About the project

Most deployments move people to established locations with existing infrastructure. Bare base and FOB stand-ups are the exception, and they are the hardest planning problem the career field owns. Long before wheels go down, a planning team is already working the layout — the work is thorough and it is done by professionals.

What is hard is the speed and the repetition. The same siting decisions get re-derived from source documents each time, the reasoning behind a good layout tends to leave with the rotation that produced it, and a defensible first draft can take a week of staff effort. IRON SIGHT is built to compress that timeline and hold onto the reasoning — not to replace the planners doing it.

The Air Force is not the Air Force without a runway. Everything a wing does downrange depends on engineers putting concrete, power and water where there was none, and on making sure the aircraft always have a safe place to come home.

So the tool starts where the planning actually starts. Plot the runway, and the camp grid orients to it: clear zones, lateral offsets, the main supply route, then billeting, feeding, medical and the rest — sited around the airfield instead of guessed at and corrected later.

IRON SIGHT was built inside the 48th Fighter Wing at the 48th Civil Engineer Squadron, by a small group of senior engineers who kept running the same problem from both ends: the exercise floor and the real thing.

The near-term proving ground is the RAF Feltwell Combat Support Training Range, where layouts can be planned, built, walked and corrected. The longer intent is broader — to shape FOB and bare base build-ups anywhere, with the same rigor and a fraction of the lead time.

Liberty Engineers lead the way.

IRON SIGHT began as an idea from Kenneth Jimenez, a civil engineer who wanted the squadron's collective judgment written down somewhere it could be reused — where power, structures, EOD, readiness, water and fuels each leave their expertise on the plan, and leadership stacks strategic intent on top of it.

The goal was never a better spreadsheet. It was a shared workspace that gets a squadron to a defensible layout in an afternoon, and keeps getting sharper every time somebody who knows the job touches it.

IRON SIGHT is a planning aid. It does not replace the base civil engineer, published airfield criteria, explosive safety siting, environmental review, or the approval chain. Every output is a draft for professionals to review, adjust and own.