First there was a shoot-out in the old hotel, the three-story building on the edge of town with the peeling white paint and shuttered windows. Then there was word of a hostage situation in a building nearby, possibly the one with the gun turret mounted on the roof. Just down the road an explosive-rigged truck smashed through a checkpoint; troops are evacuating the wounded. To make matters worse, now there’s a bank robbery in progress.
A line of troops, each in matching fatigues, press their bodies against the dusty wall of a shabby house near the center of town. They’re after the bank robbers, but first they have to find them. A Chinook helicopter crosses the clear blue sky overhead, kicking up rolling clouds of dust from the hills surrounding the village. The boom of a mortar round echoes in the distance. Slowly, quietly, the troops move from one building to the next, their rifles trained on the courtyard walls, the rows of shops with Arabic signs, the minaret-topped mosque, the bullet-riddled carcass of a Humvee lying near the graveyard, anywhere else snipers may be waiting.
This could be Iraq — but it’s not. What gives it away are the snowcapped peaks to the west, most notably Cheyenne Mountain. Then there are the little cameras mounted all over town. Each is wired to a nondescript building on a hill nearby, where, in true Orwellian fashion, people are watching everything, room by room, courtyard by courtyard, that is occurring in Medina Jabal — which means "mountain city" in Arabic — on a massive bank of computer screens. As the observers watch the troops progress through town, they take notes and occasionally speak to the soldiers via two-way radio headsets. “Go into building 18,” they say, “and stand by on building 73.”
Welcome to the wilds of Fort Carson, the Army base just south of Colorado Springs, where, little by little, a makeshift Iraq is growing up amid the 137,000 acres of mostly desolate hills and prairie. From bomb-shelled checkpoints to precisely detailed Iraqi villages — complete with real, live Iraqi civilians — it’s starting to look downright Middle Eastern in some parts of this vast wilderness.
It’s all the work of imaginative personnel scraping together creative ideas and meager funding, real Iraqi refugees recreating the world they just barely escaped, and visionary Army officers willing to push the official envelope in order to best prepare their soldiers for a war half a world away. The result is both fascinating and bewildering — a shell-shocked Disneyland growing beneath the foothills. But it’s not just for show—the strange world of “Fort Carsondad” may hold the key to the Army succeeding in Iraq — if it’s not already too late.
Part 1: The Mayor of Fort Potemkin
Dan Benford is a likable fellow. His healthy physique and decorous demeanor betray the years he spent in the military. But his jovial goateed smile and relaxed way of speaking show that he’s now civilian through and through. His calm attitude seems almost surprising, in fact, considering, as he likes to joke, that the 127,000 uninhabited acres of Fort Carson are, "my responsibility.”
Dan Benford, Interim Range Control Officer at Fort Carson, explains the theories behind his specially designed war zones.
Parking his vehicle on the crown of a low hill, he gets out and gazes out at one of these special sites: a scattering of small buildings, mostly one story, nestled in a dry basin. This is Range 60, also known as Medina Jabal. It’s a Military Operations on Urban Terrain (MOUT) site, designed to mimic cities, towns and other built-up areas in which U.S. soldiers find themselves fighting. Lately it’s been dressed up to resemble Iraq: buildings have been decorated with Arabic signs, the church has been outfitted with a minaret.
From his vantage point, Benford points out new houses that have been erected and high courtyard walls enveloping most of the buildings. This was all done to make the village intentionally congested. “What we ran into in Iraq in the urban sprawl is that a lot of the buildings are built close together,” he explains, so he wanted to do the same thing here. Using intelligence brought back by soldiers — he hasn’t visited Iraq himself — Benford and his staff have continually updated Medina Jabal. There’s a stark graveyard and a grassy soccer field. The police station has a usable jail and telephone poles around the village can be used to create roadblocks. The hospital has an old dentist chair and the market’s shelves are stocked with empty cans and cardboard boxes. There are secret passageways and hallways that lead to nowhere. Automated targets — both friend and foe — are rigged to pop up in windows and doorways. Benford has even requisitioned unusable Colorado Springs buses that can be loaded with make-believe bombs. There was a plan to install a drive-up window at the bank, but it was too expensive and nobody was sure Iraqi banks offered drive-through. “I’d love to get a subway, but it’s not going to happen,” says Benford, chuckling.
A mosque and other scenery at Medina Jabal.
“We want to make a ground soldier think, use their initiative,” says Benford. “That way we can help our soldiers come home safely.” In a sense, this man is the both the architect and mayor of Medina Jabal, the ruler of a Potemkin village frequented only by grunts and top brass. It’s like he’s playing a full-scale, real-word version of SimCity, one where he can wreak actual havoc upon all he creates.
While MOUT sites, mock cities and towns designed for Army training, have been around for a few decades, only recently have they been anything but an afterthought in the Armed Forces. For most armies throughout the centuries, the favored urban warfare tactic has been to avoid cities and towns altogether. In about 500 B.C., Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, "The worst policy is to attack cities." While the U.S. Army became proficient in urban operations during World War II, such tactics largely fell out of favor during the Cold War. At the Army’s Combat Training Centers around the country, where units engage in large-scale battle simulations, mock warfare was for the most part focused on tank-on-tank engagements.
Such training served well in straightforward, city-free battles such as most of Operation Desert Storm, but as insurgents began holing-up in and launching attacks from urban areas in post-"Mission Accomplished" Iraq, the Army began to understand that its soldiers are increasingly living and fighting in urban war zones. The wars of the future, they realized, would be fought block by block, precinct by precinct, with no quick victory. It was a sobering thought: city warfare — as the US learned harshly in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 — is by its very nature discouragingly difficult. Complicated geography, hiding places around every turn — so much can go wrong, and it usually does.
“No longer do we fight the war and we demobilize and everybody goes home,” says Lt. Col. Richard Harms of Combat Training Center Directorate at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., which oversees operations at the Army’s Combat Training Centers. “No longer can we bypass urban areas. We’ve done that in the past, but we won’t be able to do that in the future. We need to be able to go downtown and stay downtown.”
A Chinook helicopter flies over Medina Jabal, a mock Iraqi village in Fort Carson.
“We as a warrior culture have left the Cold War era and have embraced the fact that overall success in war will not only involve success in direct combat, it also involves success with the people who live in the environment where we conduct combat,” says David K. Dismukes, command information officer at Fort Benning, Ga., home of the U.S. Army Infantry Center. “Current operations in Iraq deal with civilians first and foremost, insurgents and terrorists second. We can beat the insurgency, but if we don’t win and maintain the trust of the people and their elected government, we will not win the war.”
It’s no wonder the Army has recently embraced urban-operations training like never before. At the National Training Centers, detailed make-believe Iraqi cities, complete with bomb-making facilities and shadowy networks of arms dealers, are going up where tanks once rumbled across empty fields. At Army bases across the nation, plans are in the works for dozens of pretend Middle Eastern towns.
It’s no different at Fort Carson. Medina Jabal is just a single municipality in what’s become a miniature nation-state of war-torn villages and outposts on the base. Faced with a limited budget, Benford and his team have been forced to build their battlefield with whatever supplies available. Often this entails fashioning buildings out of old shipping containers, stacked atop one another like Legos, or making mosques out of TUFF SHEDS. But the results are still impressive. At a different location on the base, there's also a security checkpoint featuring a remote-controlled truck that can be rigged with mock explosives and sent hurtling at guards in training. At another location, there’s an Iraqi thoroughfare where insurgents can drop imaginary bombs on truck convoys or pretend improved explosive devices (IEDs) can incapacitate vehicles as they rumble through. And soon, amid all this specially designed violence, a new capitol city will rise. Next month the Army breaks ground on a $28 million Combined Arms Training Facility on a remote section of the base. With 30 life-like buildings, an underground tunnel system, elevator shafts, an airport and a sky bridge, this new MOUT site is going to make Medina Jabal look like Hicksville.
Driving past the empty field where the Combined Arms Training Facility will soon be built, Benford can’t hide his enthusiasm. In his mind’s eye he sees troops barging into buildings, insurgents popping out of trap doors, skirmishes being waged across busy streets. These are all wars he wants to fight — with each battle he wages here, maybe he can teach a few soldiers how to avoid a similar battle when they’re staring down a similar war-torn street thousands of miles away in the desert.
“It’s going to look like a real town,” he says excitedly. “I can’t wait to see it.”
Watch a slideshow of images from Medina Jabal at Fort Carson.
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