Ron Plante of all people turned up this facility, which was an absolute surprise to everyone including the good folks at the ADA Center right there on Fort Bliss. He deserves a major league attaboy for stumbling across the site which is smack in the middle of the post.
Obviously, during the system's brief operational life Army Air Defense Command, US
Safeguard Command or Training & Doctrine Command built this small installation and I do mean small; at most it measures maybe 60 by 120-feet. The fac's at the northeast corner of Taylor Street and Jeb Stuart Road, lat/long 31-38-16N/106-25-20W. It's immediately adjacent to the 6
th ADA Brigade's motor pool and garage complex (a nice young 6
th ADA troop escorted me onto the site; like everyone else, he didn't have a clue of its significance) and incorporates five concrete caps which represent the blast doors for
Spartan and
Sprint missiles. They're appropriately spaced from two actual silos; according to Dave Ross, curator for the ADA museum, the tubes and adjacent loading masts were the same as those found at the Mickelsen
Safeguard site and served in the loading and maintenance training roles.
Thanks to Ron and Dave, we apparently have an answer to the question of whether the Army actually got to a point of setting up a training facility for the
Safeguard program. Did the current motor pool serve as the remainder of the training complex? That question remains unanswered at this time.
