wes. army. mil (28 April, 2004) The U. S. Army Corps of Engineers Waterways Experiment Station (WES) is the largest Civil Engineering and Environmental Quality Research and Development (R&D) complex in the United States. Each WES project is conducted in response to the requirements of Army Civil Works R&D (coastal engineering, flood control and navigation, materials and structures, and environmental quality) and military R&D (airfields and pavements, survivability and protective structures, sustainment engineering, environmental cleanup, computer aided design and drafting, high performance computing, and software engineering).