Hunter M. Woodall, Jr. was a practitioner and champion of operational testing throughout a long career in the military, industry, and government.  He was always a tireless advocate for bringing the results of operational testing to bear on system acquisition decisions, decisions that directly affected U.S. Army soldiers.

Woodall began his career in analysis and testing in the late 1950s with the Combat Operations Research Group (CORG), which supported the Continental Army Command in its execution of the Army's Combat Developments function.  In his initial work on weapons systems analysis, be conceived, designed, and oversaw the execution of PROJECT PINPOINT,which for the first time collected operational data on a large scale on the ability of weapons crews to aim at real world targets under field conditions, vastly improving the weapons effectiveness data.

In the early 1960's, the Army embarked on a far reaching examination of the use of helicopters in combat operations, which included studies, war games, troop tests, and field experiments.

To provide scientific support to these tests and experiments, the Army engaged the services of the CORG which created a test and evaluation division on site at Fort Benning, Georgia, and chose Woodall to be its leader.  For three years, Mr. Woodall designed tests and experiments, oversaw their execution, oversaw the collection of data in the field, reduced and analyzed data, and presented the results to the highest levels of the Army leadership.  The end result was that the Army accepted the airmobility operational and organizational concepts that had been developed, and formed the First Cavalry Division (Airmobile), which deployed to Vietnam in the summer of 1965 and employed the new concepts on the battlefield at the famous Battle of the Ia Drang River in November 1965.

In the early 1970's, as the Assistant Deputy Undersecretary of the Army (Operations Research), Woodall contributed to the development of the U.S. Army Operational Test and Evaluation Agency, which has survived until this day albeit having been subsumed by a larger testing organization.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Woodall was engaged in the refinement of the Department of Defense Systems Acquisition Process and its adaptation to meet Army needs.  In 1980, the Army bestowed upon Woodall its highest honorary award, the Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service.  At the presentation, the Undersecretary of the Army spoke to Woodall's dedication to learning the truth through operational testing and thus exercising the deepest possible care for American soldiers.