More than 20 U.S. Army museums that showcase the legacies of major historic units or bases will close in the next three years in a major overhaul of the museum system, Army officials said Wednesday.
A list of museums slated to be closed by 2028, obtained by Task & Purpose, includes ones at Fort Drum, New York, which is dedicated to the 10th Mountain Division, and museums at major bases like Fort Stewart, Georgia, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and Fort Bliss, Texas.
In all, the Army plans to reduce its current roster of 41 museums — 38 of which are on or near bases inside the U.S. with three overseas — to 12. The decision comes as the Army’s body for overseeing the museums deals with aging buildings and growing maintenance costs.
“We have more museum footprint than we can support and that is the bottom line,” said James Vizzard, the deputy executive director of the Army Center for Military History at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. “We can keep the museums open, but we cannot present a museum experience our visitors deserve and, frankly, our workforce deserves.”
Army museums are overseen by the Center of Military History, under its Army Museum Enterprise directorate, Vizzard said. The museums own and care for about 540,000 artifacts, which might be weapons, uniforms, vehicles or any other notable objects with historic or educational value, across its museums, warehouses and other facilities. The museums also oversee a collection of 60,000 archived documents.
Only about 1% of the artifact collection is on display at any time in the museums, Vizzard said. Historians and curators regularly create exhibits from the vast pool of stored artifacts for showcasing in the museums.
“Part of the problem is that [each museum] can afford to hire a couple of curators, but every museum should also have education specialists. That’s what museums are for,” Vizzard said. “You need to have exhibit technicians and educators and those are where we tend to skimp, frankly, and that gets back to that museum experience. You’re not getting the right museum experience if you just have curators.”
The National Museum of the United States Army at Fort Belvoir, Virginia is also overseen by the center, but its budget, staffing and exhibit spaces will not be affected by the round of closures.
One of the driving factors is the state of the aging facilities. Many Army museums, said Vizzard, occupy older buildings on a base, leading to high maintenance costs.
“The museum enterprise was created because lots of individual entities, whether that was posts or units or schools, created their own little museums,” Vizzard said. “So you had a post commander who was all excited about it and put a lot of money into it and built it up. And then the next commander was like, ‘I don’t really care about the museum. I got to train people to go to war.’”
As a result, museums at smaller bases without outside funding often find their way to ever smaller and older buildings.
“They’ll say ‘we have this really old building, let’s put the museum in it,” Vizzard said. “And as someone who lives in a 90-year-old house, my word for it is ‘money pit.’”
If the Army was to repair and update the over 100 buildings that Army museums now occupy, Vizzard said, the cost could run to $65 million. By comparison, the total annual operating budget for all 41 museums, he said, is $35 million. Leaky roofs and bad HVAC, he said, make for bad experiences for visitors and also can damage exhibits.
The restructuring, said Vizzard, was due to dwindling resources and rising costs across the museums, which often occupy old, poorly maintained buildings on the bases they
The move was not, Vizzard said, a reaction to the flurry of federal budget cuts under President Donald Trump, either via the Elon Musk-run Department of Government Efficient, or DOGE, or under the major cuts to the Pentagon budget mandated by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
“One question we’ve gotten a lot is, you know, ‘was this from DOGE? Was this the new administration?’ It absolutely was not. We were working on drafts of the information paper, frankly, before the inauguration, and we did not change them significantly in response to anything that happened after. This has been a long time coming.”
The bases where museum will be kept open, according to the list obtained by Task & Purpose are:
The U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York
U.S. Army Museum of Hawaii in Honolulu
Fort Gregg Adams, Virginia
Fort Bragg, North Carolina
Fort Cavazos, Texas
Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri
Fort Campbell, Kentucky
Fort Jackson, South Carolina
Fort Benning, Georgia
Fort Novosel, Alabama
Fort Sam Houston, Texas
Fort Sill, Oklahoma
Those set to be closed include museums on the following bases:
Fort Huachuca, Arizona
Fort Lewis, Washington
White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico
Fort Carson, Colorado
Fort Riley, Kansas
Fort Bliss, Texas
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
Fort Knox, Kentucky
Fort Stewart, Georgia
Fort Drum, New York,
Fort Hamilton, New York
Rock Island, Illinois
Fort Eustis, Virginia
Camp Humphreys, South Korea
Vilseck, Germany
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