Government/Military Trends

Creating Home Front Efficiencies Through Consolidation and Cooperation

Issue Table of Contents

Delivering Home Sweet Home Through Private-sector Partnerships Creating Home Front Efficiencies Through Consolidation and Cooperation The Whole Building Design Guide: A One-stop Shop for Design Guidelines Military Construction Standards and Related Publications

Earlier this month, the Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC)¹ Engineering Innovation and Criteria Office (EICO)² kicked off an initiative to combine the building criteria for family housing for the four branches of the military — the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines. The goal of the project is to create uniform criteria for the planning, design, and construction, of family housing units, minimizing the redundancies inherent in a system in which each branch of the military develops its own guidelines.

Currently, each of the military branches creates very specific guidelines for each type of family housing unit it builds. The criteria for family housing are closely linked to the rank of the individual the family unit is designed for — the higher the rank, the greater the square footage of the house, the more bedrooms and bathrooms, and the higher the quality of some of the design features.

According to David Young, architect and criteria specialist, EICO, Congress mandates such basic size requirements, but over the years, the restrictions have slowly been altered. This has provided each of the military organizations with greater flexibility in designing their new housing units. In doing so, they are now better able to provide living environments for their personnel that are closer in line with the expected living standards for civilians.

While the housing situation has improved for military families, the burden is still on each of the branches of the military to create, maintain, and distribute their own design criteria. The result? Wasted effort and money.

To reduce these redundancies and cut costs, the EICO has begun the task of gathering all family housing design criteria into a single "unified" criteria document, with the eventual goal of consolidating them into a single set of guidelines. The first step involves examining the existing criteria documents and developing a scope of work. This should be completed by the beginning of December. The new Unified Facilities Criteria (UFC) document is expected to be rolled out by next June.

A History of Cooperation
As David Young points out, this type of collaboration between military branches is not a new phenomenon. The Navy has long worked with the Marines on construction projects, as has the Army with the Air Force. And in 2000, the Department of Defense (DoD) began to create even more engineering efficiencies, with the establishment of the Tri-Service Engineering Senior Executive Panel and the Unified Design Guidance Coordinating Panel. Personnel from the office of the Secretary of Defense, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, NAVFAC, and the Air Force Civil Engineer Support Agency all serve on the panels.

“They look at the larger issues of the joint services group,” says David. “They get together on a regular basis and decide on how to work together on different things.”

It is not always possible, however, for the various military organizations to share design criteria. “For instance, the Marines do their training differently than the Navy. So they have substantially different design requirements when they house their troops,” David says. The new "unified" criteria are being developed to promote consolidation wherever feasible, and still allow for, and reflect these differences when necessary.

Employing Private Sector Standards
Along with the development of uniform criteria, the military is also using private-sector construction codes whenever possible. Last year, the DoD selected the International Building Code (IBC), developed and managed by the International Code Council³, as a primary reference and has incorporated many of the standards into its (UFC) documents. Used with modifications that reflect the military’s unique requirements, the IBC has become part of the department’s construction guidelines, which are described in UFC 1-200-01, Design: General Building Requirements.

As with the development of common design criteria for the entire military and the increasing cooperation between the branches, the adoption of private-sector codes greatly benefits the DoD, delivering cost-savings and improved communication capabilities throughout the military.