JCORT ’26 concludes

Defense Logistics Agency Disposition Services wrapped up its 2026 Joint Contingency Operations Readiness Training on June 12, closing an annual simulation that brought together about 50 expeditionary civilians and Joint Reserve Force members from the Army and Air Force across Battle Creek, Michigan; San Joaquin, California; and Richmond, Virginia.

The exercise is designed to train, assess, and validate the skills of DLA expeditionary civilians and joint reservists on mission-essential tasks, while gauging the readiness of the organization’s deployable assets to support real-world contingencies. This year’s iteration expanded from last year’s focus on front-end receiving to end-to-end reverse logistics, with teams practicing the full spectrum of receiving, warehousing, issuing, and shipping.

“We want our expeditionary personnel to be better prepared for deployment and perform mission essential tasks in support of warfighters during a contingency operation,” said DLA Disposition Services Strategic Management and Contingency Plans Officer Tim Walters. “We also wanted to provide them experiences from JCORT to continuously improve our expeditionary force’s capabilities.”

Participants trained on cutting torches, worked through “Kind, Condition, Count” receiving procedures, and operated heavy equipment used in demilitarization and material mutilation. They also assembled a modular, scalable Expeditionary Site Set that DLA can deploy to support property disposal downrange during overseas contingencies or in domestic disaster response.

“This was a good way to help build confidence for reservists performing tasks to standard without job shadowing,” Walters said. “We hope they walk away with a strong sense of teaming with fellow expeditionary civilians and hope they gained a better self-assessment of deployment readiness.”

For many reservists, JCORT marked their first exposure to a DLA reverse logistics-focused exercise. At the Battle Creek Air National Guard location, Contingency Area Functional Manager Brian Davidson led hands-on instruction with the heavy equipment used to demilitarize and mutilate excess material. “Our equipment is very large and inherently dangerous, so it’s very important that our operators become extremely comfortable with them, so they know what the limitations are and that they don’t get hurt,” Davidson said. “We want all of them to come home safely and in the same healthy condition they left in.”

Participants said the blend of classroom and practical training helped connect procedures to purpose. “These two weeks have been very helpful for me because we have been learning more about the process of demilitarizing equipment,” said Army Sgt. Alondra Lopez, who is assigned to Disposal Support Unit 2 in Anniston, Alabama. “Between the classroom and the hands-on portion here, I better understand why we are performing our tasks with certain steps, and safety precautions we take, and the equipment that we use.”

Concluding the event in Battle Creek, DLA Disposition Services Director Mike Cannon underscored the urgency of maintaining a ready force. “We’re going to get that call some day and we’ll have to go forward and clean up messes, get that scrap, take the excess, demilitarize those damaged assets and we are not going to be given months and months to prepare for these missions,” Cannon said. “I have to have a ready force of deployers, and that’s you folks who are the expeditionary civilians and military reservists.”