Fort Irwin contractor to lay off 60 at Army National Training Center war-simulation sites

Charlie McGee, Victorville Daily Press
·3 min read
Soldiers participate in an urban patrol training scenario in Ujen, one of the training cities at the Fort Irwin National Training Center in 2016.
Soldiers participate in an urban patrol training scenario in Ujen, one of the training cities at the Fort Irwin National Training Center in 2016.

An Orlando, Florida-based subcontractor is laying off 60 workers at Fort Irwin in less than three weeks after the company declined a contract handling critical functions for the U.S. Army National Training Center’s warzone simulations.

PULAU Corp., a global provider of military “training, logistics and supply chain management” according to its website, told California’s Employment Development Department this month it “will be permanently laying off all employees working on the (Training Support Services-Enterprise) Range Sustainment contract” in Fort Irwin — 48 workers at Building 6100 Barstow Road and 12 workers at Bicycle Lake Army Airfield 6201A Westbrook Ave. — “at the close of business on April 16, 2022, or on the employee’s last working day of that week.”

The cause of the layoffs, according to the March 15 state filing, is that the company that first tapped PULAU as a subcontractor at the Army training complex in 2016 — Alexandria, Virginia-based CALIBRE Systems Inc. — “informed PULAU that it would not exercise our upcoming option year commencing on April 17, 2022.”

The filing this month didn’t meet the 60 days’ heads-up companies are usually required to give for layoffs of this size under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. According to PULAU’s March 15 filings, this “reduced notification period” is due to short notice from CALIBRE that its subcontractor work will be ending next month.

PULAU and CALIBRE didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. A Fort Irwin spokesperson declined to comment, saying, “You would need to reach out to the contracting company to get a comment, as they were the ones to awarded that subcontract.”

Twelve of the workers who will be permanent laid off by April 16 are fuel handling specialists at the Bicycle Lake Army Airfield site, according to PULAU’s state filing. The rest work at Building 6100 on Barstow Road, including:

  • 24 range maintenance workers, two of whom are also fuelers

  • 9 range ops specialists

  • 3 electronic technicians

  • 3 equipment operators, one of whom holds the title of lead operator

  • 2 electricians

  • 2 generator mechanics

  • 2 heavy equipment mechanics

  • 2 HVAC mechanics

  • 1 production control clerk

These workers are represented by Teamsters Local 166, according to PULAU’s state filing. The Teamsters chapter acknowledged but hadn’t responded to a request for comment as of Monday.

The contract in question applies to various aspects of Range Operations, which a now-defunct Fort Irwin job application describes as “a 7 day a week 24 hour service for Military training” and “the central organization that schedules and de-conflicts all range training and processes all administrative standard and non-standard range requests.”

PULAU’s services at the Army NTC less than 40 miles north of Barstow include “firing desk operations, range/tower support for 22 NTC ranges, and maintenance support for the Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) sites and Forward Operating Bases (FOBs),” the company stated in a press release sometime after its subcontract work at Fort Irwin began.

CALIBRE is the government’s prime contractor and appears to have first tapped PULAU to perform this work as its subcontractor in late 2016, according to federally-run USASpending.gov.

The website includes disclosures showing that CALIBRE began a $26.2 million contract in late 2015 at Fort Irwin.

It then gave PULAU a $5.8 million slice of those funds in Nov. 2016, plus additional payments totaling nearly $870,000 in following years, for the specific Range Operations that PULAU is now set to shutter in a few weeks.

The Range Sustainment work appears to have transferred to a larger contract that CALIBRE has held since 2018. This contract is currently set to expire April 16 with government obligations of $56 million, but CALIBRE has an option of extending it to April 30, 2023, with an additional $13 million in obligated funding.

Charlie McGee covers California’s High Desert for the Daily Press, focusing on the city of Barstow and its surrounding communities. He is also a Report for America corps member with the GroundTruth Project, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to supporting the next generation of journalists in the U.S. and around the world. McGee may be reached at 760-955-5341 or cmcgee@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @bycharliemcgee.

This article originally appeared on Victorville Daily Press: Contractor to lay off 60 at Fort Irwin's Army National Training Center