When I wrote “Rush to the intimate” (DOWNLOADS tab), a discussion of the ‘cultural turn’ in US counterinsurgency, I was fascinated by a rich and rapidly expanding literature on pre-deployment training and Mission Rehearsal Exercises in simulated “Afghanistans” and “Iraqs” across the United States and beyond in what Steve Graham later called, in Cities under siege, a ‘theme-park archipelago’:

‘US troops prepare for deployment in Afghanistan and Iraq by rotating through major Combat Training Centers.  The arc of these ‘theatres of war’ runs from the United States through Europe to Jordan and Kuwait, but the main Mission Rehearsal Exercises are conducted at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fork Polk, Louisiana; the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California; and the US Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Training Center at Twentynine Palms, California.  Each includes prefabricated villages and small towns to train troops in urban operations.  … There is little attempt at morphological similitude.  In fact, the same physical structures serve for Afghanistan and Iraq, as though the two are indistinguishable and interchangeable, and the buildings are rudimentary approximations.  One journalist described the crude architecture of ‘Wadi al Sahara’ at Twentynine Palms as being ‘like an impressionist painting’.  From the surrounding hills it could be mistaken for part of Basra or Fallujah, but ‘a walk through its dusty streets shows it to be only a vast collection of shipping containers.’ This too is not without its performative consequences.  Shipping containers are an improvement on poker chips and Lego bricks, but reducing living spaces to metal boxes and studio flats conveys a silent message about the sort of people who live in them.

‘The focus at all the training centres is on interactive realism, and the cultural turn has transformed the terms of engagement.  In the early stages of the ‘war on terror’, the emphasis was on kinetic operations and on state-of-the-art special effects that drew on the visual and pyrotechnic skills of Hollywood and theme-park designers.  When one reporter visited Fort Polk in January 2003, she described troops calling in air strikes, securing roads and bridges on the perimeter of a town, and dealing with ambushes staged by insurgents played by soldiers from the base. Her story repeated the physical imagery of the Handbook for Joint Urban Operations issued the previous fall with precision: ‘From sewers to rooftops, cities are multi-layered, like three-dimensional chess boards.’  Civilians appeared only as casualties, and then only in the very last paragraph, where one soldier admitted that he had ‘no clear answer’: ‘“What can you do?”’ The cultural turn is supposed to provide the answer to that question, and from 2006 a flurry of media reports described a new emphasis on military-civilian interaction.  Exercises still include kinetic operations, though these are now more likely to focus on combating IEDs and suicide bombings, but the main objective is no longer scoring kills but ‘gaining the trust of the locals.’  The deployment of Civilian (sometimes called Cultural) Role Players has expanded dramatically.  More than 1,000 are on call at Fort Polk alone, including 250 Arabic speakers, many of them recruited from the Iraqi diaspora in Atlanta, Houston, Memphis and as far away as Michigan.  Their very presence has changed the imaginative geography.  One corporal noted that his previous training had never incorporated civilians ‘wondering what’s going on, and looking around, and doing everyday things.  So when we got there and there were other people besides the enemy, it kind of threw us on our heels.  You know, all we trained for was that the enemy are the only ones on the streets.’  But these Civilian Role Players are not extras, figures to be bypassed, and their roles are carefully scripted.  They play community leaders, police chiefs, clerics, shopkeepers, aid workers, and journalists, and new scenarios require troops to understand the meaning of cultural transactions and to conduct negotiations with local people.  Careful tallies are kept of promises made by US commanders, and the immediate consequences of civilian casualties are dramatized in depth.  Mock newscasts by teams representing CNN and al Jazeera remind troops that local actions can have far-reaching consequences.  Even the special effects have become more intimate; in one Gothic gesture, amputees are used to simulate the effects of suicide bombs (though not, I suspect, US air strikes).  ‘It is no longer close in and destroy the enemy,’ one Marine officer explained: ‘We have to build relationships with Iraqis in the street.’