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Development Test Command

The Mission of the U.S. Army Developmental Test Command is to support the materiel acquisition process for defense materiel by: Planning and conducting tests and simulations across the full spectrum of environments (arctic, tropic, desert, shock, vibration, electromagnetic, nuclear, underwater, live fire); Verifying safety of new materiel; and Developing and procuring new test technology and instrumentation.

The U.S. Army Developmental Test Command (DTC) is the Army's premier organization for developmental testing of weapons and equipment. The DTC and the Army Evaluation Center, both headquartered at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, and the Operational Test Command, headquartered at Fort Hood, Texas, are subordinate to the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command (ATEC), headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia. DTC includes more than 7,000 professional and highly skilled engineers, scientists, technicians and administrators, dedicated to ensuring that the equipment used by today's soldier provides a decisive edge on the field of combat.

DTC possesses the largest, most diverse array of testing capabilities in the Department of Defense, testing military hardware of every description under precise conditions across the full spectrum of arctic, tropical, desert and other natural or controlled environments on highly instrumented ranges and test courses.

DTC operates three test installations - Dugway Proving Ground, Utah; White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico; and Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona. DTC also operates five other test centers - Aberdeen Test Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland; Aviation Technical Test Center at Ft. Rucker, Alabama; Redstone Technical Test Center at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama; Electronic Proving Ground at Fort Huachuca, Arizona; and Cold Regions Test Center at Fort Greely, Alaska.

This developmental-testing component of the Army Test and Evaluation Command is continually striving to improve its test technologies to capture the best data it can for test customers. The command is also working to streamline test schedules, cut costs and keep pace with the Army Transformation through innovative initiatives such as the Virtual Proving Ground, which integrates live testing with the modeling and simulation technologies and high-performance computing in support of test programs.

One of DTC's innovative programs, the Versatile Information System - Integrated ONline (VISION), uses state-of-the-art data-collection technologies, a digital data library accessible to test customers through the Internet, and a full range of communications technologies to give the Army quick access to critical information on which to base acquisition decisions.

While the Army was undertaking the early stages of its transformation by establishing, equipping and training its initial brigade combat teams at Fort Lewis, Wash., VISION played a role by providing performance information about vehicles brought to ATC for a bid-sample evaluation. The Army's source-selection board used this information to select the Light Armored Vehicle III, an eight-wheeled armored vehicle manufactured in Canada, as the basis for infantry-carrier and mobile-gun-system variants of the Army's interim armored vehicle (IAV), an operational mainstay of the brigade combat teams.