New commander’s big plans for Los Alamitos
A little more than a year ago, Col. Nick Ducich of the California Army National Guard served as the commander of a NATO peacekeeping task force in eastern Kosovo when a spring snowstorm blanketed his post.
Now he’s based just six miles from the sunny Seal Beach Pier as the new commander of Joint Forces Training Base Los Alamitos.
Orange County commuters might be familiar with the 1,300-acre base because of the Black Hawk helicopters that regularly fly over the interchange of the 405 and 22 freeways.
As Orange County’s only remaining military airport, the Los Alamitos Army Airfield is strategically significant for the West Coast because it can accommodate every aircraft in the U.S. fleet. A 247-foot C-5 Galaxy military transport, for example, made a rare overnight visit in July.
“It’s one of the few places that you have that long of a runway, and that’s why in case there is a large disaster in the greater Los AngelesOrange County area, this is going to be your primary hub,” Ducich said.
California National Guard soldiers responded to the L.A. riots in 1992. Black Hawk helicopters deployed from Los Alamitos dropped water on the Thomas fire in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties in 2017.
Like many career soldiers, Ducich comes from a military family. His father served in the Marines and his uncle died in Vietnam.
In 2015, Ducich traveled with a National Guard team to Ukraine to help train and mentor forces there. Last year, he made international headlines as the first Serbian American to lead U.S. troops in the small Balkan country of Kosovo, which has a complicated ethnic and political relationship with neighboring Serbia.
Ducich’s grandparents emigrated from Bosnia and Herzegovina. He grew up attending a Serbian Orthodox church in Alhambra.
“I would pick a different church or monastery every Sunday to go to, and I would stay afterward and talk to the people and get a sense of what the true issues were,” he said. “For the most part it was about survival.”
Ducich rotated home late last year and was appointed in May to the dual role as the head of Los Alamitos and assistant division commander for its 40th Infantry Division.
In the short time he’s been in town, Ducich has recognized and started to address a number of infrastructure issues, said Dean Grose, a Los Alamitos City Council member who chairs the base’s military affairs committee.
Notably, Ducich made it a priority to replace aging lights on the airfield’s runway, Grose said, and helped secure funding for a new base fire engine.
Ducich said he’s also working on getting funding to repair the runway, modernize an old aircraft hangar, improve hangar security and construct a permanent building for the state’s Mediterranean fruit fly prevention team, which operates twin-engine planes at the airfield.
“When you’re looking at anything that’s approaching the 50-year life cycle, you can either do a little bit of maintenance and improve the surface or you can do the full-bore ‘I want to replace this runway,’ ” he said. “The bucket is only so deep, and everyone is trying to fight for that critical resource.”
Ducich also has plans to improve aging buildings and populate them with government employees from the Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies, as well as improve maintenance bays for military transport vehicles.