Command consolidation could decimate Fort Eustis

Uncertainty swept through Hampton Roads this summer when the U.S. Army announced a significant transformation of its Training and Doctrine Command, aka TRADOC, headquartered at Fort Eustis in Newport News.

In May, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George told the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee that the command would be merged with the Army Futures Command in Austin, Texas, to form a new Army Transformation and Training Command. The decision follows a directive by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to streamline the military and eliminate “wasteful spending.” In an April 30 memo from Hegseth to senior Pentagon leadership, he directed Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll to merge the two commands to “downsize, consolidate, or close redundant headquarters.”

So, where does that leave Fort Eustis?

Established in 1973, TRADOC supports the Army by training soldiers and support units. It oversees 32 Army schools organized under 10 Centers of Excellence, each focused on a separate area of expertise within the Army. The command trains over 750,000 soldiers and service members annually and has more than 35,000 military and civilians worldwide. Of this number, approximately 2,000 are based at Fort Eustis.

TRADOC moved its headquarters from Hampton’s Fort Monroe to Fort Eustis in 2011, after Fort Monroe ceased to be an Army post under the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission.

At the end of June, the TRADOC musical band was inactivated after its founding at Fort Monroe in 1932. The band, which performed at President Jimmy Carter’s state funeral in January, was already scheduled to be eliminated as part of the Army’s realignment in February 2024 and was not part of the Trump administration’s plans. Still, it was a bittersweet moment, especially as larger questions persisted about the future of the command.

Many questions

News of the merger left Hampton Roads officials wondering how many military and civilian personnel would be affected, which functions would remain in Virginia, and whether the headquarters at Fort Eustis would be vacated entirely. It would take them a while to get any answers.
By early June, a bipartisan delegation of Virginia’s congressional lawmakers pressed for answers.

In a letter to Driscoll and George, U.S. Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, along with 10 U.S. representatives, wrote that they had received “troubling updates” from community stakeholders, which led them to believe that the impact on Virginia would be more substantial than the Army had previously shared with Congress.

One of the major rumors was that the G-2 intelligence section at Fort Eustis might be eliminated, which would result in 250 job cuts. The lawmakers said they had heard about other cuts, including at the Center for Initial Military Training and the headquarters staff of the three-star general, with ongoing general staff reductions projected between 20 and 80 personnel.

In July, a TRADOC spokesperson said that the new command will be based in Austin, but not all Fort Eustis personnel would be relocated. The merger process was expected to begin in October and continue “well into” 2026, but as of August, it was still unclear how many Army and civilian personnel will relocate from Virginia to Texas.

“When units inactivate or change mission, a move for military personnel is not automatic,” TRADOC spokesperson Maj. Chris Robinson said in a July email. “Several factors — such as rank, current position and stabilization, among other factors — determine whether a soldier will relocate. There may even be opportunities for soldiers to transfer to a different unit on Fort Eustis. Each soldier can work with the Army to explore assignment options that support their career goals and family needs. In most cases, Army personnel will stay at one assignment for two or three years.”

Robinson added in July that the command’s leadership is “committed” to working with affected civilian personnel whose jobs migrate to Texas or are eliminated to “identify and pursue open opportunities across Fort Eustis,” but specific numbers were still a mystery at the end of August.

Long-term risks

Old Dominion University economist Bob McNab says that even without firm numbers, historical precedent suggests such military consolidations often lead to the complete relocation of personnel and resources to the new headquarters.

“We have enough history to know that once you essentially say, ‘We’re taking this command and we’re moving it to another location,’ that troops and civilian employees follow and that you typically don’t end up with a split command between two bases,” McNab says. “And over time, you end up with a gradual reduction of forces from the site that is being taken away, to where it’s eventually just reduced to zero, and that command essentially gets fully absorbed into the new command.”

Despite the Army saying it wouldn’t entirely relocate all of Fort Eustis’s TRADOC functions to Texas, McNab says, the cost and inefficiency of operating geographically separated parts of a single command are what will likely drive consolidation into a single location over time. He expects functions at Fort Eustis to wither away over time.

“It wouldn’t make sense to say, ‘Oh, we’re going to have a portion of it in Texas and a portion of it at Fort Eustis’ just because of the coordination costs involved between two separate commands that are geographically separate,” McNab says.

While the near-term impact on Newport News’ economy may be modest, the loss of military and civilian jobs would reduce the flow of dollars into the local economy, he notes. More importantly, the shift signals a longer-term risk for the region’s military footprint, possibly setting the stage for future reductions.

For instance, McNab speculates that a diminished Army presence at the base could make Fort Eustis more vulnerable to closure in a future Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process. “If we believe at some point in time the defense budget is going to come under pressure and the Department of Defense is going to look for efficiencies, then this is a potential warning signal about Fort Eustis’ future. As you reduce the presence of forces and civilians of Fort Eustis, the argument for keeping it open in a future BRAC round declines.”

McNab says that although for the most part defense spending has remained healthy under the Trump administration, that could change in the future and cause economic pain in the commonwealth and specifically Hampton Roads.

“I think in the broader sense for Virginia, it does show the pressure that Virginia will be under in the coming years with regards to federal resources, that federal civilian employment and even military employment may not be as guaranteed.”