Fort Indiantown Gap Busiest National Guard Training Center

For the second year in a row and fifth time in the last seven years, Fort Indiantown Gap (FTIG) in Pennsylvania was the busiest National Guard training center in the U.S.

During the 2021 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, FTIG hosted 113,075 personnel for a total of 727,878 “man-days” of training. Man-days are a computation of the number of personnel multiplied by the number of days they trained on post. FTIG was also the busiest training center in 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2020.

Camp Shelby, Mississippi, was the next closest training center in 2021, with 618,643 man-days. Fort Pickett, Virginia, was third with 430,915 man-days, and Camp Atterbury, Indiana, was fourth with 410,086 man-days.

FTIG covers over 17,000 acres in northern Lebanon and Dauphin counties. It is home to numerous ranges, training facilities and simulators and regularly hosts personnel from all branches of the military, both active-duty and reserve-component, as well as foreign militaries, first responders, law enforcement and state and federal agencies. It is also home to several schools, including the Eastern Army National Guard Aviation Training Site, the 166th Regiment Regional Training Institute, the Regional Equipment Operators Training Site, the Lightning Force Academy and the Northeast Counter Drug Training Center.

Lt. Col. Andrew O’Connor, FTIG’s director of plans, operations, training and security, said the installation’s location and its ability to host Warfighter exercises play a role in its being the busiest training center. FTIG began hosting Warfighter exercises in 2016 and usually hosts one a year, O’Connor said. FTIG and Camp Atterbury are the only two National Guard training centers that host Warfighters.

“There’s a lot of reserve-component units in the northeast, and that helps,” O’Connor said. “The New York National Guard is pretty big, the Virginia National Guard is pretty big, and there are a lot of Army Reserve units around.”

FTIG is the only Level II National Guard training center in the northeast United States, meaning it has billeting for a brigade, maneuver acreage for a company-plus, individual and crew-served weapons ranges, and squad and team collective ranges.

Additionally, a new 63,000-square-foot Training Support Center opened at FTIG earlier in 2021 that consolidated the operations previously located in six World War II-era buildings into one facility.