Construction has begun on a new $27 million facility for the Army Mountain Warfare School in Jericho.
The location is just up the road from the school’s current training center, at the Camp Ethan Allen Training Site in the hills of Jericho. That site is the headquarters for the Vermont National Guard’s 86th Infantry Brigade Combat Team. Thousands of soldiers have come there for training in mountain warfare over nearly three decades.
Lt. Col. Steven Gagner, speaking Thursday at a groundbreaking ceremony, said the new center “will allow us to expand our work of developing and delivering world-class mountain warfare training, and deliver it to more soldiers in new and dynamic ways.”
U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., helped to secure funding for the project in President Trump’s $738 billion defense budget for fiscal year 2020, one of the largest military budgets in U.S. history.
“[Leahy] is proud to make sure the funding would be there for this expansion,” said his state director, John Tracy, on Thursday. “The need was there.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders I-Vt., a vocal critic of the 2020 defense budget, was represented at the ceremony by his state director, Kathryn Becker Van Haste. “It’s really great to see all the progress we’re making here in Jericho,” she said, praising in particular the project’s energy-efficient building design.
The 82,700-square-foot facility is slated for completion in 2022. It will include an indoor climbing wall, a dining area and lodging. It will be heated in part by a geothermal system, with space for solar panels.
The old facility, built in 1987, will remain in use for other Army operations.
The Army Mountain Warfare School was founded in 1983 and became the official U.S. Army Mountain Warfare School in 2003. It has trained soldiers in particular for deployments to Afghanistan, where the U.S. has been at war for nearly two decades.
The center already trains 1,000 soldiers annually in mountain and cold weather combat, Gagner said, and the demand has “swelled far beyond our current capacity.” The new training site will have a “dramatic effect on the U.S. military’s mobility,” he said, “in current and future conflicts.”
