Army photo

Army soldiers undergo COVID-19 coronavirus checks at Fort Sill, Okla.

WASHINGTON: As of today, the Army has temporarily stopped bringing in new recruits for basic training, the four-star chief of Training & Doctrine Command (TRADOC) told reporters this afternoon. The pause will last at least two weeks, Gen. Paul Funk said.

The Army had already curtailed field exercises and assemblies for troops in operational units. Last month, Defense Secretary Mark Esper reportedly rejected an earlier proposal to stop shipping new recruits to basic training.

Training for privates already in the pipeline continues, Funk and his subordinates said, with additional precautions to keep young soldiers at least six feet apart from each other and their instructors for their first 14 days in the Army while they’re watched for COVID-19 symptoms. With 54,000 soldiers currently at some stage of basic training, advanced individual training, or mid-career courses, Funk said, the system should produce a steady flow of graduates to meet Army units’ manpower needs for some months to come, although he gave no details on what specialties might run short when.

Army photo

Army soldiers maintain social distancing as they prepare to board a bus at Fort Sill, Okla.

“We are still training every day to fight and win our nation’s wars as our nation expects us to do,” Funk told reporters. (Two attended the briefing in person at the Pentagon but most, myself included, participated over a conference call). April and May are historically the Army’s lowest months for new recruits in any case — “we only had about 219 left to ship between now and the 19th of April,” he said – so it was an ideal time to pause the intake process. The Army will build up its counter-coronavirus defenses at training facilities, monitor public health conditions in both individual volunteers and every county in the country, and reassess two weeks from now.

The Army has already shut down recruiting offices nationwide and moved entirely to online recruiting. The move to social media actually began in 2018, after the Army failed to meet recruiting goals and demographic studies suggested the recruiting-age population was more responsive to virtual appeals, explained Maj. Gen. Frank Muth, who heads US Army Recruiting Command (USAREC). Now the service has gotten legal authority to get 90 percent of the enlistment contract process done online, Muth said, with only a few final steps requiring face-to-face contact.

Under the new procedure, Muth went on, once a young person has signed up, their recruiter keep taps on them by phone, asking whether they’ve been self-isolating, whether they have any symptoms, and so on. If the recruit reports they’re healthy at every point – check-ins are required two weeks, three days, two days, and one day before their scheduled ship-out date – they’ll be picked up and taken to a Military Entrance Facility (MEF), where they’ll be questioned again and have their temperatures taken. Only then will they take Army-provided transportation to their assigned training base.

Army photo

Soldiers practice social distancing in a cafeteria at Fort Sill, Okla.

On arrival, recruits go through another screening, said Maj. Gen. Lonnie Hibbard, who commands the Center for Initial Military Training. Even when they begin training, he says, they now spend the first two weeks in social-distancing mode. The Army has reorganized the standard 10-week basic training program – some specialties, like infantry, go longer – to move as much of the classroom instruction as possible to the first two weeks, with group training and field activities only starting afterward. That way the new recruits spend their first 14 days doing individual physical exercises and attending classes – held outdoors whenever weather permits – while either remaining six feet apart from each other and their instructors, or wearing face masks. Those precautions aren’t always possible in the more hands-on training that follows, but the Army hopes any carriers will show symptoms before the two weeks are up.

This whole system, however, depends on taking temperatures, asking recruits how they feel, and watching for visible symptoms. But many carriers of the coronavirus remain entirely asymptomatic, even when they become contagious. They may look healthy and feel fine, but research suggests they’re actually capable of spreading the virus in the tiny drops of spittle that people spray in normal speech. (Stopping those droplets is the main benefit of wearing masks).

The only way to detect these silent carriers is to test for the presence of antibodies to the virus – but the US is suffering a nationwide shortage of test kits. Army labs and contractors, among many others, are struggling to fill the gap.

Of the roughly 100,000 troops in TRADOC — 54,000 trainees, 46,000 instructors and staff — only 102 have tested positive for COVID-19 so far, Gen. Funk said, and 12 of them have already recovered.