Residents of Tooele and elsewhere can find the new commander of the Tooele Army Depot mountain biking through Settlement Canyon or camping in the Oquirrhs.
“It’s beautiful, I’m super excited,” said Col. Luke Clover, sitting at a borrowed table in one of the installation’s lobby areas. The bright late morning sunlight spilled onto the straw and sand outside, giving the room a yellow hue.
The deposit, more than 44,000 acres in the Western Desert, has come a long way since its creation, spurred by the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. What began as “a dust bowl, thousands of acres of sagebrush” has become a temporary period of five years. warehouse, which held a thousand German prisoners of war during World War II, according to the US Army.
After 80 years and many changes in technology and mission, Tooele Army Depot has established itself as the Department of Defense’s western center for “storage, transportation, receipt, demilitarization, and maintenance of conventional ammunition.”
In a change of command that happens every two years, former Tooele Army Depot commander Col. Eric Dennis has moved to the arguably greener pastures of Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs.
But Clover already feels time ticking away. “Unfortunately, I can only stay here for two years,” he said. “There is already a timeline for the planned change of commanders.”
‘It’s not like a normal installation’
The warehouse is special for several reasons, Clover said. Geographically, Utah’s high desert is the perfect place to work on munitions, the installation’s biggest mission. “We don’t have that much deterioration of ammunition in this type of weather,” he said.
The base is far enough from population centers to allow workers to “produce, receive, store and demilitarize munitions,” he said, while also being linked to the country’s rail and road transportation network.
But the deposit has another particularity: the surrounding community. In Clover’s short three weeks on the job, he said, “I can’t even count the number of people I’ve met who say, ‘My grandfather worked here, my father worked here, all my uncles and aunts worked here. , I’m working here, my kids are working here.'”
He said the Tooele Army Depot is not a normal facility. “We don’t have a lot of military here,” he said. He is one of two uniformed service members who work at the nearly 500-employee warehouse, mostly civilian employees of the Department of the Army.
Clover says the reason is that they are “at the top of the Department of Defense’s organic industrial base.”
“We know that everything we do reaches out to the sons, daughters, mothers and fathers of America who are serving the county,” he said. “Everyone here knows, ‘I need to do the best I can to support the brave men and women who volunteer to support and defend this country.’”
Growth potential
“Right now, the plan is not to increase or decrease the size of the workforce, or anything mission-related as it pertains to the installation,” Clover said. “But we know there are opportunities there.”
The depot was much larger in the 1990s, but later changed its mission. But Clover said, “We have a tremendous opportunity to increase the amount of munitions work… and we’re going to try to sell it to the rest of the Department of Defense.”
“We want to bring in additional work because we want to create more jobs and more benefits for the community,” he said, but the process requires a long-term vision.
He is tasked with working toward a strategic plan set by previous commanders for the year 2042, a century after the base’s founding. It requires anticipating the Department of Defense’s needs in terms of technical expertise, equipment, testing parameters and general conditions to conduct its mission safely and efficiently, according to Clover.
“How do you eat the elephant, one bite at a time?” he said. “We intend to take the bites out of that elephant and define a plan for how we take the next bites to achieve that vision for 2042.”
The new commander said he will work to address the base’s ever-present concerns of noise, safety and environmental impacts.
“I may not always be able to resolve every issue or concern, but I intend to be transparent and clear in communications to address those concerns,” Clover said.
The commander has already been seen picking up trash on the side of Commander Boulevard, which could bode well for the warehouse’s next two years.
