King Khalid Military City (KKMC) (; transliterated: Medinat Al-Malek Khaled Al-Askariyah) is a special city in northeastern Saudi Arabia and about 60 km south of Hafar al-Batin city, designed and built by the Middle East Division, a unit of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, in the 1970s and 1980s. The consultants were Brown, Daltas, and Associates as well as LeMessurier in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The city was built to provide lodging for several brigades of Saudi troops, with a design population of 65,000 people. The city is named after former Saudi King Khalid bin Abdul Aziz. Construction The Corps of Engineers King Khalid Military City (KKMC) was as extensive as any of the Kingdom's massive private programs. Saudi Arabia sought and received U.S. Corps assistance in part because it was impressed with the Dhahran civil air terminal and other early projects the Corps built with US funds. The Kingdom also lacked the expertise to manage a huge program at that time. However, equally important was the U.S. corps reputation as an effective and honest public servant. The Saudis preferred entrusting their defence construction to a government agency. Saudi Minister of Defense and Aviation, Prince Sultan, starting in 1964 anticipated the three cantonments; King Faisal Military Cantonment at Khamis Mushayt in the southwest near Yemen; King Abdul Aziz Military Cantonment (later "City") at Tabuk Province in the northwest near Jordan; and in the spring of 1973, the Ministry approved changing the site of the third cantonment from Qaysumah to Hafar al-Batin in the north near Iraq.<ref ="grathwol" The Engineer Assistance Agreement, effective May 24, 1965, and extended several times, provides the basic framework for much of the Corps activities in Saudi Arabia. The Agreement was entered into pursuant to section 507(a) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, and is currently authorized by section 22 of the Arms Export Act with the Ministry of Defense and Aviation (MODA) further committed the (Mediterranean Division, later the Middle East Division) US Army Corps of Engineers, initially to design and construct three brigade-size military cantonments to house elements of the Saudi Arabian Army. In the spring of 1973, MODA approved changing the location of the third cantonment from Qaysumah to Hafar al Batin and expand the cantonment to a "Military City". In March 1974 a $1.5 million contract to a joint venture with Sippican Architectural Engineering and Brown Daltas & Associates Rome, Italy