SPEAKER_05: Article believes in delightful design for every home. And thanks to their online only model, they have some really delightful prices too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern, coastal, industrial, and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. My Article dining room table is the center of my house. My partner works at it all day long, and when everyone's at home, we eat around it at night because it's the only table that fits us all. It is the greatest. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.
SPEAKER_19: Rebuild your credit card with Apple Card. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn 4.35% annual percentage yield when you open a savings account. A high yield, low effort way to grow your money with no fees. Apply for Apple Card now in the Wallet app on iPhone to start earning and growing your daily cash with savings. Today, Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Savings accounts by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Pepper FDIC, terms apply.
SPEAKER_05: This is 99% invisible.
I'm Roman Mars.
Back in 2008, the so-called war on terror was in full swing. That year, close to 190,000 US troops were stationed in the Middle East. In Afghanistan, the Taliban and other anti-government insurgents were fighting against the Afghan government and its international military partners.
SPEAKER_15: It was during midday or probably afternoon. I was very tired and I was just looking for a quiet remote place.
SPEAKER_05: This is Mustafa, who is only using his first name to protect his friends and family in Afghanistan. Mustafa remembers one particular day when he needed a break from the stress of life in his village. He was exhausted. And so that afternoon, he started looking for a quiet place to take a nap.
SPEAKER_15: So I went and entered in this room and I was stuck out of bed there. And it was a very remote area of the village.
SPEAKER_05: He went into the house and quickly fell asleep.
SPEAKER_15: Next thing I know, there were Marines kicking in the door, people with their guns drawn. They came in yelling and they say,
oh, we got him, we got him. And then I was like, I didn't know what to do.
SPEAKER_05: Before he knew it, Mustafa had been handcuffed and taken in for interrogation.
SPEAKER_15: They were like, what you were doing? Where did you come from?
And later on, I found out that was a suspected Taliban house.
SPEAKER_05: It could have been a catastrophe for Mustafa, except it wasn't real.
SPEAKER_02: Because the entire situation was a military simulation.
SPEAKER_05: Best reporter, Sonia Paul.
SPEAKER_02: Mustafa, who was born in Afghanistan
and raised as a refugee in Pakistan,
was playing a role in a make-believe theater of war.
He wasn't in Afghanistan.
He was in 29 Palms, California, home to the world's largest Marine Corps training base.
SPEAKER_15: All I knew was we were going to role play as an Afghan character, living in a fictional country like Afghanistan
and pretend to be an Afghanistan and teach the Marines the Afghan customs and the culture.
SPEAKER_02: Hundreds of other Afghans were role playing alongside Mustafa in this scenario.
Everyone had a specific role in the village.
Police officer, mayor, insurgent, and so on.
Mustafa was playing the mayor's son.
SPEAKER_15: That scenario was for them to search the house just to make sure what was going on in that house. And coincidentally, which was not part of the training, I was there just because I wanted to take a nap.
SPEAKER_02: Fake cities, imitation nations, people role playing as civilians, spies, or enemies, complete with costumes and props. All of this was coordinated and constructed by the US military to prepare soldiers for war.
SPEAKER_05: These fake villages designed for US military training dot the entire United States, not to mention other countries. Researchers have identified over 400 of them around the world.
SPEAKER_02: Mustafa says he participated as a role player about a dozen times between the years of 2008 and 2013.
It was the heyday of military simulations
when most of them were made to look like mock villages in cities of the Middle East.
SPEAKER_15: They had the moths, they had shopkeepers, they had a police force, they had an army force. I really felt after the third day that I really was in Afghanistan.
SPEAKER_05: But these training simulations have a much longer history. And now, more than two years after US troops pulled out of Afghanistan, and nearly 21 years after the invasion of Iraq,
they're being revamped yet again for another era of warfare.
SPEAKER_02: In theory, these training sites are meant to prepare soldiers and protect against the loss of life.
But for the role players who staff them, people like Mustafa, the sites can start to blur
truth and fiction in ways that can be uncanny
and raise questions about the changing nature of the battlefield and the business of war.
SPEAKER_05: For much of the long history of warfare, these types of urban simulations were unnecessary, mostly because, for much of history, warfare wasn't urban at all. It happened on a battlefield.
SPEAKER_02: Around World War I, simple military simulations began to emerge.
Infantry would often dig trenches and practice drills in them to prepare for the trench warfare on the front lines.
But it wasn't until World War II
that the military fully realized the importance of urban simulations in preparing soldiers for war,
largely in response to the 1942 Battle of Stalingrad.
SPEAKER_13: The Soviet soldiers adapted themselves to fighting amid the ruined buildings.
Spurred on by hatred for the enemy,
they gave the Germans no rest.
SPEAKER_04: Stalingrad was a very dense urban environment and included buildings the size of urban blocks that had multiple stories, that had basements, that had attics.
SPEAKER_02: That's Steven Mueller.
He's an architect who studied the history and design of military training sites.
Before this moment, infantry training might have involved some exposure to urban environments,
but nothing at the scale of Stalingrad.
SPEAKER_04: All of the allied militaries were realizing that they were underprepared for the sheer scale and scope and complexity of prolonged warfare in a complex three-dimensional urban environment.
And so then all of the allied forces, including the US, started preparing for more and more battles like that
by building environments that could better simulate that.
SPEAKER_05: And these simulations also began to incorporate role players.
SPEAKER_04: So there would be, for instance, the role player playing Hitler or Goebbels, the kind of propaganda minister,
and these role players would be inciting a crowd of supporters. That would be part of the scenario that the allied forces would train to intervene within.
SPEAKER_05: But the main focus of the military simulations was practicing for and adjusting to the complexity of different physical environments where soldiers would be fighting.
SPEAKER_02: The military went to great lengths to create authentic replicas of each new theater of war,
like replicating the moisture content of the wood used in enemy buildings so they could understand how a foreign environment would respond to fire and explosions. They hired architects to design fake German apartment blocks and mock Japanese dwellings.
They paid attention to minutiae on the exterior and interior of these homes to ensure they were realistic.
SPEAKER_05: Over the decades, they also built roads and sewer systems to mimic the ones in Korea and eventually phony Vietnamese villages in the swamps of Louisiana.
SPEAKER_02: But the people piece of the battle became increasingly complex,
and a major turning point for the military came out of a real conflict in the 1990s.
US forces were deployed to support a United Nations humanitarian mission in Somalia when a military coup devastated the country's agriculture
and led to a nationwide famine.
SPEAKER_05: US forces ended up tangling with local warlords in the distribution of food aid. Eventually, Somali forces shot down two American Black Hawk helicopters, which was dramatized in the film Black Hawk Down.
An 18-hour firefight erupted in the streets in what became known as the Battle of Mogadishu. It's estimated that hundreds, possibly even more than a thousand Somalis died, as did 18 American soldiers.
SPEAKER_17: It is missing in the heaviest fighting yet in Mogadishu.
Some of the dead dragged through the streets by jeering Somalis, the worst US casualties yet in Somalia, forcing the Pentagon to send reinforcements into what has become an all-out urban war.
SPEAKER_02: The battle was a tragedy for all those involved, and it was considered a political embarrassment for the United States.
This kind of warfare was fundamentally different from the way the US military knew how to fight.
For one, the built environment in Somalia was chaotic,
a dense urban market built from makeshift materials like scrap metal and highly flammable wood,
which meant that it could be very easily destroyed.
SPEAKER_20: To not have been able to really win that small guerrilla warfare in Mogadishu because of the density of the urban landscape was not only lessons learned, but also like symbolic loss in a way
that we hadn't seen before.
SPEAKER_02: This is Ursula Kripa. She and Stephen co-authored a book about the relationship between urbanism and military training. And she says that critically, the intense city battle also involved a kind of combatant the military hadn't trained for,
people who weren't clearly identifiable as soldiers or fighters.
SPEAKER_20: The so-called enemy was enlisting people through the market, enlisting people in the neighborhoods to be on the lookout or to kind of be warning or to hide munitions.
SPEAKER_05: In other words, it wasn't just the environment the US military wasn't prepared for. It didn't know how to predict the people in the city, whether they were local sympathizers of the so-called enemy or civilians caught in the crossfire.
SPEAKER_02: Soon after the disaster in Somalia, and then as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began,
enormous amounts of funding flowed into the military to update its training.
The army wanted to avoid another fiasco like Mogadishu,
and they wanted their soldiers better prepared to fight in cities crowded with both enemies and civilians.
SPEAKER_14: There was some momentum around shifting military culture at that moment.
SPEAKER_05: That's Professor Andy Rice, who has studied military simulations.
SPEAKER_14: They imagined the future of wars that they would be fighting much more like those kind of urban counter-insurgency styles of combat. They'd also just rewritten the field training manual, I think in 2004, 2005, to emphasize culture and counter-insurgency as opposed to force-on-force combat operations.
SPEAKER_02: The military realized it needed to double down on training soldiers in local culture. Troops needed to understand the local politics, the traditions, and the language of the place.
SPEAKER_14: This could help them avoid misinterpreting signs and symbols in the ways that people approach, let's say, a checkpoint, so you don't shoot somebody.
SPEAKER_05: And so the importance of role players in military simulations only grew. They needed to speak the languages that soldiers might encounter. They needed to act the ways that locals might act, and their roles needed to reflect the increasingly ambiguous nature of modern warfare.
SPEAKER_14:
Like this is actually a really important skillset to be able to play act in these spaces, to be able to think about your relationships with a supposed adversary. So I wanted to see it.
SPEAKER_05: In 2007, and again in 2012, Professor Rice visited and studied a training village in Southern California designed to look like the Middle East. Its moniker was Medina Wassel.
SPEAKER_02: Medina Wassel was like a big Hollywood production. Scenes and scenarios were crafted by a team of real Hollywood writers and military consultants.
And the military also went to some absurd lengths to get these role players ready for their roles. They hired actors like Carl Weathers, who played Apollo Creed in the Rocky franchise, to give acting lessons.
SPEAKER_05: These scenarios needed to be visually dramatic as well. The military wanted soldiers to encounter the worst of the worst while training in these urban warfare scenarios.
SPEAKER_14: The aesthetics are meant to feel as though you're in a war. Like the military really wants its soldiers to be inoculated against shock, is the way that they put it. So that a soldier in a actual wartime environment won't be paralyzed with fear and not act the way that they're supposed to according to their training.
SPEAKER_02: And creating the worst day ever morphed into an industry.
Companies took notice.
SPEAKER_14: So there was a company out of San Diego. They had kind of made their reputation through like high-numbered cable, like lurid crime dramas and softcore porn.
SPEAKER_05: Around the year 2002, that lurid crime drama and softcore porn company created an offshoot called Strategic Operations. It was founded to produce stressful, hyper-realistic combat situations for training military personnel using all the techniques of the theater, TV, and film industries. They became specialists in pyrotechnics and engineering big explosions inside Medina Wassel.
SPEAKER_14: They also did kind of flesh-colored rubber suits that would squirt blood. That was another thing that they had people wear. They ended up contracting with amputees to play the roles of people that had lost limbs inside of IED explosions.
SPEAKER_02: This all sounds like a pretty wild thing to experience from the perspective of soldiers in training.
But then consider the role players at Medina Wassel, the mostly Arab-American immigrants. Many had been in the US since the 1970s, and they had signed up to basically play themselves in a facsimile of their home countries under brutal attack.
SPEAKER_05: Oestafa doesn't remember exactly how he first found out about the job as a role player. He'd been in the US for about eight years at that point, living in Sacramento, going to school, and learning the ins and outs of life in the US when some of his friends, also from Afghanistan, started applying for the job.
SPEAKER_15: It was around 2008, and I was on a spring break from my community college, and it was just perfect timing.
I had a week off, and it was a five-day assignment. I was like, okay, it's an easy enough job, so I went there.
SPEAKER_02: Can you walk me through what had happened in order for you to get the job?
SPEAKER_15: So we were supposed to meet up at this restaurant, which was also a banquet hall in Fremont.
SPEAKER_05: Fremont, California, home to one of the largest Afghan communities in the US. Oestafa says that at the banquet hall, employees of an Alaska-based military contractor had set up tables where they handed out applications. They served food while people filled them out.
SPEAKER_15: They did serve us a very nice dinner, I remember that, a traditional Afghan dish dinner. And we ate the dinner while we were signing up.
SPEAKER_02: Was there a particular type, if you will, who went for this kind of job? And if so, what was that type?
SPEAKER_15: I won't say any particular type. Obviously, it was disproportionately male.
If I have to guess, probably it was 80% male and 20% female.
They tended to be more people that had limited ability
to speak English, and actually, the company loved that they were primarily targeting this community that spoke no English or very limited amount of English, because it brought even more intensities to the role player. So if you really don't know how to speak English or very little understanding of experience, so you can portray that more naturally.
SPEAKER_05:
Oestafa estimates there were at least 400 people there that night applying for the job. The contractor, a company called Tetitlac, was also performing on-the-spot drug tests and background checks.
SPEAKER_15: And then around midnight, we got boarded on the buses that was chartered by the company, and we left Fremont all the way to 29 Palms. So pretty much, I got hired on the spot for this job.
SPEAKER_02: So the day you were hired was a day you went to 29 Palms?
SPEAKER_05: Yes, that's correct.
Oestafa had never even heard of 29 Palms before signing up to be a role player. It's a huge Marine Corps base near Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California's Mojave Desert.
SPEAKER_15: So once they took us in in the base, they handed out these scripts for us. They said, here, memorize this, remember your role, just follow the script. But my role was very left vague. I'm not sure if it was done on purpose. We had a lot of freedom to just improvise.
SPEAKER_02: The workday started at around 6.30 a.m. after a simple breakfast. Then Oestafa and the other role players boarded a bus that brought them to the field.
That's where Oestafa first saw the mock village where he'd be working.
SPEAKER_05: It was built out of dressed-up shipping containers. Everyone wore traditional clothes, and Oestafa says they weren't allowed to speak English, only Farsi and Pashto. Everything to Oestafa looked shockingly accurate.
SPEAKER_15: I really felt after the third day that I really was in Afghanistan because I was so immersed in that environment and then that role.
SPEAKER_05: But there were also elements of his experience that were difficult or confusing for him and other role players. Some of the role players were recent refugees. They literally left one theater of war only to enter another.
SPEAKER_02: And sometimes, like in the case of one of Oestafa's friends,
the simulation blurred the real and the fictional and upsetting ways.
In another conversation we had over the phone, Oestafa told me about a friend of his who didn't speak much English, who had trouble grasping what his role was supposed to be.
What he understood was that he was supposed to play a police officer, but he was actually supposed to play a police officer working as an insider for the Taliban. And the Marines, in this scenario,
were in fact on the hunt for his character.
SPEAKER_05: So when they found Oestafa's friend, they brought him in for interrogation, and a Marine intelligence officer started accusing him of being part of the Taliban.
SPEAKER_02: And Oestafa's friend crumbled.
SPEAKER_12: And then he started panicking and said,
oh, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I came to New York, they took my fingerprints via metrics, I'm good, I have a green card, I'm legally here.
SPEAKER_05: He was terrified, and the interpreter started laughing, and he tried to calm and comfort Oestafa's friend in his native language.
SPEAKER_02: He said, this is all pretend. You're not being accused of being part of the Taliban. You're a role player.
SPEAKER_12: You will not get in trouble, you will not get arrested when you leave this job,
because he thought he was gonna get deported for being a Taliban.
SPEAKER_02: Reflecting back on that experience and how traumatizing it was for his friend,
Oestafa says that working 12 hours a day, sometimes up to two weeks at a time,
made it easy to forget you were in a simulation.
SPEAKER_15: We just got absorbed in that role
and just forget that what you're doing is actually a make-believe scenario, not a real life, but then I guess we just lost sense of that.
SPEAKER_05: But even with these uncomfortable dynamics, Oestafa found that being a role player was a good job. He says the role players had comfortable sleeping quarters on the military base with nice beds, hot showers, and access to a gym. Rotations typically lasted two weeks at a time.
SPEAKER_02: Oestafa would learn about rotations at 29 Palms through an automated phone message the military contractor sent out to the role players.
It was in English, Farsi, and Pashto.
SPEAKER_15: You would get a one-week notice, and then they will say, hey, from this day to this day,
there's a two-week rotation coming up. If you're interested, press one. If you're not interested, press two.
SPEAKER_02: If they press one, they would then get more information
about what time to arrive if they came on their own
or how to catch the next chartered bus from Fremont to 29 Palms.
SPEAKER_15: People that were working in that job, they were really very, very careful not to miss that phone call because they knew if they miss one time, they're gonna get kicked out out of the list of role players pretty much.
SPEAKER_05: And there was money to be made. Oestafa says at the time that he participated, role players earned about 1000 to $1,800 a week.
SPEAKER_02: Money that was especially meaningful to non-English speakers who might've struggled to get other kinds of work.
SPEAKER_05: And for contractors and subcontractors who build and staff these simulations, the money is even bigger. A year-long NBC News investigation published in 2019 found that since the early 2000s, the industry around these simulations has ballooned.
SPEAKER_01: NBC News has identified a network of 256 companies in 46 states providing role players and receiving more than a quarter of a billion dollars a year in government contracts.
SPEAKER_02: In 2009, the Government Accountability Office found that the Department of Defense spent $94.8 million on these simulations,
which means that by the time the NBC report came out a decade later, spending had more than doubled to over $250 million.
SPEAKER_05: And at the time of the 2019 report, there still hadn't been a comprehensive audit of that spending. Independent watchdog groups said these programs took off during the war on terror to serve an immediate need, and they were basically forgotten. But that doesn't mean they don't still warrant scrutiny.
SPEAKER_02: Because now, even as the US has withdrawn from those wars, these training grounds aren't going away.
They're just adapting.
SPEAKER_05: Our reporter, Sonia Paul, takes us into one of these training grounds after the break.
Thank you. Immediately after you post your job, ZipRecruiter's smart technology starts showing you candidates whose skills and experience match it. And to encourage top candidates to respond to your job post even sooner, ZipRecruiter lets you send them a personal invite to apply. This month, find the talent you need to fill all of your roles with ZipRecruiter. See for yourself what four to five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Just go to this exclusive web address right now to try ZipRecruiter for free. It's ziprecruiter.com slash nine nine. Again, that's ziprecruiter.com slash nine nine.
ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire.
Your business was humming, but now you're falling behind.
Teams buried in manual work, taking forever to close the books. Getting one source of truth is like pulling teeth. If this is you, you should know these three numbers. 37,000, 25, and one. 37,000, that's the number of businesses which have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. 25, NetSuite turns 25 this year. That's 25 years of helping businesses do more with less, close their books in days, not weeks, and drive down costs. And one, because your business is one of a kind. So get a customized solution for all your KPIs in one efficient system with one source of truth. Manage risk, get reliable forecasts, and improve margins. Everything you need to grow all in one place. Right now, download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance, absolutely free at netsuite.com slash invisible. That's netsuite.com slash invisible to get your own KPI checklist. Netsuite.com slash invisible.
SPEAKER_18: Ask Sherwin-Williams during the January winter sale, January 12th through the 22nd, and get 30% off paints and stains with prices starting at 31.14. That means 30% off our most popular color family, blue. Psychologists have found it to be soothing and relaxing, which makes it especially great for bedrooms and bathrooms. And of course, get 30% off all of our other colors. Shop the sale online or visit your neighborhood Sherwin-Williams store. Click the banner to learn more. Retail sales only, some exclusions apply. See store for details.
SPEAKER_16: At Amika, auto insurance comes with empathy.
That means we know the most important part of the car
is the driver.
Amika, empathy is our best policy.
SPEAKER_06: Like flat, mountainous, got some urban areas in it.
SPEAKER_02: In early 2023, I visited the National Training Center at Fort Irwin in Southern California.
I was there along with a group of researchers, a few other members of the press, and some military family members.
SPEAKER_06: A lot more sand than trees and grass, right?
SPEAKER_02: As we sat inside a yellow school bus, an army sergeant narrated what to look out for in the world we were about to enter.
Endless smiles of arid-looking mountains surrounded us.
Like 29 Palms, Fort Irwin is also in the middle of California's Mojave Desert, near the city of Barstow.
And the training simulation we were headed to was the village formerly known as Medina Wasil,
the same village Professor Rice visited.
But now, it's been adapted for training for more current conflicts, like the war in Ukraine.
SPEAKER_06: — All right, so we're about to enter in what we call the city of Rzizh.
SPEAKER_02: — Rzizh is made up of 785 buildings. It's the largest and most detailed of all the urban training villages.
SPEAKER_06: — So we have schools, we've got an embassy, we've got a parking square, we've got high-rise buildings, we've got subterranean tunnel systems, we've got a prison, right?
SPEAKER_02: — Rzizh is intended to simulate a contested border city between the make-believe countries of Denovia and Atropia.
Denovia is nominally a republic, but functionally an authoritarian state.
Atropia is an oil-rich, western-leaning oligarchy.
Both are Muslim-majority nations in the Caucasus region of the world.
The general on the tour told me the army is looking to hire role players who can speak more Eastern Bloc languages,
like Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Armenian.
SPEAKER_08: — If you pay attention to the signs, right, it's in Russia. You change it to Russian, right? So they're replicating the fight in Ukraine.
SPEAKER_02:
— Since there weren't any soldiers actually using the training ground,
what we saw on the tour was a sort of simulation of a simulation.
Other than a couple of fake attacks and explosions to show us the Hollywood-style special effects that the military uses,
there wasn't any simulated combat going on.
It almost felt like the tours of Universal Studios, my family and I went to when I was a kid.
At one stop, our army tour guides even took us
to shoot blanks from some machine gun. — I feel like I should try it if I'm here, now or never.
SPEAKER_06: — Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_02: — Trying to take in everything during the tour was a lot.
It was overly stimulating and surreal,
walking through war-torn Rzizh with its Lego-like buildings,
piles of rubble, a lonely-looking mosque, and a bazaar.
SPEAKER_08: — Just if you want to follow me through, go ahead. — I'm a monster!
SPEAKER_02: — The bazaar wasn't very big. It was a sort of wide-alley buttressed by short, tan-colored buildings made out of corrugated material.
Hawkers were selling housewares, eggs, fruits, vegetables, meat on a stick.
My guess was that the point of the scene was to fill us, and future soldiers, with culture shock.
But I was more excited to interview the fake mayor of Rzizh.
I tried to ask him about his job as a role player through his translator,
but he refused to break character.
SPEAKER_21: — Can I ask a question? — How does one find this kind of job?
SPEAKER_11: — Since this ended up being a little awkward,
SPEAKER_02: I quickly adjusted to ask him a question within the scenario.
SPEAKER_11: — How did you come to be mayor of Rzizh?
SPEAKER_11: — How did you come to be mayor of Rzizh?
SPEAKER_11: — Yeah, it's all about the government of Ethiopia. So he chooses me as mayor.
SPEAKER_21: — So it's not an election, but people... Or no, it is an election, like...
SPEAKER_11: — Is it a big deal?
SPEAKER_10: — No, it's a situation where people are not able to live in the city because they don't know what the situation is.
SPEAKER_11: — Yeah, so right now, during the situation, we cannot provide a regular election, that's why.
SPEAKER_21: — Oh, I see. — And so... — They have a job.
SPEAKER_02:
— Right. And what is the population of Rzizh? — Talking to the mayor and translator was bizarre, and almost fun, in a disturbing way.
It felt like the three of us were knowing participants in some weird role-playing game,
rather than an intense warfare simulation.
And the fact that I was there on a tour made the situation even more perplexing.
That war had become a kind of Disneyland.
SPEAKER_07: — So coming out here as a junior member in the army from a tiny little farm town in West Texas, it truly felt like deploying to another country, right?
SPEAKER_02: — This is Captain Stephen Covey.
SPEAKER_00: — I mean, when you drive that 30-minute drive down the road from Barstow,
you do really feel like you're going to nowhere, which is kind of a helpful feeling out here, that you do feel like you're just in its own world for the scenarios that we create out here.
— And that's Major Robert Rhodes.
SPEAKER_02:
The three of us sat down and spoke after the tour.
They told me that Denovia and Atropia have been a fixture in military simulations since the 80s.
And these fake countries have their own lore within the military's culture.
SPEAKER_07: — I had a t-shirt that said, American blood isn't worth Atropian oil or something like that. That's the idea behind it. It's just everyone understands it. You'll see Atropian veteran bumper stickers and stuff like that. — Yeah, it's an inside joke for that reason.
SPEAKER_02: — Captain Covey and Major Rhodes also emphasized that these simulations have only become more psychologically and logistically complex in recent years.
SPEAKER_07: — For the past year, between Russia and Ukraine, we've had the opportunity to watch an invasion happen through the lens of social media. And it's absolutely fascinating.
SPEAKER_05: — It's become clear that preparing for war now takes more than just practicing on a physical battlefield. The theater of war is also online. So on top of training for combat and counterinsurgency in these simulations, the National Training Center has also created its own social media system to mimic this other aspect of modern warfare.
SPEAKER_02: The soldiers are forced to quickly react to these different information streams.
Some of the social media posts might be pointing out something the soldiers did wrong.
Some of it might also be pure disinformation that the Danovians,
who are the so-called bad guys in this scenario, might be trying to propagate.
SPEAKER_00: — So now they have to react to a disinformation environment and kind of help shape the narrative and get their story out and the truth out of what's going on in the training event. — And it's absolutely something that the modern-day soldiers are going to have to contend with,
SPEAKER_07:
both good and bad.
SPEAKER_05: — The army isn't just preparing for possible conflicts in Eastern Europe. The New York Times reported that the U.S. Army is now training in the Hawaiian jungle to prepare for the possibility of conflict with China.
SPEAKER_02: — The U.S. military is always looking to the future, preparing for the next conflict they see on the horizon.
I spoke with other role players who have role-played in fictional countries all over the world.
There's also Terbia, Cortina, the Republic of Arnland, the People's Republic of Pineland, just to name a handful.
I even came across current job listings for role players on Indeed.com.
One stated that foreign language fluency isn't necessary, but that applicants must be able to act as a foreign language speaker.
And that can include speaking, quote, gibberish.
SPEAKER_05: — It's a testament to how these simulations don't go away, but are instead evolving to meet the military's latest needs. But a war is not just experienced by the military, and these simulations also provide a kind of archive of all the conflicts of the past and the difficult legacy of U.S. militarism in so many places around the world. — Mustafa says he had no qualms about being a role player.
SPEAKER_02:
He wanted to make sure that U.S. troops were trained to be as culturally competent as possible before entering Afghanistan. — But when the U.S. military withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021,
SPEAKER_05: after 20 years of war and occupation, the Taliban captured Kabul within 10 days. And Mustafa began to have questions about how much or how little the military had actually learned from the simulations. Mustafa himself had worked as a translator in Afghanistan between stints working as a role player, and he remains invested in helping the Afghan community. — So when thousands of Afghan refugees were coming to the U.S.,
SPEAKER_02: Mustafa traveled to Indiana, where one of the state's major military sites had been transformed,
not into a simulation, but into a temporary home for evacuees.
In the chaos of resettling, Mustafa saw that the U.S. Army had placed warring ethnic tribes in side-by-side living quarters.
SPEAKER_15:
— The military had prepared to fight in Afghanistan.
SPEAKER_02:
It had trained in fictional villages, like the one Mustafa worked in.
But to Mustafa,
it didn't look like they'd prepared for what would come after the occupation. Once they were gone and preparing for the next war.
SPEAKER_05: — Special thanks this week to the National Training Center and Fort Irwin,
and to Wasam Al-Badri, Lydia Maglianis, Justin Garrison, Keith Manning, Jenny Gamage, Terence Brown, Kimberly Hackbarth, Ben Widenvo, Stephen Graham,
Selim Elsway, and Nomi Stone. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building, in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California.
You can find us on all the usual social media sites if you want to feel bad about your life, but if you want to feel good,
then I recommend you go to our website, where you can find other Stitcher shows I love, and every past episode of 99PI. That website is 99pi.org.
SPEAKER_16:
— This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.
SPEAKER_05:
Around New Year's, we get obsessed with how to change ourselves, instead of just expanding on what we're already doing right. Maybe you've finally organized one part of your space, and you want to tackle another. Or maybe you're taking your supplements every morning, and now you want to actually eat a balanced breakfast too. Or maybe you've just learned how to forgive yourself for not doing everything perfectly, and then maybe the next day will just be a little bit better. Incremental change is good change.
Therapy helps you find your strengths, so you can ditch the extreme resolutions and make changes that really stick. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge.
Celebrate the progress you've already made. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible.
