This column first appeared in CityView Magazine’s “The Military Issue” July 2026 edition.
Later this year, workers should start to demolish many of the permanent exhibits at the U.S. Army Airborne & Special Operations Museum (ASOM)—the first part of a two-phase project to totally revamp one of the U.S. Army’s most public-facing museums and one of Fayetteville’s top tourist destinations.
The goal is “making a clean slate in that whole World War II, early airborne area,” said James Bartlinski, the museum director. “There’s going to be new weaves and turns and nicks and nooks and crannies to incorporate, actually, a bigger story.”
The more than $8 million project has been “years in the making,” Bartlinski said, beginning in 2018 or 2019—and the timeline is still being hammered out. But the money to do the work isn’t coming from the Army. The funding has been raised by the museum’s independent nonprofit foundation, the Airborne & Special Operations Museum Foundation.
“We had, unfortunately, outgrown the ability to tell the complete story of Special Ops within our building,” said Lynne Greene, president of the foundation board, in an email. In raising the funds, there were a number of “hiccups” along the way.
The coronavirus pandemic shuttered the museum in 2020. In 2023, a vehicle caused significant damage to the museum’s 244-seat theater, damage that still has not been fully repaired. Later that year, the museum’s simulator closed due to aging technology. The museum is currently getting a new roof in work that’s unrelated to the capital campaign or renovation of the exhibits.
Through all of these challenges the foundation was led by Executive Director Renee Lane. But she officially retired on May 22.
“The capital campaign took on a renewed effort under Renee Lane’s leadership,” Greene said. “There seemed to be insurmountable odds and hurdle after hurdle that she was forced to navigate through … Her hard work and dedication is paramount to the strong position of the ASOMF today.”
Two-Phase Project
Bartlinski spoke with CityView on May 29, the same day that the museum received the final plans for the new permanent exhibit. Those designs were shaped by a series of questions from staff.
“What stories are we missing that need to be told, or is there new information … that we could add?” Bartlinski recalled. “What new artifacts have been brought into the museum since the museum opened in 2000 that will help us tell a story? Because one thing we don’t want to do is be a textbook on a wall without any artifacts to back it up.”
Among these new artifacts:
- An M29 Weasel tracked vehicle used in early special forces operations in Italy during World War II.
- The first American flag flown over the Los Baños prison camp after Airborne troops helped liberate the camp from Japanese soldiers in the Philippines.
- Jungle Joe, a stuffed carrier pigeon who carried messages for the special operations precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
These artifacts and more will help the museum expand the story it tells about the history of Airborne and Special Operations troops—not just the Battle of the Bulge but also lesser-known events and figures such as Virginia Hall, an OSS operative who worked behind enemy lines.
The second phase of the museum renovation would update the exhibits from the end of World War II to the current era. To keep at least some of the museum open through the renovations and to give time to raise funds, Bartlinski said that would begin once the first phase finishes, hopefully by the end of next year.
The permanent exhibit currently begins in 1940 and walks visitors up to the present day. Turning one corner, a World War II-era C-47A plane dominates the ceiling with a mannequin paratrooper poised to leap to the museum floor. Turning another corner, visitors can see the twisted remains of the rotor of Super 61, one of the Black Hawk helicopters downed in Mogadishu in 1993. Live-size dioramas portray scenes from Vietnam, Panama, and Afghanistan.
The museum brings in about 115,000 to 120,000 visitors a year—slightly below the pre-COVID-19 annual attendance of around 140,000, according to Bartlinski.
“It’s slowly coming back,” he said. And when the new gallery opens, he hopes “we’re going to see those numbers jump again.”
A Unique Regulatory Space
Another new pull for visitors may be the revamped virtual reality experience, which should be opening soon to replace the simulator that failed in 2023. But that project is under the purview of the ASOM Foundation, not the museum directly.
“We took that opportunity (of the failed simulator) to redesign that space, remove the simulator seating and recently poured an unbelievable amount of new concrete to make way for an exciting new ‘Airborne’ simulation through virtual reality,” Greene said.
These parallel projects can exist because, like other military museums, ASOM exists in a unique regulatory space.
The museum staff and operations fall under the Army Museum Enterprise. Building maintenance is the obligation of Fort Bragg, even though the museum is the first Army museum built outside of an Army installation. And the foundation is a separate nonprofit entity that operates the gift shop, collects donations, raises funds, and provides money for everything from printed exhibit panels to major renovations.
“When you’re inside this building and five feet out, you’re on Fort Bragg,” Bartlinski said. “Five feet out, that’s the city of Fayetteville property that our foundation leases from the city. So you can imagine how confusing that gets.”
As one example of the complications involved in any large project at an Army museum, the Army paid for the final design, but the foundation will be in charge of hiring contractors to do the work. In order to receive the final design, the foundation will have to file a formal Freedom of Information Request, Bartlinski said.
The official Army museum staff is also quite small. Besides Bartlinski, the Army pays for two curators and a collections manager, making the foundation’s full-time staff essential for operating other aspects of the museum. And the ASOM Foundation has more flexibility, including in managing the museum website and social media.
It’s a symbiotic relationship, one that Bartlinski said Lane was adept at managing.
“We had a great relationship, we bounced ideas of all off each other all the time,” Bartlinksi said. “I mean, you have to work as a team.”
Lane declined to speak with CityView for this story prior to her retirement. On Wednesday, the foundation announced that Margaret Britten was its new executive director.
“Margaret brings more than a decade of nonprofit and communications leadership to the role, with experience spanning development, marketing, public relations, and community engagement across some of the nation’s leading military-serving organizations, including Team Red, White & Blue and the USO of North Carolina,” the ASOM Foundation said in a social media post.
Britten will lead the foundation’s fundraising, donor relations, strategic partnerships, and community engagement efforts in support of ASOM’s educational programs, exhibits, and long-term sustainability.
“I am honored to step into a role built on such a strong foundation shaped by dedicated board members, visionary leaders, and most recently, Renee Lane’s extraordinary seven years of service,” Britten said in the announcement. “The museum preserves the stories of men and women whose service and sacrifice helped shape our country. As the daughter of a Green Beret and a military spouse who has spent my career serving the military connected community, I look forward to working alongside the Foundation’s board, staff, donors, community partners, and the Army team at the museum to ensure those stories continue to educate and inspire for generations to come.”
ASOM in the Community
Like all Army museums, the primary goal of ASOM is to train the troops.
Not all airborne and special operations missions are successful or uncontroversial. The purpose of the museum is not to “sugarcoat” history, Bartlinski said—even failures and controversies are learning opportunities. He pointed to a past museum exhibit and professional development events for soldiers on the disastrous military operation during the Iranian hostage crisis, Operation Eagle Claw.
“We’re unbiased, and all historians, museums should be unbiased,” he said.
But the museum also serves more mundane purposes. Bartlinski said that about every week ASOM hosts some ceremony—a promotion, re-enlistment, or retirement—in addition to soldiers visiting for training once or twice a month. The museum also gets 10 to 20 requests a year from civilians looking for assistance with research.
ASOM brings visitors into downtown Fayetteville as well as surrounding shops and restaurants, according to Michelle Williams, president and CEO of the Fayetteville Area Convention & Visitors Bureau.
“The U.S. Army Airborne & Special Operations Museum gives visitors a chance to experience an important part of Fayetteville’s story and connection to Fort Bragg in a very personal and engaging way,” Williams said in a statement. “Between the immersive exhibits, artifacts and life-size dioramas that chronicles over 80 years of U.S. Army Airborne and Special Operations history, it appeals to a wide range of visitors—from veterans and military families to history enthusiasts and people visiting the area for the first time.”
And the museum plays an important role in the community.
For the last four years, the museum has worked with students from Jack Britt High School and now also Massey Hill Classical High School to curate an exhibit in the museum’s temporary gallery. Half a dozen teens are selected each year and spend the school year learning how to create the exhibit, from picking artifacts to writing labels and text panels.
“Each year it improves, and I think one of the reasons is that we get legacy kids,” Bartlinski said, “and those legacy kids act as mentors in the school with those kids, and it just gets better.”
