Fort Benning hosted the Army’s Infantry Week, with five competitions to test strength, teamwork, and technical proficiency across ground combat disciplines.
FORT BENNING, Ga.—Hundreds of troops from across the United States and around the world gathered in Georgia from April 7 to April 13 to test their skills in five grueling competitions as part of the U.S. Army’s Infantry Week.
Challenges ranged from hand-to-hand fighting to long-range marksmanship and multimile ruck marches, as competitors vied to demonstrate their prowess in ground combat.
Although winning any of the week’s competitions comes with accolades and bragging rights, the events are about demonstrating the skills critical to success on real-world battlefields.
“The five competitions showcase the essential warfighting capabilities that our soldiers need to be lethal, resilient, and ready for any threat across the globe,” said Brig. Gen. Phillip Kiniery, commandant of the Infantry School at the U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning.
From April 7 to April 10, troops competed in airborne operations, field reconnaissance and stealth, marksmanship, and hand-to-hand combat. An even more demanding three-day gauntlet capped the week as teams contended for the title of Best Ranger.
Best Jumpmaster Competition
“The overall straightness of this load, this lip, I don’t like that,” Staff Sgt. Kevin Koziol said, as he provided a visual inspection of a door bundle that a team had prepared for airdrop from a moving aircraft.
As a qualified jumpmaster—the expert paratrooper responsible for airborne operations from inside an aircraft—Koziol offered his expertise as a judge in the newest Infantry Week competition: Best Jumpmaster.
In its inaugural showing at Fort Benning’s Infantry Week, the Best Jumpmaster Competition featured seven four-man teams of paratroopers testing their skills at various aspects of packing and using parachutes to deploy themselves and their equipment into a battlefield setting.
The last large-scale U.S. parachute assault into a combat zone took place during the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, when about 1,000 paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade dropped into northern Iraq.
Although massed parachute assaults have been less common in the modern age, paratroopers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division continue to provide a global rapid response deployment capability. Members of the 82nd Airborne recently deployed to the Middle East amid fighting with Iran.
The ability to air-drop supplies also remains relevant in modern conflicts. The U.S. military conducted multiple airdrops of humanitarian supplies into the Gaza Strip as Israeli forces conducted combat operations there after Oct. 7, 2023.
Teams were judged on their scores across the various competition events. Those events included physical fitness assessments, a written test of teams’ knowledge of equipment and parachute infantry history, practical tests of their ability to rig parachutes for specialized items, their ability to correctly inspect parachute equipment, and evaluations of their abilities to perform critical tasks from an aircraft.
A team representing Fort Benning’s Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade won the inaugural Best Jumpmaster Competition.
By Ryan Morgan
