At Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) two existing facilities, the Tandem Van de Graaff machines and the AGS have been joined by a beam transfer line, and modified to permit acceleration of light ions (up to sulfur) to energies of 14.6 GeV/amu. Light ions supplied by a pulsed ion source are accelerated by the Tandem to an energy of about 7 to 8 MeV/amu, and are transferred directly into the AGS in the fully stripped state. In the AGS an auxiliary rf system has been added to accelerate through the low velocity region from about 7 to about 200 MeV/amu, at which point the previously existing AGS RF system takes over to complete the acceleration cycle to full energy, as it normally does for protons. Standard resonant slow extraction delivers the beam to the existing experimental beam facilities. This is the first phase of a long range program to provide facilities for relativistic heavy ion experiments with fixed targets and ultimately with colliding beams at BNL. The design objectives for this project and preliminary results obtained during the commissioning of the light ion program are described in this paper. Plans for a future second phase, a booster accelerator to permit heavy ion acceleration in the AGS, and of the third phase, a proposed Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are briefly mentioned as well.