Army Opens Five Test Ranges to Private Sector; Michigan Site Offers Ukraine-Modeled Electronic Warfare Testing
The timing is not coincidental: this opens two weeks after the Pentagon ordered 21-day munitions acceleration plans and one week after the Army disclosed it burned through 1,200+ interceptors in recent operations. Removing the legal and contracting friction lets firms like Cambridge Aerospace compress design-test-production cycles. The Ukraine-modeled EW environment at Camp Grayling is a tell — the Army is no longer testing against generic contested airspace; it is testing against specific Russian tactics observed in real time, which means private firms get access to classified threat modeling without formal security clearances if the range simulates it.
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll just removed the procurement-partnership requirement for range access, which collapses the approval timeline from months to weeks and opens the test infrastructure to startups without government contracts.
This directly addresses the interceptor depletion crisis flagged in the Pentagon's Aug. 5 acceleration memo — private firms can now iterate cheap interceptor designs at real scale without negotiating a program of record first. Watch whether the September electromagnetic event at Camp Grayling draws significant participation; if adoption stalls, it signals that access alone doesn't solve the production bottleneck.
Does the Army have capacity to host concurrent private-sector tests without displacing scheduled military exercises, or will range conflicts force a triage decision by Q4?
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