Heidi Virginia Brown [1] (born 20 July 1959) [2] is a retired U.S. Army Major General who was the first woman to command an air defense battalion and later, in combat, an air defense brigade.
Heidi Virginia Brown [1] (born 20 July 1959) [2] is a retired U.S. Army Major General who was the first woman to command an air defense battalion and later, in combat, an air defense brigade.
Born in Texas [2] and raised in El Paso, Brown graduated from Austin High School in 1977. [3] [4] That same year, she was nominated by Congressman Richard Crawford White to the United States Military Academy. [5] In 1981, she graduated from the second West Point class to include women. [3] In 1993, she graduated from the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. [6] Later, she earned a master's degree in education from the University of South Carolina. [7]
Brown worked at the Pentagon where she developed a computer program to identify demographic profiles of deployed Army units. [8] In September 1997, she returned to Ft. Bliss. [8] She was in charge of a PATRIOT missile battalion in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the late 1990s. [9] During this time, when she led the 2-43 Air Defense Artillery Battalion, she became the first woman to command an air defense battalion. [8] [10]
In 2002, Brown became the first woman to command an air defense artillery brigade in the Army. [3] In 2003, she became the first woman to command a brigade, the 31st Air Defense Artillery Brigade, in combat during the Iraq War. [4] [11] In 2008, she took a new assignment in combat support operations. [9] Later she became the director of global operations for the U.S. Strategic Command stationed in Offutt Air Force Base. [4]
Brown retired as an Army Major General in 2017. [4] She retired to Locust Grove, Virginia. [4]
Fort Bliss is a United States Army post in New Mexico and Texas, with its headquarters in El Paso, Texas. Named in honor of LTC William Bliss (1815–1853), a mathematics professor who was the son-in-law of President Zachary Taylor, Ft. Bliss has an area of about 1,700 square miles (4,400 km2); it is the largest installation in FORSCOM and second-largest in the Army overall. The portion of the post located in El Paso County, Texas, is a census-designated place with a population of 8,591 as of the time of the 2010 census. Fort Bliss provides the largest contiguous tract of restricted airspace in the Continental United States, used for missile and artillery training and testing, and at 992,000 acres boasts the largest maneuver area. The garrison's land area is accounted at 1.12 million acres, ranging to the boundaries of the Lincoln National Forest and White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Fort Bliss also includes the Castner Range National Monument.
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The 11th Air Defense Artillery Brigade is an air defense artillery brigade of the United States Army stationed at Fort Bliss.
The 31st Air Defense Artillery Brigade is an air defense artillery brigade of the United States Army based at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
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This article lists events involving Women in warfare and the military in the United States since 2011. For the previous decade, see Timeline of women in warfare and the military in the United States, 2000–2010.
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