The long-awaited National Museum of the U.S. Army is a stunning tribute to America’s oldest branch of service.

by LTC Adam Morgan After many years of planning, fundraising and construction, the spectacular, long-awaited National Museum of the United States Army was finally opened on Veterans Day, 2020, promptly shut down due to Coronavirus restrictions, and has reopened. The museum has borrowed the best ideas from other military museums around the world and incorporated them in this one location on 84 acres at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, 20 miles south of Washington, D.C. The main building is approximately 185,000 square feet. Thousands of artifacts, documents, paintings, and photographs—the vast majority of them having never been seen before by the public—trace the history of the United States Army from the Revolutionary War to today’s global war on terrorism through a series of galleries. The museum consists of five main exhibit halls, a theater, Veterans’ Hall, food-service and retail areas, an experiential learning center, and a lobby with visitor-reception area. Full-scale dioramas—such as displays of Sherman tanks and soldiers descending a “scramble net” from their transport ship into a landing craft heading for a hostile D-Day beachhead—put the visitor in the heart of the action. While displays and exhibits representing the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Mexic