Camp Desert Center was not a combat training facility in the mode of Camp Young to the west. Its function was logistical: to receive, store, and distribute the supplies that a million soldiers in training required, and to provide medical care for those who were injured or fell ill in the extreme desert conditions. The supply depot served the California-Arizona Maneuver Area's extensive network of training camps. The 300-bed evacuation hospital was designed to function as a forward surgical facility — a hospital that could operate close to combat conditions, moving if necessary and treating casualties with the speed that battlefield medicine required. It was, in short, a school for military medicine conducted in one of the most physically demanding environments in North America.

The unit that trained at Camp Desert Center from May to December 1943 was the 92nd Evacuation Hospital, and its subsequent deployment traced some of the Pacific war's most significant operations. From the California desert, the unit shipped out to New Guinea, where American and Australian forces were grinding through some of the most difficult jungle terrain and disease environments of the war. From New Guinea the 92nd moved to the Battle of Leyte and then the Battle of Luzon in the Philippines — the campaign to retake the main Philippine island from Japanese occupation that cost more casualties than any other Pacific operation. The unit ultimately participated in the occupation of Japan after the surrender in August 1945. The journey from the desert hospital tent to the ruins of imperial Japan was a very long one.

Alongside the medical personnel, Camp Desert Center housed the 18th Ordnance Battalion, the unit responsible for maintaining and repairing the weapons, vehicles, and equipment that the Desert Training Center's operations consumed at extraordinary rates. Desert warfare is hard on machinery: sand infiltrates engines, heat degrades lubricants, and the distances involved mean that equipment failures must be repaired far from conventional facilities. The ordnance battalion's work at Desert Center was training for exactly the conditions they would face when American forces entered North Africa and then moved through Italy and eventually France and Germany. The lessons of desert maintenance proved directly applicable to the campaigns they were being prepared for.

Camp Desert Center closed on December 16, 1944, as the Desert Training Center's mission wound down with the North African campaign complete and American forces engaged in the final stages of the European and Pacific wars. The Desert Center Army Air Field, built separately to support the camp's operations with two 5,500-foot runways, briefly hosted B-24 Liberator bomber training after the war before it too was closed and its buildings auctioned. The desert reclaimed most of what had been built in that compressed wartime urgency. The community of Desert Center, a small civilian settlement that had existed before the war and continued after it, remained as a reference point for what had happened here and who had trained in this heat before shipping out to places they had never imagined.