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Training in Contested Spaces
How Fort McCoy’s COVID-19 Risk-Mitigation Protocols set Conditions for
the Army Reserve to Resume Training
LTC Alexander L. Carter
United States Army Reserve, Deputy Garrison Commander
Fort McCoy, WI
Mr. Craig Hayes, Senior Military Analyst, Center Army Lessons Learned
December 2020
Introduction
A
s a Total Force Training Center, Fort McCoy,
WI, has primary responsibility to support the
training and readiness of military personnel
and units of all branches and components of America’s
Armed Forces.
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Since the early days of the Coronavirus
Disease-2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in the United
States, the Army and its installations have been
challenged to nd ways to maintain a high degree
of readiness in this “contested environment.”
One Army installation, Fort McCoy, developed and
implemented a series of COVID-19 risk-mitigation
protocols that set conditions to enable safe and eective
training to resume on the installation, resulting in the
successful training of thousands of military personnel
through the summer of 2020. This publication is
about Fort McCoy’s leadership, specically the
garrison commander and his sta, following Army
guidance to create safe, eective, and innovative
policies and practices that signicantly mitigated
the COVID-19 risks for its training populations.
A Global Virus: A Responsive Army
Before the COVID-19 virus outbreak reached
national crisis levels, the Army had taken steps to
respond to the growing risks associated with this
global pandemic. The Headquarters, Department
of the Army (HQDA) issued a series of orders and
promulgated policies across the Army enterprise
to provide clear guidance.
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HQDA issued travel
restrictions, activated emergency response units to
support the Federal Emergency Management Agency,
mobilized Army Reserve medical teams, issued stop-
movement orders, raised health protection condition
(HPCON) levels, and imposed a variety of other
restrictions on operations and training across the Army
to reduce the spread of the disease among the force.
HQDA’s issued an execution order (EXORD), in June
2020, which gave broad guidance to commanders
about how to resume operations and training
under COVID–19 conditions. This reinforced the
time-honored principles of mission command and
empowered the commanders to make decisions based
on local conditions. Garrison commanders were
directed to determine how best to support a large
backlog of training from units across the components,
which had been delayed in conducting individual
and collective training tasks, because of the virus.
Fort McCoy is a 60,000-acre Army installation
located in the heart of the upper Midwest with
a mission to strengthen total-force readiness by
serving as a training center, mobilization force
generation installation, and strategic support area.
Fort McCoy oers an environment for units to train
on multi-domain operations across the range of
military operations allowing simultaneous conduct of
individual through brigade-level training, static live
re and maneuver live re training and force-on-force
operations in both urban and unimproved terrain. The
installation regularly supports the training of more
than 150,000 military personnel each year providing
full-scale support to transient units. This includes
institutional schoolhouses, exercises such as combat
support training, global medic training, and exportable
combat training center exercises that test and validate
mission readiness for individuals and units across the
joint, inter-agency and multi-national organizations.
In accordance with guidance and instructions provided
by Army senior leadership, Fort McCoy’s garrison
command team was able to employ risk-mitigation
protocols that were tailored to local conditions. The rst
of these protocols was a formal policy that addressed
additional sanitation requirements related to mitigating
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