Supporting our Nation’s Defense

Ensuring the United States Remains a Combat-Ready Nuclear Force

Minot Air Force Base (“AFB”) is home to two major Air Force units—the 5th Bomb Wing and the 91st Missile Wing. The 5th Bomb Wing and the 91st Missile Wing are Air Force Global Strike Command Units.

As one of the Air Force’s three operational intercontinental ballistic missile (“ICBM”) units, the 91st Missile Wing, whose members are known as the “Rough Riders,” are responsible for strategic deterrence by operating, maintaining, and securing a fleet of 150 Minuteman III missiles located in underground launch facilities positioned in an 8,500-square-mile missile complex located in North Dakota. The mission of the 91st Missile Wing “Rough Riders” is to defend the nation with a combat-ready nuclear force.

The 91st Maintenance Group (“MXG”)—one of the three groups of the 91st Missile Wing “Rough Riders” stationed at Minot AFB—is responsible for providing maintenance and logistics support for the wing’s ICBM.

PROJECT DETAILS

Building 546 was originally constructed during the mid-1900s as part of the Strategic Missile Support Base Maintenance Facilities at Minot AFB and housed, among other specialized systems and equipment, the encoding and decoding equipment for ICBM. Over the years, the building has been expanded many times with numerous building additions, with a majority of the original and expanded building areas having been further transformed through renovations.

Boland was responsible for leading, managing, and performing an extensive renovation within the existing, approximately 55,000-square-foot, building, as well as redeveloping portions of the existing, approximately 20-acre, site around Building 546, inclusive of removal, reconstruction, and reconfiguration of an existing asphalt-paved parking lot, construction of a new asphalt-paved access drive, and extensive underground utilities work.

The project involved completely demolishing (aka ‘gutting’) the interior of the existing building down to the original building’s structure before reconstructing the spaces with an objective of optimizing the building areas’ layout and workflow, providing greater efficiency and flexibility with the new layout and systems, consolidating the facility support spaces, updating the areas to current life-safety, energy, and sustainability standards and codes, and improving means of egress for the building occupants, the 91st MXG.

The areas renovated serve as the only source for classified maintenance of the Minuteman III ICBM for Minot AFB. The shops within the facility provide electronic, mechanical, and facility maintenance and also house the classified library of technical manuals, codes systems, secured communication systems, and secured dispatching services. The shops include the Facilities Maintenance Team and Technical Training office and are used to keep the airmen up-to-date on all current missile maintenance security and procedures. The renovated areas also serve various other groups, to include the Electronics-Lab, Electro Mechanical Team, Keys & Codes Control Center, Material Control, Missile Communications Squadron, Missile Maintenance Team, Technical Engineering, Unit Training Manager, and Technical Order Library.

The renovation was successfully executed in phases, and certain portions of the existing building were required to remain occupied and operational. To ensure that the 91st MXG could continue to function during the renovation, Boland was also responsible for designing, manufacturing, and providing temporary swing space trailers (“SST”) for the occupants of Building 546, allowing portions of the building occupants to vacate the existing building during the renovation. The SST consisted of twenty-two (22) temporary trailer units used to form five (5) large SST complexes, which also included eight (8) individual storage / work space office container facilities used for various support functions. In total, the custom-constructed SST facilities equated to approximately 17,300 square feet of temporary facility space for use by the existing building occupants of Building 546.

SUSTAINABILITY

This project included incorporating principles of sustainability to meet the program needs by complying with the high performance and sustainable building Guiding Principles requirements.