Maj. Gen. Justice Will Retire After 42 Years of Service

After serving as the Research, Development and Engineering Command leader and Aberdeen Proving Ground commander since December 2009, Maj. Gen. Nick Justice says he will retire.

He will relinquish responsibility to Dale Ormond, an Army civilian executive, at a ceremony on Feb. 10 at the Post Theater.

Ormond returns to APG from the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, KS, where he served as deputy to the commanding general since 2008. He previously served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army and as acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Policy and Procurement.

Justice, a two-star general, led RDECOM and APG through the final stages of the Base Realignment and Closure process that began in 2005.

“The Aberdeen area has been blessed with by the BRAC move,” Justice said of BRAC, which brought thousands of jobs to APG.

But Justice won't be hanging up his uniform immediately as there will be a separate ceremony for his official retirement after 42 years of military service, according to a RDECOM press release.

“We really looked at our tagline – ‘Technology Driven. Warfighter Focused," said Justice. “That’s very appropriate because we really wanted to improve our relationship with the field Army.

"One of the things I wanted was to get us an operational mission so that people in the line Army would truly understand our value.”

That objective became a reality in 2011 when the RDECOM Forward Area Science and Technology Center in Bagram, Afghanistan, became operationally capable.