Army Defends West Point Graduation Plans; Trump To Speak

WASHINGTON: Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and the head of West Point, Lt. Gen. Darryl Williams, defended the decision to bring graduating West Point cadets back on campus for a ceremony and speech by President Trump. While McCarthy said there will be “a small, safe graduation ceremony for them,” the primary reason he cited is to conduct the physicals required for the Army’s newest officers to move on to their first jobs.

Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a former Army pilot who lost both legs in Iraq, had denounced the graduation ceremony for putting the cadets at risk simply as background props for a “vanity speech” by “a Commander-in-Chief who values his own photo ops and TV ratings over their health and safety.”

Army leaders deemphasized the president’s speech and said the graduating senior class – not the younger cadets – had to come back.

“They have to come back to the academy to begin the process to become 2nd Lieutenants and to report to their first assignments,” McCarthy said. “We have to bring the cadets back to West Point to begin the process of the physicals they need to take and all of the clearance procedures.”

“They have to be medically ready to join the Army,” added Williams, “so it’s a series of medical tasks, essential tasks, that can only be done at the United States Military Academy.”

The graduating cadets will also pick up their personal possessions – in many cases including their cars – which they left on-campus when they headed out for Spring Break on March 6^th with every expectation they’d be back soon.

“We have almost 400 cars sitting in a parking lot that I can see from my house,” Lt. Col. Christopher Ophardt, West Point’s public affairs director, told me in a followup call. Barracks rooms are full of personal possessions, he added. Graduating students need their property back before they can go join their first Army unit.

Yes, Ophardt acknowledged, in theory you could figure out the closest military hospital or recruit processing facility for every cadet, and have them travel there individually to get their physicals. In practice, it’s prohibitively difficult to work out the logistics of making sure all those facilities can accommodate the cadets on top of their current workload — when many of them are operating with reduced staff — and making sure the cadets can make these individual trips safely, without exposing them to the coronavirus in the process.

A group of 25 West Point staff has been studying the problem for months, Ophardt said, with the academy’s mathematics professors even helping to run models of COVID-19’s spread across the country. In the end, with New York seemingly past the peak of the pandemic, the Army decided to bring the West Point cadets back to the one place it knew they could get to, the academy itself, and create a comprehensive health defense to protect them on arrival.

Before the cadets can return to campus, they’ll go through an elaborate multi-layer process designed to screen out COVID-19 carriers and contain any contagion that might occur:

• West Point staff are checking in regularly with cadets about their physical and mental health before they make the return journey.
• “60 to 70 percent” of the cadets will make the trip in their cars or other private vehicles, Lt. Gen. Williams said, rather than exposing themselves to passengers on planes, buses, or trains. The Army is working to help the other 30 to 40 percent find safe passage.
• Rather than return immediately to main campus, cadets will come in to a “staging base” at Camp Buckner, the academy’s outdoor training area 15 minutes’ drive from West Point proper.
• Every returning cadet will be tested for the COVID-19 coronavirus, with the results analyzed within hours on heavy-duty GeneXpert 16 diagnosis machines provided by the Army just last week.
• On campus, the returning senior class will be broken into five separate cohorts, each living and dining in isolation from the other four to control any outbreak. Even within their cohorts, cadets will practice social distancing when it’s possible and wear masks when it’s not.
• Cadets will be isolated and monitored for 14 days before the graduation and other group activities.

While the Army briefing didn’t detail the graduation ceremony itself, McCarthy referred to the Air Force Academy’s recent graduation as a model. Photos of the Colorado Springs ceremony show the Air Force cadets remaining at least six feet apart, with no family members or other audience in attendance.

What if West Point cadet does not return to campus, for whatever reason? Will they be disciplined?

“We will take each case separately, case by case,” Williams said. “I’m not going to make a blanket statement.”

The Army has given base commanders wide discretion in what protective measures to take and how to enforce them, based on changing local conditions. That includes Williams as commander of West Point, but also the commanders of training centers around the Army, which recently restarted bringing in new recruits for basic training after a two week pause. And commanders must account for where each potential arrival is coming from as well.

“Every single person, we’re going to look at an individual, [because] one size is not going to fit all,” said Gen. James McConville, the Army Chief of Staff. “I you’re sitting in a hot zone and your family has it and you’re quarantined, that’s not the type of person we probably want to bring through.”