As the Army's 250th Birthday approaches, Yuma Proving Ground's history resonates

Courtesy Photo | According to U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground Heritage Center curator Bill Heidner, when the Yuma Test Station was re-opened in 1951, six different test activities reported back to separate home stations across the United States. They didn’t share range space, and rarely discussed aspects of their respective test missions with one another. Intriguingly, the truck-mounted MGR-1 ‘Honest John’, the United States’ first surface-to-surface nuclear-capable missile, was developed at Redstone Arsenal in 1951, and thus could theoretically have been what the soldiers saw. But Heidner says the system didn’t come to Yuma for testing until 1958, the year after the Soviet Union proved it possessed intercontinental missile capability by launching Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. “White Sands Missile Range was really busy in a post-Sputnik spasm, so some of the hiccups with Little John and Honest John were tested here,” said Heidner. “It resulted in many upgrades like telemetry and cinetheodolites and a lot of range improvements. We didn’t really have the instrumentation to accommodate missile testing prior to that: YPG was mainly a tube-launched projectile kind of place.”  

YUMA PROVING GROUND, ARIZONA, UNITED STATES

06.03.2025

Story by Mark Schauer 

U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground

The year is 1949.

The United States is four years past victory in World War II.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of 16 million American Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines, the nation is safe from the aggression of hateful adversaries across each ocean.

At Yuma Test Branch during the war, engineers used the Laguna Dam to rapidly test and field thousands of pontoon bridges adequate to modern mechanized warfare.

Meanwhile, at Camp Laguna and nearly a dozen other sites across the Arizona and California deserts, 20 divisions of Soldiers had trained in general Geroge S. Patton’s Desert Maneuver Area, rationed to two quarts of water a day. Two of the divisions hit the shore at Normandy on D-Day, and 10 of the divisions of the 20 went on to liberate concentration camps in Europe.

The nation was safe. It was time to demobilize and enjoy post-war freedom and prosperity. Yuma Test Branch wasn’t needed any longer-- it was shuttered.

And then, in June 1950, a new war began.

Communist North Korea suddenly invaded free South Korea. In September, General Douglas MacArthur led a United Nations force in a daring amphibious landing at Inchon. By November, the North Korean invaders had been pushed back nearly to North Korea’s border with China.

The weather was brutally cold. The uniforms the American forces had were not suitable for the frigid conditions. Their rations froze to the point of being inedible. Then, an American force of about 30,000 near the Chosin Reservoir was attacked by a Chinese force four times as large.

The weather got worse. Rifle bolts froze shut in the most desperate moments of combat. Tank treads froze to the ground.

Against all odds, the Americans made a successful fighting withdrawal south across two grueling weeks of some of the most intense combat in the history of warfare.

What if their equipment had been up to the extreme conditions?

What if their equipment had been tested in a natural environment before their lives depended on it?

‘What if’ was a painful question America’s armed forces never wanted to face again.

Yuma Test Branch reopened as Yuma Test Station in 1951. A new name. A greatly expanded mission. One that has continued every year since.

It would be shorter to describe what the proving ground didn’t test in the following decades. If a Soldier drove, fired, or wore it, most likely it came here before it entered their hands.

As a multi-purpose test center that took on the lion’s share of the nation’s artillery testing, it was always a majority civilian post, with engineers and technicians busy testing numerous pieces of artillery and armored vehicles in the rugged desert.

In 1958, the Airborne Test Force, the Army’s most elite active-duty experts in all manner of cargo and personnel parachutes, was stood up here.

In 1963, the post got a new name: U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground (YPG). And across the long years in Vietnam, YPG’s personnel kept up the test mission. Virtually all the weaponry you can think of.

There was even more than that, though. In 1966, the highest-ever artillery shot took place at YPG. At the same time, NASA was testing the mobility test article, precursor to the lunar rover, across the rugged ranges.

In 1971, the aircraft armament testing mission permanently relocated from Aberdeen Proving Ground to Yuma Proving Ground. The nation’s first prototype and fielded attack helicopters got their potent compliment of weaponry thanks to the efforts of Yuma Proving Ground’s testers.

Around that same time, the post’s engineers were testing a network of satellites that came to be called the Global Positioning System.

The core components of the Army that roared to rapid victory in Desert Storm: the Apache attack helicopter, the M1 Abrams main battle tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, all proved their mettle here before Soldiers needed them there. In those years, a tread on an Abrams or Bradley might last hundreds of miles. After long testing at YPG, their life expectancy is now measured in thousands of miles.

The Soviet Union fell. The Cold War ended. In the early 1990s, the economy was in recession. Did America really need to invest as much as it did in its armed forces? Across the nation, bases were realigned and closed. People wondered if Yuma Proving Ground’s story was nearing an end.

And then, once again, the world changed. Terror visited the homeland in unprecedented fashion. Towers fell. The epicenter of America’s military was attacked.

The Global War on Terror was going to be a new kind of warfare. Irregular. American forces were targeted with improvised explosive devices rigged up by insurgents. Their power against unarmored and under-armored vehicles was deadly to American forces inside. YPG personnel worked 60- and 70-hour weeks, in some years on every day except Christmas, to rapidly test and field jamming devices for remote triggers and new armored vehicles with blast-diffusing V-shaped hulls. Their efforts saved the lives of thousands of U.S. Soldiers, and the limbs of thousands more.
And during those same years, guided artillery projectiles were tested and fielded. The punishing power of the King of Battle could be delivered with near pinpoint accuracy, sparing civilians while taking the fight directly to the enemy’s own hideaways.

Today, near-peer adversaries loom across the ocean. The United States isn’t going to be caught off guard this time. In 2018, the Army formed the Army Futures Command tasked with preparing for all comers in this multi-domain new world, and Yuma Proving Ground remains at the forefront of the constant effort to defend the nation. We hosted the first two iterations of Project Convergence, the annual capstone of Army Futures Command’s campaign of learning, the second of which was the largest single capabilities demonstration in the Army of the preceding 15 years.

YPG hosts the Experimental Demonstration gateway Event making the Army’s next-generation combat helicopter and the Joint Counter UAS Office’s semi-annual demonstration to fight and defeat small adversary unmanned aircraft.

The fight is more complex then ever, but Yuma Proving Ground is bringing its best to the nation’s defense. Machine learning and AI is being utilized to drive major efficiency gains in our testing.

For as long as the United States has a military, and for as long as America wants their Soldiers’ weapons and equipment to work as it should, the work of this post will remain vital and necessary to our national defense.

Eight decades. Soldiers. Civilians. Contractors. One team. One fight. For now and always, the story continues.

• Date Taken: 06.03.2025
• Date Posted: 06.03.2025 14:38
• Story ID: 496487
• Location: YUMA PROVING GROUND, ARIZONA, US