The Plan Behind the Plan: How Military Installation Master Plans Actually Get Made

The Plan Behind the Plan: How Military Installation Master Plans Actually Get Made

By Nathaniel Pyron

Every building on a military installation started as a box on a map that most people will never see. Before the groundbreaking, before the DD1391, before the budget line in the military construction program, there was a master plan — and before there was a master plan, there was a process for making one. If you want to understand how military bases actually get built, you have to understand the machine that produces the plan.

I have spent my career inside that machine. As a civilian community planner working with the Marine Corps at Camp Blaz and in Darwin, Australia, I learned that the master plan is not a binder that sits on a shelf. It is the document that decides what gets built, where it goes, and — just as important — what never gets built at all. Nathaniel Pyron still believes the most important thing a planner can do for an installation is keep that document honest, current, and tied to the mission.

The rulebook is UFC 2-100-01, Installation Master Planning — the Department of Defense's governing instruction for how military master plans get made. First issued in 2012 and carried through a 2020 edition (with the latest change in March 2025), it lays out the process in stages. Walked through properly, those stages are the difference between a plan and a pile of drawings.

Stage one: the Vision Plan

Every master plan starts with a vision — not a slogan, but a working agreement between the planners, the mission owners, and the community about what the installation is supposed to become. The Vision Plan documents that agreement with three things: a vision statement, a Framework Plan that divides the installation into planning districts, and a Constraints and Opportunities Map that shows what the land will and will not allow.

When the process was fully applied at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, the planners and stakeholders built their vision statement in public workshops: "In support of Service members, families, and the mission, we will create a sustainable community of walkable neighborhoods with identifiable town centers connected by complete streets." That sentence then governed everything that followed. If a proposal did not serve it, the proposal did not survive. That is what a vision statement is for — it is a filter, not a poster.

Stage two: Installation Planning Standards

Once the vision is set, the plan writes down the rules of the built environment: standards for streets, buildings, and landscapes that apply installation-wide. This is where military planning borrowed from civilian practice — the standards work like form-based codes, regulating the shape and character of development rather than just separating uses. How wide are the streets? How do buildings meet them? What do the landscapes between them look like?

These standards matter because installations turn over staff constantly. A new commander, a new public works director, a new tenant — none of them were in the room when the vision was written. The planning standards carry the intent forward so that projects designed five or ten years from now still build the same installation the vision described.

Stage three: Area Development Plans

Here is where the plan gets geographic. The installation is divided into districts — planning areas defined by geography, land use, building type, or transportation networks — and each district gets its own Area Development Plan. Every ADP carries three core products: a Regulating Plan that shows where things go and what form they take, an Illustrative Plan that shows what it will look like, and an Implementation Plan that shows how it gets built.

On an airfield district, the Regulating Plan is where every invisible constraint becomes land-use law: the explosive safety arcs, the AICUZ noise contours, the Part 77 height surfaces, the wildlife-hazard zones. This series has spent weeks walking through those constraints one by one; the ADP is the document where they all land together. I have seen this from the inside — the Travis ALZ training-area overlay I worked on with Solano County's planners is exactly the kind of airspace constraint that has to live inside a regulating plan, or it lives nowhere.

The genius of the ADP structure is that it makes the master plan modular. As mission requirements or command priorities change, one district's ADP can be updated without redoing the entire installation plan. The master plan stays a living document because it was designed in increments — and each district gets its own plan summary, known in the Army as the Real Property Master Plan Digest.

Stage four: the networks and the money

The ADPs are linked by Network Plans: installation-wide regulating and illustrative plans, plus transportation, pedestrian and bikeway, and open space networks. Utilities, roads, and parks do not respect district boundaries, so the network layer makes sure the districts still add up to one installation. The process also draws a growth boundary — the line beyond which the installation will not sprawl — and requires that boundary be reviewed every five years.

Then comes implementation, where the plan meets the money. The Development Program is the plan's project list: the facilities, infrastructure, and land moves that have to happen, sequenced and costed. This is the handoff between planning and programming — the point where boxes on the map become DD1391s, MILCON projects, and funded work. Congressional research on military construction treats "developing or revising an installation's master plan" as part of the advance planning phase of every project. The plan is the project's birthplace.

Stage five: the Plan Summary

Finally, the whole effort gets documented in a Plan Summary — a record of the vision, the standards, the ADPs, the networks, and the implementation program, written so that someone outside the planning profession can understand it. The plan has to outlive the planners who made it, and the summary is how it does that.

The Pacific angle

On Pacific installations, this process carries an extra weight. Space is the scarcest resource on an island — there is no "other side of the base" to sprawl into, and the growth boundary is not a planning preference, it is a fact of geography. I saw this in the Army Garrison Hawaii real property master plan update, where planners and soldiers sat down in workshops to lay out district plans, presented their preferred plans to senior leaders, and called the result a living document with a 30-to-50-year horizon. When land is finite, the master plan is the only mechanism that keeps competing needs — housing, training, the flight line, the fuel farm — from devouring each other. The process exists to make those tradeoffs on paper, where they are cheap, instead of on the ground, where they are not.

The planner's five moves

If you are handed a military installation and told to produce or update a master plan, here is how I would run the process:

1. Start with the vision, and mean it. Write the vision statement with the people who will live under it, and then let it actually kill bad proposals. A vision that filters nothing is decoration.

2. Write standards before you draw projects. Installation Planning Standards for streets, buildings, and landscapes keep the plan coherent across staff turnover and decade-long build-outs. Regulate form, not just use.

3. Plan at the district level. Build the master plan as a set of Area Development Plans — each with its Regulating, Illustrative, and Implementation Plans — so one district can be updated without reopening the whole plan. Modularity is how plans survive.

4. Tie every project to the plan on paper. The Development Program is the bridge to MILCON. If a project cannot trace its parentage to the master plan, it should not be programmed — and if the plan cannot produce projects, it is not a plan.

5. Keep it alive. Review the growth boundary every five years, update ADPs as missions change, and maintain the Plan Summary so the plan survives its authors. A master plan that is not current is a historical document, not a planning one.

The machine behind the map

Congress noticed this process, too. The approach was written into the National Defense Authorization Acts of 2013 and 2014, which tells you something about how seriously the institution takes it: master planning is not bureaucracy, it is how a military with hundreds of installations keeps from building itself into a corner.

Nathaniel Pyron has watched good master plans absorb new missions, new aircraft, and new force structures — and bad ones strangle the installations they were supposed to serve. The difference is almost never the quality of the drawings. It is the quality of the process: honest vision, firm standards, modular districts, funded implementation, and a plan summary that keeps the whole thing alive after the charrette team goes home. Every building on the installation started as a box on a map. The process is what makes sure the map was worth drawing.

About the author

Nathaniel Pyron is a military urban planner specializing in military master planning with an airport/airfield focus. A U.S. Navy veteran who served in 1995, he later spent three years as a civilian community planner working with the U.S. Marine Corps at Camp Blaz and Darwin, Australia. He studied at the Arizona State University School of Urban Planning, and is an active LEED AP BD+C. Based in Honolulu, Hawaii, he writes about installation planning, airfield land use, and where military readiness meets community design. His LinkedIn title is Urban Planner (Land Use & Airspace).