Maj. Gen. William F. Mullen, commanding general of the Marine Corps Training and Education Command, and Navy Rear Adm. Milton J. Sands, commander of the Naval Service Training Command, answer reporters’ questions by phone about training during the COVID-19 pandemic, July 7, 2020.
Transcript
Commander Sean Robertson. Before we start, I would ask that you please keep your phones muted. Unless you are speaking and ordered prevent feedback and other distractions. I’ll be facilitating our briefing today. Today we have Marine Corps Major General Bill Mullen, the commanding General Training and Education Command and Navy Rear Admiral Jamie Sands, Commander, Naval Service Training Command to discuss accession training in the COVID-19 environment. Let me start with a quick communication check. General Mullen, can you hear me? Yep. Thank you, sir. Rear Admiral Sands, Clear. Thank you. General Mullen. The floors years for smoking in comments. Thanks very much. The first thing I’d like to say is there’s nothing more important in protecting our Marines and sailors and their families. Focus has always been and will always be the safety of our recruits. Are Marines, sailors? Their families recognized that the key to continue brink or success probably help protection measures in place to minimize exposure and transmission recruit training include social distancing, use of personal protect women reinforcing hygiene measures, 14 days restriction of movement during training, Barda training and testing of recruits. You know, training being altered to comply with COVID-19 protocols set by the CDC. No training standards, program instructions or graduation requirements are being altered or reduced. For example, even though the semi annual PFT has been waved across the entire fleet, Marine Force is not being waved to recruit depots and formal learning centers where in a PFD is part of the Pioli and a graduation requirement in 19 protocols are primarily impacting us in our movement planning and reduce shipping rates to maintain social distancing during training. Closely coordinating Marine Corps Recruiting Command weekly to ensure there is no protective ability, no blockage in the obsessions. Pipeline and shipping rates are flexible to respond to any for unforeseen blockage. Recourse. Recruit Tebow San Diego’s current limited 325 recruits per company with social distancing. Parris Island LTD. 454 for males, 120 for females do the different styles of barracks. Mainly, it’s the squad days in those barracks that has the capacity reduction. Another movement impact it has affect our training pipeline is we made the decision to cancel the 10 days leave normally taken by Marines immediately after graduating recruit training. Cancellation leaves allows us to control the transportation method environment to the School of Infantry for their follow on training and marine combat training or after Training Battalion from boot camp to rival the former Learning Centers were taking steps to protect recruits of Marines by isolating new recruits and Marines minimized threat of Explosion covid as they progress through the Lt pipeline. This also provides reassurance to our sister service partners. Approximately 52% of our MOS bruising schools are another service locations and that we’re minimizing the risk to those populations as well. Refining success reducing explosion covid it in four key areas. Contact testing time and improve staging slash quarantine isolation areas. The guards to contact were aggressively executing measures to reduce contact between personnel in all areas of training, yet particularly Folkestone times of high congregations. Such a mess halls, chapels, physical fitness and classrooms. Currently a primary factors limiting in MTR de throughput. Our social distance requirements and squad Jacobin squad, Bay size and charities must enforce those this things for help. Protection measures to be successful regards testing the screening of its sessions at military answers, processing stations, screening and testing it reception battalions and the use of quarantine and isolation are resulting in a protective bubble needed to allow initial entry and follow on training. Continue our current on site testing capabilities. Significant force multiplier for emerging cases and in pot in processing post rahm recruits into training with minimal impact of the schedule. Enabling post rahm recruits to commence training immediately. Requires capability. Bulk test with rapid results. Turn around in 24 to 48 hours. Recruits who test negative or processed into training recruits who test positive along with the roommate are moved to single rooms until they satisfy conditions for return to training according to medical priorities. The Naval Medical Research Center Process in Paris Island test 24 48 hours Receipt at its facility in Silver Springs, Maryland or Mount Sinai Hospital. They have a medical center. San Diego does test for San Diego and their turnaround time. It’s 48 hours. With time, we’re finding preventive Medici. Medicine specialists are critical for timely decisions. In addition, they facilitate close coordination, medical and pregnant to cook, identify test and romps of thematic personnel while conducting thorough contact investigations with regards to staging quarantine isolation areas. While this may seem somewhat obvious, are improved staging, quarantine, isolation. There’s a pile of combating Kobe 19 during the 14 day Rahm period, a recruit and follow on training centres. Excessively adapter process to mitigate the risks. Recruits, Marines and training personnel while maximizing throughput. Kobe 19. Environment to a combination reducing contact, testing, isolation and Rahm prior to train. It will be necessary for us to continue assessing the situation location as progress is taking all aspects into consideration. Like current Kobe 19. Status of each location, local state regulations, etcetera before we make any changes are approached. Implementing COVID-19 per calls has been introduced, deliberative and continuously evolving as to how to operate most effective while mitigating the risk to our recruits and training personnel and maximize concessions. Throughput in closing is important addresses. Academic has been a great team effort. Therefore, I must give here thank you to the families and all the Marines involved throughout training education. Man crew depots, always through the staff, appear to be calm headquarters. The sacrifices they have endured thus far been extraordinary. To ensure our marines and families air safe course prepared to answer the call when called about. That’s all. Thank you, Atmel Sands. Did you have some opening comments, sir? Yes, please. I just would like to follow a major general quickly here. Just good afternoon. From Great Lakes, Illinois Naval Service, Training Command and the home of the Navy’s only boot camp, the Navy has continued the mission essential basic training of new sailors throughout the pandemic. We’ve sent over 8100 new sailors the fleet way we believe we’re on track to meet the Navy’s recession goal of 40,800 sailors for fiscal year 2020. Right now, we have over 6700 recruits engaged in basic training here in Great Lakes, and we recently increased our weekly shipping toe over 1200 new recruits each week. We’ve been able to make this increase and continue training throughout the pandemic, using a combination of risk mitigation procedures, protect our force and continue our mission. Are departing for Great Lakes. Recruits were asked to complete a 14 day restriction of movement at home What they arrive in Chicago. All recruits conduct an additional offsite restriction of movement for 14 days and are tested prior to their movement onto the main base and recruit training Command. We’ve retained much of our active duty staff on base and instituted based covering, cleaning and social distancing requirements that are familiar to us all. We’re in daily consultation with Experts from the Navy’s medical community. Remain in close touch with Navy Personnel Command to ensure the training process is aligned from recruiting all the way to the fleet. Well, there remains a dynamic situation I’m immensely proud of not just the recruits but the recruit division commanders, instructors and other staff who have continued to British sailors. Lovely. Well, we’ve adjusted our processes across the session due to Kobe. 19. What we haven’t changed or the requirements to be a basically trained sailors, every sailors trained in five Navy warfighting confidences, firefighting damage control, watch standing seamanship and small arms. Handing in marksmanship. Each new sailor is trained as part of a team and inculcated in the fundamentals of the Navy’s core values. You’re tough, well prepared and excited to join the Fleet Officer Training Command in Newport, Rhode Island. It’s another one of my command as implemented, Similar requirements and changes is having similar success in continuing to train in the middle of this pandemic. Since March, we’ve said 710 active and reserve officers. Through training and on to the fleet. Our officer, candidate, officer development and limited duty officer, Chief Warrant officer schools have continued to train both line and staff officers needed to lead the sailors graduating here in Great Lakes from RTC, Our neighbor Reserve officer Training Corps units have just as well working closely with our Rossi host schools to prepare for the coming school year and continue training midshipmen to become future leaders in the Navy and Marine Corps this spring and today we have commissioned over 1100 new officers in the Navy and Marine Corps. We’ve had to adapt across our session training programs, but we have remained focused on the identity transformation and training required to send warfighters. Thank you. Thank you, gentlemen, as a reminder for the media, please provide your full name and agency Prior Teoh toe asking your question and please limit yourself to one question and a related follow on. If you would. We’ll go to the line first. Bob Bob or later from AP. Did you Ah, Did you manage to get on the line? No. Okay, Mega Next time from us and I news. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Um, I wanted to ask about the kind of financial side of all of this with having to pay for additional housing during the wrong period. Additional medical personnel on have on hand whether it’s PPE. I was just wondering kind of what that does for the budget for the remainder of this fiscal year and if it looks like you’re gonna have any shortfalls, but you’ll have to address or effects somehow being compensated by maybe a lower throughput. I just wondered what the fiscal picture looks like right now for both the Navy and Marine Corps side major Charl Malan that can address the Marine Corps side. Um, right now, that’s a bit of a moving target. We obviously have the Kobe supplemental that’s been very helpful. Um, we’re looking way got to a point where we’ve normalized what we’re doing for Rahm, which probably most expensive part of us, because that goes to the the additional housing piece there. And what we’re trying to do is find a less expensive way to do what we’re doing now. We’re hoping be ableto knocked. How much money we’re spending on coverted protection measures. But that again moving target with guards, the other things based on the lower throughput. Let’s Marines coming in, though, as we’re looking at my reports right now, it’s not that many less, but it’s all things were looking at to try and balance things out. And so I can’t really say right now whether we’re gonna be short or over making This is animal sand. Just follow General Mullen, uh, agree with what he put out already, the Covitz supplemental has been immensely helpful and help and maintaining our ability to produce sailors for the fleet that by far the most expensive part of this for us, is paying for offsite rahm facilities. As General Mullen mentioned, we too are engaged in looking for a cheaper and, uh, longer term sustainable option. And we’re starting to look now at a a base to the north of us that we could use. It will simultaneously reduce our costs for force protection and allow us to have a one location to execute this offsite rahm for what we think may be a period of up to a year. We’re looking at this over the long haul. So again The most expensive part for us has been the offsite restriction of movement facilities. And we’re looking now actively and having some success and changing our methodology to reduce our expenses over the long term. Okay, coming here in the room. Tom Bowman. Did you have a question? It’s a Tom Bowman with NPR First General Muller, could you specify what reduce shipping rates actually mean in numbers and also for both of you? I think early on there were delays and moving recruits from states with high corona virus rates. Is that still continuing? Yeah, the reduce shipping is because of ah squad bay capacity, and right now it’s different on each coast. Um, what we’re looking at is the overall number that we need to recruit and put through training over the year, which is the vicinity of 38,000 and the number that we’re gonna be short by. We know we will be short. That’s changing. Based on like this week, for instance, we left a number of open weeks between now and the end of the fiscal year, just a couple of them, just in case things don’t go well with regards to the measures we’ve taken with cars. Ditto bid. Things are going very well. So instead of this, we being openly we shipped. So that’s less Marines that we short. We have them all. All the Marines we need in our pool. Excuse me, all the recruits we need in our pool. It’s just a case of putting him through the squad based and each squad bay, especially at Parris Island. They all have different capacities, some a great deal more than others. And so when we talk social distancing, that’s where the reduced numbers come in. Or it also any delays and moving recruits from states with high Corona virus rights. My apologies on that one we had some initially when MEPs stations would close down would shift to a different place. And then we made the decision that we would not ship from states that got really, really bad. They were obviously read with guards. CDC guidelines. We’ve opened them back up. We’re watching very, very carefully. Are recruiting. Command is actively engaged in that to make sure that if we’re having a problem, Mr Civic Gary, we will take a week or two off from shipping that location. And so far it’s been working because for the recruits that are showing up, we’re having very, very few test positive over is Jamie Standard. And just follow General Mullen. We’re following the same procedures as wrinkle recruiting command when it comes to shipping from different locations. And we went through that same process General Mall and describe where we did originally have met stations that shut down. They based on being in a condition red status. We’ve reopened. But we are still keeping a careful eye. Is rink were, of course, on a resurgence of the disease. And we remain still positioned to reduce shipping from certain areas, if that makes sense right now, our offsite rahm, that front end, 14 day process we use has been very, very effective and really mitigating the impact of the disease once it comes in our life life. So that probably more than anything is really helped us maintain a steady flow despite different fluctuations, levels of the disease in different states. Okay, Okay, Jeff, show. Go. Thank you, General Mullen. A little off topic. It’s kind of Marine Corps Lord that Marines do better on their PST when they’re completely inebriated. Have you got any data that shows that Marines performed better on their pft while drunk. Interesting question. No. Over. Okay, Yes. Mean Tash Day 50 gonna be resumed resume next year. Yes, it will. Okay. Thank you, Jeff. Yes, mean. Tash Day from National Defence Magazine. Hi. Thank you. My questions for both General Mullen and Animal Fan. Are you seeing a greater need for technology? Such a simulator to help sailors brings training. What type of equipment is a Navy Marine Corps looking for? You know, I would imagine maybe equipment that is more poor. Bulls to be. Props used, moved around like on a ship are on pace to be advantageous during coverted. Thank you. Several sands. Once you go first. This time I think so. Yes. Yes. And I think your name was I think that’s what I heard. So we don’t have a greater requirement for simulators. But what we are seeing is the challenge is what do you do with the recruits while they’re in this restriction of movement process? Because obviously, just by going through that 14 day restriction of movement, their limited a little bit with what we can do is we go ahead and take that use that time to make sure we’re not bringing the disease into our lifeline. And so what we’ve done is we’ve dunmore what I would call virtual training where we do sailor ization. We do Navy core values. We do what we call warrior toughness training, and we’ve been using a distributed learning environment to do that. So I think I’ve had in the rooms. We can push the lessons to the recruits and really maximize the use that time as far as our simulators, though, to answer questions directly, Kobe hasn’t really caused a an increase need for simulators. The majority of our training that we do in the Navy’s boot camp is really hands on do reps and sets. We repeat things over and over again to build muscle memory. And if that, that really enabled the proficiency of these basically trained sailors as they head to the fleet over, that was great answer. Animal sand. We’re doing similar things. The guards who are recruits when they’re in the rahm staging. Also, we have something called Marines waiting training. If they moved on to their most schools there waiting training, how can we deliver them something that gives him a head start. Get them rolling with regards to what is required of them to learn. Um, this COVID, it is pushed us do a great deal more with trying to get the distance learning piece, computer based training, micro video learning and other things getting that type of thing out there. But since I own the entire train, continue for the brink. Or I would say we’re looking to get a lot more involved. Simulations. What we’d like to be able to do is have large scale exercise, people plugging into an exercise virtually or live from multiple locations. And some of that also goes to their things that we frankly cannot do in a live training environment that can only be done in simulation, and we have to find a way to simulate them. So those are all the kind of things we’re looking for over. Thank you. Okay, uh, Janie from us. A journal. Just tensions. How do you are? Training exercise with other international 1,000,000. 30. So 10 record prepared to us and South Korea joint military exercise virus earn next month. With a resumption of these operations, how would humanity these exercise. Thanks for your question. One of things we have to do since we’re out forward, deployed with our Navy brother and is we have to do interoperability training. We had to figure out ways to work with our allies and partners. That’s never gonna end. So we have to figure that piece out. And frankly, that part is enough to me. But I know that we’re going to give it our best effort because we have to be able to train with our partners and allies. We have to learn from them. They have to learn from us. So we’ve got to figure that out. And there’s a great will to do so, especially as some of the restrictions are getting lifted over. Thank you, Gina Harkin from military dot com. Thank you. Can you give us a sense of the number of Kobe cases each of your services have seen at a country level training camp and then outside of boot camp, the army recently saw sizable covert outbreak at a training site in Fort Bragg. I’m wondering if either of you have seen similar clusters that any of your training site this is, uh this is Evel San. I’ll take that answer first from the Navy were not really Don’t talk about just how many infections we’ve had it any of our locations across the fleet to include our basic training facilities. Uh, what we have seen, though, is we have been successful and really mitigating this disease and keeping it from slowing down our training. We made a bunch of adjustments. We conduct risk Matt Risk assessment every single day to try and really make sure our number one priority of maintaining a safe training environment for our recruits in our sailors continued, Uh, but right now we have not seen any spikes, surges, rial increases in the disease in any of our sessions, training in the Navy over I’ll really what Apple Stand, said those German. We don’t really get into the numbers that much, but I will tell you, out of the over 30,000 Marines were trained during this period. And again, it’s not just an trouble. Training goes through all the training. Three entire training continuum we’ve had, at best, less than 500 cases. And of those cases, the majority had no symptoms whatsoever. They were identified through contact with somebody did tested positive and had some symptoms. And about any of those who were sick. None whatsoever. Hospitalized. So it though we have had people obviously get it. It has mostly been a non event for us. Over. Okay, gentlemen. Ah, movement moving to the end here. We’ve got just a few minutes left. Uh, General Mullen, did you have any closing remarks? Just thanks. We continue engine what we’re doing on just one of things that the common out the sorry major drink or tried to emphasize, especially all the parents were sending us. Their kids were doing the best we can to accomplish our mission. But also to make sure that our recruits are training. We’re turning them into Marines in the safest environment possible. And that all the instructors we have being tremendously professional in how they’re going about this. It really has been amazing to watch over. And Advil. Sands, Did you have any, uh, any remarks? Toe Finish the south here? Yes, please. Just an echo. General Mullen. A little bit of the beginning here. Thank you, too. For to this group for your continued interest in what we’re doing. I mean, our service, it exists, and it maintains freedom of maneuver and trust based on the trust of society. Extends so grateful personally and professionally for your continued interest and also like to thank our Navy families as you go through. This is General Mullen indicating this is a This is a challenge to continue production, basic training, especially of sailors through a pandemic. And it’s been a remarkable team effort, and we’ve got the biggest support team. Is the families out there that are really sacrificing its? We ask Maura, Maura, the sailors that are doing the training and, frankly, Maura Maura of the recruits going through the training that have to move through things like a two week Graham procedure and training in a Kuvin environment. There were mitigating the effects of that disease. So I would I would like to close with just thanking you for your support and interest and then a special thanks to our Navy families who kind of make this all possible over. Thank you very much, sir. Um, Gentlemen, if you have time for one more question from the floor, I’m being signaled for a quick follow up here. Both of you. It’s a Tom Bowman again from NPR. I was out at the National Training Center back in May, and the medical folks out there said they could test in how it’s roughly 166 soldiers per day. They want to ramp that up to 1000 per day. And I’m just wondering, you have challenges at your training facilities with in house testing machines, eyes that something you want to ramp up a zwelling? Do you have to sort of send him all that the samples out to outside labs just does. Gentleman. It is somewhat of a challenge, though a lot of that has been streamlined because of the need, especially turnaround eso. Right now, things are working well with both depots. Um, getting more testing, Getting the equipment at Parris Island or at San Diego in particular may not actually be that helpful, because then we would have the people that would be able to run it. So I’m pretty satisfied with how things are going right now over, and this is Advil Sands here. From the Navy’s perspective, we also send the majority of our tests out to a military installation to be processed, and I’m really happy with that. It works well because we have so many folks and we test in masses, they come out Iran. So we’ve tested before, 100% before they go into our really this larger training environment, right? And so using kind of this matter large numbers sending him off for this kind of mass testing really works well for us. We have an in house capability which is resident down the street at the level Federal Health Care Center. A remarkable hospital v A and D o d combined hospital, right in our in our neighborhood here that supports us. So we do have in house testing capacity there that we leverage. But we tend to use that more for specific cases and rely mostly on the test that we send off. There are also, like in most places across the country, competing interests where the local health care center has, uh, several facilities where they take care of the elderly and they’re obviously at a higher risk. We think with COVID then our younger population. So I’m very I’m very content with our current capability to test. I would always like more. Uh, right now we’ve got what we need, and you can tell there the way I measure it is by our ability to continue training in this environment while maintaining a safe training environment for recruits in our sales over. Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time today. And, uh, I hope you will both have an absolutely fantastic day. And that’s the end of our briefing today. Thank you.