The Army must prepare its units to employ Full Spectrum Operations (FSO) competencies as part of the Joint Force 2020 in order to generate the desired strategic effects that "prevent" adversaries from escalating conflicts, "shape" the international environment, and, where challenged, "win" decisively and dominantly across the range of conflicts. To ensure its success, the Army must make changes to the National Training Center's (NTC) Contemporary Operational Environment (COE). This paper traces the NTC's evolution, analyses the strategic security landscape from present to 2020, and makes recommendations to optimize the NTC's preparation of Brigade Combat Teams. The main recommendations target the depiction of three of the COE's "operational variables": infrastructure, social, and economic. Accounting for fiscal and other resource-constrained realities, this study finishes with suggestions on how to incrementally implement these ideas, emphasizing "smarter" stewardship over increasingly scarce resources. If employed, these ideas can generate a tailored COE that allows units the most realistic and challenging training experiences short of actual combat.