JCORT ’26 wraps up

BATTLE CREEK, Mich. -

Defense Logistics Agency Disposition Services concluded Joint Contingency Operations Readiness Training 2026 June 12, capping an annual simulation that brought together agency civilians and its Joint Reserve Force members.

JCORT trains, assesses, and validates the skills of joint reservists and DLA expeditionary civilians assigned to the major subordinate command. The training focuses on mission essential tasks, while assessing the readiness and availability of DLA Disposition Services expeditionary assets to support real world contingencies.

"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, who led is year's simulations. "We also wanted to provide them experiences from JCORT to continuously improve our expeditionary force's capabilities."

Walters said last year's training exercise, Reserve Contingency Operations Readiness Training, focused on the key tasks required to support property disposal operations, specifically the front-end process of receiving property. This year, expeditionary civilians teamed up with reservists to practice end-to-end operations, from initial receiving to warehousing, issuing and shipping.

The event brought together about 50 expeditionary civilians and agency reservists representing the Army and Air Force across three locations: Battle Creek, Michigan; San Joaquin, California; and Richmond, Virginia. For most reservists, JCORT was the first time they participated in a DLA reverse logistics-based exercise.

"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."

Some tasks included using cutting torches, practicing 'Kind, Condition, Count' procedures for receiving property, and operating heavy equipment. Reservists and civilians also constructed a modular, scalable Expeditionary Site Set, which DLA can deploy to provide downrange property disposal services to warfighters during overseas contingency operations or domestic disaster response missions.

"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."

At the Battle Creek Air National Guard location, Contingency Area Functional Manager Brian Davidson supervised instruction on the heavy equipment DLA uses 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."

Davidson said JCORT is a great example of how civilians can work together with the JRF and partner to accomplish the DLA mission.

Wrapping up the exercise, DLA Disposition Services Director Mike Cannon spoke with Battle Creek participants on the importance of the event and the roles they may be asked to fill.

"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."