and there were now a couple hundred scientists out of a job.
The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks were two rounds of bilateral conferences and corresponding international treaties involving the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War superpowers dealt with arms control in two rounds of talks and agreements: SALT I and SALT II.
“Wilbur B. Payne, also a former director at TRAC White Sands, when it was called the TRADOC Systems Analysis Agency, told the TRADOC commander that he had a whole bunch of talented scientists across the street that we could bring in to help with analysis and support the Training and Doctrine Command. We brought them over and that is how we came to be.”
“We really were born out of these original rocket scientists. They advocated detailed modeling in the conduct of analysis and built high fidelity tools to support studies. This capability remains a hallmark of our organization today,” Lambert said. “The detailed combat simulations that we develop, run and use in house stand on the shoulders of those scientists.”
“It is fascinating how much even to this day we are influenced by the origins of our organization.”
Contributions
Among several things, one of the main things Lambert is proudest of, is the impact that TRAC-WSMR studies have had over the years. These impacts have been recognized by a number of awards to include what he calls the “academy awards” for analysis.
One of those awards is an Army level award, the Dr. Wilbur B. Payne Memorial Award for Excellence in Analysis. The other award is a Department of Defense level award, the David Rist Prize. TRAC-WSMR has won a number of these awards over the years. In 2020 the organization won both of those awards for their work on a study called Strategic Fires.
Lambert said the organization has also won several modeling and simulation awards.
“One of the things that has made it so much fun for me personally, in the eleven years I’ve been doing this, is that the kinds of analysis and questions we are being asked are constantly changing. and the folks we are informing has gotten a whole lot higher in the hierarchy.”
Highlights
Lambert said TRAC-WSMR got their start doing analysis for M1 tank development, one of the “Big Five.”
“A few years later, during the Haiti incident, we did a detailed war gaming effort of the 82nd Airborne Division’s operational plan, to help them prep for the invasion which ended up as a humanitarian effort instead. The approach for this wargame was cutting edge for its time.”
Lambert said they were also involved in the Division XXI advanced war fighting experiments over several years in the late 90s that helped the Army to develop digitized units that exist today. “That allowed us to know where our friendly forces were and to track identified enemy forces on a Common Operating Picture. That was our first experience into field experimentation, and if you think about it, that is what we are doing right now with Project Convergence 21.”
Project Convergence involves getting Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines in the dirt, both at White Sands Missile Range and Yuma Proving Ground to experiment with and demonstrate capabilities across the joint force.
“A long staple of our work entailed analysis of alternatives—statutorily required analysis that supports the acquisition system for big dollar items like tanks, artillery, missiles--all those kinds of large programs.”
Lambert said they also conducted mix analyses to determine the right mix of capabilities within a portfolio. In 2006 TRAC-WSMR won the Wilbur B. Payne Award for their work on the Precision Munitions Mix Analysis. They also did a lot of work for the Future Combat Systems from 2003 to 2010.
Then after 9/11, there was a requirement to conduct irregular warfare analysis.
Irregular warfare (IW) is defined in United States joint doctrine as "a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations." Concepts associated with irregular warfare are older than the term itself.
Current US military doctrine describes irregular warfare as having five core activities: counterterrorism (CT), unconventional warfare (UW), foreign internal defense (FID), counterinsurgency (COIN), and stability operations (SO).
Lambert said there were several years of frustration by Army senior leadership because there wasn’t a capability for analysis of IW in the Army.
“We didn’t have a capability in the analytic community to model the irregular warfare environment.”
Here at WSMR they created the irregular warfare tactical war game capability, which took TRAC about a year to create. “It allowed us to look at these longer time horizons. We used that to inform a lot of folks to include some of the reserve psychological operations units. We packaged it up as a standalone game and it gave them a way to train their folks before they went down range.”
Lambert said TRAC received recognition from Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, then Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, who had come out to TRAC-WSMR to get a briefing on it and he said “Finally, somebody listened to what I said.”
Talking about Strategic Fires, Lambert said SF was kind of a hybrid use of almost all their tool kit. He said that study started as a short question from the Army G-8, who asked “I’ve got all this stuff and all these vendor ideas. What should the Army invest in? What should we jettison?” Lambert said the study started with an assessment of about 8 or 9 capabilities.
“We had 3 months to do the work.” He said they sent teams out to the Combatant commands to conduct war games. The data collected from those wargames were used as inputs to optimization models that they built on the fly to produce results to inform the Secretary of the Army. He said this all happened in the middle of COVID-19 and his team never missed a beat.
Follow on questions prompted expansion of the optimization effort and the inclusion of combat simulation.
“It was sent to the highest levels. I am really proud of that and the two “academy awards” for analysis we won for that work.”
“We have a long history of an organization that adapts and changes to a rapidly changing analytic environment.”
Lambert said moving from TRADOC, which has a very different mission set than what they now have with Army Futures Command, was a very big shift. One of the biggest things that changed for them was the time available to do the work.
He said they used to have a year or so to conduct a study. “Now we are down to what GEN Murray calls sprints. These are really quick turnarounds, where we have 3 months to provide information to help inform his decisions.”
Lambert said TRAC has a good rapport with Murray. He said they meet with him every Tuesday to provide him study results and to get his guidance on new efforts.
“TRAC has a long history of adjusting to change and a long history of success.”
Looking Ahead
Speaking on the future of TRAC, Lambert said one of the best things to happen to them, talking about TRAC at large, is that they are kind of self-sufficient as an organization.
“So when we were moved to Army Futures Command we at least had that going for us. We just had to adapt.”
Lambert said things have changed so quickly. He said they are no longer just doing work for the commanding general of AFC, but they are also doing work for the Secretary of the Army, the Chief of Staff of the Army and other Army senior leaders.
“It has been both exhilarating and challenging to be part of the stand up of a new four-star command.”
“I think going forward, TRAC will continue to be an asset to Army senior leaders to get after their most pressing questions. We are doing a lot of what TRAC traditionally does, but we are also doing a lot of different work directly for Army leadership that spans everything from end strength, to readiness, to modernization. We have been involved in all three over the years and I think, going forward, we are going to do more of that.”