U.S. Army builds new Apache facility at Fort Riley

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is building a 119,000-square-foot Attack Aviation Battalion Complex at Marshall Army Airfield in Fort Riley, Kansas, with an estimated price tag of $83 million, the Corps’ Kansas City District reported.

The facility, led by the district’s Fort Riley Resident Office, will expand maintenance and storage capacity for the base’s Apache helicopter squadron, which currently operates out of an adjacent hangar built more than a decade ago. The new complex can store six additional aircraft under normal conditions and can be reconfigured to hold more during severe weather.

The building includes more than just hangar space. “There is a two-story administrative facility that’s attached to the maintenance hangar bay. [There is] parking, armament and ammunition storage vaults for the helicopters and security forces, support infrastructure and specialized fire suppression systems,” said Nathan Mccarn, senior construction control representative for the project.

Walsh Group is the prime contractor, coordinating subcontractors handling concrete work, masonry, and later phases covering plumbing, electrical and telecommunications systems, heating and cooling, insulation, drywall and windows. Mccarn said the vaults have concrete walls two to three feet thick with double vault doors, and the exterior will use split-face stone over concrete masonry units with metal panel reinforcement in some areas.

Construction is currently in the structural phase, with 60 to 70 percent of the main building’s structural work complete, according to Bodie Richardson, quality assurance lead for the district’s Kansas Area Office. That figure primarily reflects the exterior concrete masonry unit walls, along with completed foundation slabs and portions of the hangar’s steel frame.

Richardson’s team runs quality assurance checks throughout construction, including concrete temperature and air pressure testing and moisture and density testing on backfilled soil. On one recent day, the team inspected a slab-on-grade metal deck for concrete placement on the second floor and conducted density testing around an underground 30,000-gallon water storage tank used for firefighting.

“With any construction project, you have tolerances for all aspects of work, whether it’s your concrete slab being constructed or the cinderblocks used to construct the concrete masonry units,” Richardson said.

“You’re complying with the specifications, or if there’s something out of tolerance, what is the process to correct it moving forward?” Richardson said.

The Kansas City District has handled other large-scale military and federal construction projects in the region, including the General Leonard Wood Community Hospital in southern Missouri and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s West campus in St. Louis, which opened in 2025.

The Attack Aviation Battalion Complex is scheduled for completion in August 2027, though Richardson said contract modifications could affect that timeline.