Space and Culture

We posted the NY Times story about mock Iraqi villages in Nevada, and now here’s Wired reporting on Baghdad, USA, a.k.a. the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana.

“The 4,000 guardsmen here for these late-winter exercises will encounter 500 soldiers from the 509th, 500 support staff, a dozen Apache and Blackhawk combat helicopters, 30 tank-like Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and 1,000 jeeps, Humvees, and sundry other things with wheels. Commanders on the ground get video feeds from simulated surveillance planes flown over 3-D maps of the battlefield. In-game journalists produce three daily newspapers, a radio show, and a nightly reel of video highlights. More than 200 of the role-players are Arab Americans, many of them Iraqis, bussed in from around the US for extra realism. A three-week exercise can cost up to $9 million.

The environment, too, is eerily detailed. Many of the ‘towns’ are rough models: a handful of corrugated aluminum and wood-frame buildings with an upright drainage pipe serving as a minaret for the mosque, for example. But the most elaborate town, Suliyah – officially named Shughart-Gordon, after two soldiers killed in Somalia – has dozens of multistory concrete buildings, including a school with a playground, an open-air market, and a convincingly equipped hospital. There’s even a cemetery. During exercises, the pumps at the gas station can explode in a 30-foot fireball. Rooftop concussion cannons throw in random bursts of noise and flame. Fog machines and speakers fill the buildings with smoke and the sounds of gunfire or barking dogs. More than 900 cameras record it all.”

Wow. Personally, I found myself thinking a lot about the guys who plan the structures and paths, paint the anti-American grafitti on the buildings, publish the newspapers. You know, the designers. No doubt they’re masters and commanders of the persona – that singular, official version and vision of the Iraqi people that soldiers will carry into battle. But the situations in which these personas act must be quite complex: “We’ll never win by killing all the insurgents. We have to get the support of the population.”

Cubic, the defense contractor involved in the training, treats combat as somewhat of an affective spectacle, while the military focuses on the minutia of everyday life:

“They’ve staged bloody aftermaths of bomb attacks, applying gory makeup to Vietnam veterans with missing limbs to make extra-convincing bomb victims. Teams of ‘firemarkers’ zip around the Box on all-terrain vehicles, rigging up Hollywood-style pyrotechnics for roadside bombs and explosives-laden cars. Prevatt reminisces about a mass grave they created, a charnel pit of bound mannequins with simulated head wounds. ‘We put a bunch of bones and meat in there and buried it for a couple days so it would smell right,’ he says.

The JRTC expends enormous resources on elaborate scenarios that try to replicate, predict, and manipulate human behavior. That can mean gunshots, but more often it means subjecting troops to hours of entirely prosaic jobs. Trainees at Polk spend days guarding gates, maintaining security at demonstrations, and placating civilian leadership. ‘It’s all about building and developing relations with the locals,’ says Petraeus of the Combined Arms Center. ‘Knowledge of the cultural terrain is as important as knowledge of the physical terrain’.”

But, really, I just have to wonder why the official JRTC & Fort Polk website prominently displays phone numbers to report child and spouse abuse or sexual assault. Is pseudo war and hatred during the day making these folks freak out on their loved ones when they get home at night?