Capt. Valeria Anderson, commander of the 257th Transportation Company, stands amid Heavy Equipment Transporters on Friday at the Armed Forces Reserve Center. Las Vegas is getting a new Army Reserve unit to handle headquarters matters for ones already here, including the 257th Transportation Company. Photo by John Gurzinski.
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Military officials say an Army Reserve unit from Salt Lake City is coming to Las Vegas under a nationwide reorganization.
The move is being supervised by a California-based regional readiness command that oversees Reserve citizen-soldiers in Nevada, Army Reserve officials confirmed in interviews last month.
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They said the 650th Regional Support Group out of Salt Lake City will be relocated to the Las Vegas Valley around Oct. 1.
"The Army Reserve has decided it needs a command-and-control brigade in Las Vegas due to increasing population in that area," said Col. Steve Mogan, chief operating officer for the 63rd Regional Readiness Command in Los Alamitos, Calif.
The 650th Regional Support Group is a nondeployable, command-and-control headquarters unit consisting of 60 soldiers commanded by a colonel. About a dozen of the 60 will be full-time soldiers who will bring a combined payroll to Las Vegas of about $800,000 per year, Mogan said.
The entire unit will drill once a month on weekends with annual training of two weeks to four weeks per year.
Mogan said the readiness command's engineer is looking at leasing a facility or building a new one to house the 650th.
The addition of 60 Army Reserve soldiers will bring to 735 the number serving in Nevada-based units.
The 650th now falls under the 96th Regional Readiness Command at Fort Douglas, Utah. But the 10 regional readiness commands nationwide are being transformed into four regional readiness support commands.
The nationwide consolidation of Army Reserve commands has created the new 63rd Regional Readiness Support Command at Moffett Field, Calif., to oversee Army Reserve facilities in Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico along with those now under the 63rd in Nevada, Arizona and California.
The reorganization is expected to be completed by 2009.
As envisioned by Army Reserve Chief Lt. Gen. Jack Stultz, the transformation is needed to "design the force to fit the fight."
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 "changed the playing field and the rules of the game" for deploying the Army Reserve, Stultz was quoted as saying in the summer edition of Soldiers magazine.
"Since early 2003, we have had about 40,000 Army Reserve soldiers mobilized ongoing in support of operations Noble Eagle, Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom," Stultz said.
"The challenge is to maintain that level of support to the war on an enduring basis. To that end we have no choice but to change our structure."
The restructuring entails putting various units under deployment authority based on the function of the unit rather than the region where they are located.
For example, a truck unit from Nevada will report for deployment through a truck unit command in Louisiana. Army Reserve signal units from across the United States will fall under the theater signal command in Hawaii.
The new arrangement doesn't shrink the size of the Army Reserve.
Instead, it consolidates headquarters' command-and-control support to make war-fighting units more efficient.
Since 9/11, more than 158,000 Army Reserve soldiers have been mobilized for an average of 380 days, according to a report by Maj. Ramon Torry, mobilization planner at the 63rd Regional Readiness Command.
In Nevada, Army Reserve units that have been deployed or could be deployed are the:
• 257th Transportation Company, about 300 soldiers.
• 314th Combat Service Sustainment Battalion, 74 soldiers.
Most soldiers assigned to the 257th Transportation Company "Rolling Thunder" were deployed for Operation Iraqi Freedom after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
The company spent 346 days in Kuwait and Iraq, traveling 2.25 million miles in 93 Heavy Equipment Transporters, powerful trucks with goose-neck trailers.
Sixty-eight of the company's tractor-trailer rigs that moved tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles around Iraq's battlefields have since been rebuilt and are stored at the Armed Forces Reserve Center at Nellis Air Force Base.
Forty Army Reserve soldiers assigned to the 313th Military Police Detachment returned to Las Vegas on Dec. 3, 2005 after spending nearly a year in Iraq.
The reservists from Nevada and five other Western states trained Iraqi cadets at the east Baghdad police academy.
Their tasks ranged from instructing SWAT teams to firearms and canine training.
