99% Invisible - 566- Imitation Nation

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

Fake cities. Imitation nations. People role-playing as civilians, spies, or enemies, complete with costumes and props. It's all part of an effort coordinated and constructed by the U.S. military to prepare soldiers for war. Fake villages designed for training purposes dot the entire United States, not to mention other countries. Researchers have identified over 400 of them around the world.Imitation Nation

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. It was during midday or probably afternoon. I was very tired and I was just looking for a quiet remote place. 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 an app. So I went in the interd in this room and I was so I'm bad there and it was a very remote area of the village.

He went into the house and quickly fell asleep. Next thing I know there were Marines kicking in the village. He went into the house and quickly fell asleep. Next thing I know, there were Marines kicking in the door, people with the gun strong, 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. Before he knew it, Mustafa had been handcuffed and taken in for interrogation. They were like, what you were doing? Where did you come from?

And they were on a farm that was a suspected Taliban house. It could have been a catastrophe from Mustafa, except it wasn't real. Because the entire situation was a military simulation. Best reporter, Sonya Paul. 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. All I knew was we were going to roleplay 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. Hundreds of other Afghans were roleplaying alongside Mustafa in the scenario.

Everyone had a specific role in the village, police officer, mayor, insurgent, and so on. Mustafa was playing the mayor's son. And 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 was taken up. Fake cities, imitation nations, people roleplaying

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. 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. Mustafa says he participated as a role player about a dozen times between the years of 2008

in 2013. It was the heyday of military simulations, when most of them were made to look like mock villages and cities of the Middle East. They had a mosque, they had shopkeepers, they had a police force, they had an army force. It really felt after the third day that I really was in Afghanistan. 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. 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. For much of the long history of warfare, these types of urban simulations were unnecessary. Mostly because, 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. 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 and preparing soldiers for war. Largely in response to the 1942 Battle of Stalingrad. The Soviet soldiers adapted themselves to fighting under the ruined building. Spurred on by hatred for the enemy, they gave the German no-ret. The Salangrad was a very dense urban environment and included buildings the size of urban blocks that have multiple stories that have basements that have addicts. That's Stephen 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. 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. And these simulations also began to incorporate role players. So there would be, for instance, a role player playing Hitler or Gerbels, the kind of propaganda minister,

and these role players would be inciting a crowd of supporters that would be better the scenario that the Allied forces would train to intervene with them. 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. 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 can understand how a foreign

environment would respond to fire and explosions. The hired architects to design fake German apartment blocks and mock Japanese dwellings. They paid attention to minutia on the exterior and interior of these homes to ensure they were realistic. 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. 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. 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. It is missing in the heaviest fighting yet in Mogadishu, Some of the dead dragged through the streets by gearing Somalis. The worst US casualties yet in Somalia,

forcing the Pentagon to send reinforcements into what has become an all-out urban war. 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 for makeshift materials like scrap metal and highly flammable wood, which meant that it could be very easily destroyed. To not have been able to really win that small gorilla 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. This is Ursula Creepet. She and Stephen co-authored a book about the relationship between urbanism and military training. And she says that critically, the intensity battle also involved a kind of combatant the

military had in train for. People who weren't clearly identifiable as soldiers or fighters. The so-called enemy was enlisting people through the market and enlisting people in the neighborhoods to be on the lookout or to kind of be warning or to hide munitions. 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. 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 the one other soldiers better prepared to fight in cities crowded with both enemies and civilians. There was some momentum around shifting military culture at that moment. That's Professor Andy Rice, who has studied military simulations. They imagined the future of wars that they would be fighting much more like those kind of urban counterinsurgency styles of combat.

They'd also just rewritten the field training manual, I think in 2004, 2005, to emphasize culture and counterinsurgency as opposed to force-on-force combat operations. 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 at the place. This could help them avoid misinterpreting signs and symbols in the ways that people Approach, let's say a checkpoint, so you know, shoot somebody 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.

Like this is actually a really important skill set 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. 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 Wasel. 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 Wasle. Medina Wasle 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. 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. 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 an actual wartime environment won't be paralyzed with fear and not act the way that they're supposed to according to their training. And creating the worst day ever morphed into an industry. Companies took notice. So there was a company out of San Diego. They had kind of made their reputation

through like high numbered cable, like, you know, lured crime dramas and soft core porn. Around the year 2002, that lured crime dramas and soft core porn. Around the year 2002, that lured crime drama and soft core 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 pirate techniques and engineering big explosions inside Medina Wasel. 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. This all sounds like a pretty wild thing to to play the roles of people that had lost limbs inside of IED explosions. 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 Wasle, the mostly Arab-American immigrants. Many had been in the U.S. since the 1970s, and they had signed up to basically play themselves in a facsimile of their home countries under brutal attack.

Mustafa 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 U.S. when some of his friends, also from Afghanistan, started applying for the job. It was around 2008 and I was on a spring break from my community college and I was just

perfect timing. I had a week off and I was a 5-day assignment. I was like, okay, it's an easy enough job, so I went there. Can you walk me through? What had happened in order for you to get the job? So we were supposed to meet up at this restaurant, which was also a bankered hall in Fremont. Fremont, California, home to one of the largest Afghan

communities in the US. Which stuff says that at the Banking Hall, employees of an Alaska-based military contractor had set up tables where they handed out applications. They served food while people filled the mouth. They did serve us a very nice dinner, I remember that, traditional Afghan dish dinner. And we ate the dinner while we were signing up.

Was there a particular type, if you will, who went for this kind of job? And if so, what was that type? 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 were targeting this community that spoke. No English or very limited amount of English because it brought even more attention to the role player. So if you really don't know how to speak English or very little understand of experience, so you can portray that more naturally. We stuff estimates there were at least 400 people there that night applying for the job.

The contractor, a company called TITLEC, was also performing on the spot drug tests and background checks. And then, at our midnight, we got boarded on the buses that was chartered by the company and we left free month all the way to 29 pounds. So pretty much I got hired on the spot for this shop. So the day you were hired was the day you went to 29 pounds? Yes, the script. Mustafa had never even heard of 29 palms before starting up to be a role player.

It's a huge Marine Corps base near Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California's Mojave Desert. So once they took us in the base, they handed out the scripts for us. It said, hey, I memorized 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. The work they started at around 6.30 a.m. after a simple breakfast. Then Mustafa and the other role players boarded a bus that brought them to the field. That's where Mustafa first saw the mock village where he'd be working. It was built out of dress-stop-shipping containers. Everyone

wore traditional clothes, and Mustafa says they weren't allowed to speak English, only Farsi and Pashdoh. Everything to Mustafa looked shockingly accurate. It really felt after the third day that I really was an Afghanistan because I was so immersed in that environment and that role. 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. And sometimes, like in the case of one of Mustafa's friends, the simulation blurred the real and the fictional and upsetting ways.

In another conversation we had over the phone, Mustafa 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. So when they found Mustafa's friend, they brought him in for interrogation and a Marine intelligence officer started accusing him of being part of the Taliban. So when they found Mustafa's friend, they brought him in for interrogation and a Marine intelligence officer started accusing him of being part of the Taliban.

And Mustafa's friend, Crumble. And then he started panicking and said, oh, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I can't think of you. They took my fingerprints via metrics. I'm good. I have a green card. I'm legally here. He was terrified.

And the interpreter started laughing and he tried to calm and comfort Mustafa's friend in his native language. He said, this is all pretend you're not being accused of being part of the Taliban. You're a role player. You will not get in trouble, you will not get arrested when you leave the job, because he thought he was going to get deported for being a Taliban. Reflecting back on that experience and how traumatizing it was for his friend, Mustafa 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. We just got absorbed in that role and just forget that what you're doing is actually make believe as scenario not a real life, but then I guess we just lost sense of that. But even with these uncomfortable dynamics, Mustafa 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. Mustafa would learn about rotations at 29 palms through an automated phone message, the military contractors sent out to the role players. It was in English, Farsi, and Pashto. You would get a one week notice, and then they would say, hey, from this day to this day, there's a two week rotation coming up. If you're interested, press month, if you're not interested, press two. 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 charted bus from Fremont to 29 Poles. People that were working in that job, they were really very, very careful not to miss that phone call because they knew, after miss one time, they're going to get kicked out of the list of role players

pretty much. And there was money to be made. Mustafa says at the time that he participated, role players earned about $1,000 to $1800 a week. Money that was especially meaningful to non-English speakers who might have struggled to get other kinds of work. 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. NBC News investigation published in 2019 found that since the early 2000s, the industry around these simulations has ballooned. 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.

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. 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.

Because now, even as the US has withdrawn from those wars, these training grounds aren't going away. They're just adapting. A reporter Sonia Paul takes us into one of these training grounds after the break. You can see how complex it's raining, right? Like flat, mountains, got some urban areas in it, right? 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. A lot more sand than trees and grass, right?

As we sat inside a yellow school bus, an army sergeant narrated what to look out for in the world we are about to enter. Endless smiles of erud-looking mountains surrounded us. Like 29 palms, Fort Irwin is also in the middle of California's Mahavi Desert, near the city of Barsto. And the training simulation we were headed to was the village formally known as Medina Wasole, the same village professor rights visiting. But now, it's been adapted for training for more current conflicts, like the war in Ukraine.

Alright, so we're about to enter in what we call the city of Regis. Regis is made up of 785 buildings. It's the largest and most detailed of all the urban training villages. So we have schools, we've got an emissary, we've got a market square, we've got high-rise buildings, we've got sub-trail, tunnel systems, we've got a prison, right?

Regis 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-Black languages, like Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Armenian. If you pay attention to the signs, it's in Russian, it changes to Russian. So they're replicating the fight in Ukraine. 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 blinks from some machine gun. You know, like I give a say, should try it, but here's what now we're never going to do. Trying to take in everything during the tour was a lot.

It was overly stimulating and surreal. Walking through War-Torn Reziche with its Lego-like buildings, piles of rubble, a lonely-looking mosque, and a bizarre. and the bizarre. The bizarre wasn't very big. It was a sort of wide alley butchers by short, tan colored buildings made out of corrugated material. Hockers 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 Rizesh. I tried to ask him about his job as a role player through his translator, but he refused to break character. Can I ask her, like, how does one find this kind of job? Since this ended up being a little awkward, I quickly adjusted to ask him a question within the scenario. How did you come to be mayor of Brazil? How do you become a mayor of this city? Как вы стали мэром этого города? Мы нас начале правительства отропей. Да, это все, что в городе.

Так что вы чувствуете меня? Так, это не власть, но люди. Нет, это власть, как... Это обычный выбор? Нет, ситуация визная, это виборе, пока у слювья не тут лиа вибра. Гасадарства, прав river election, that's why. Oh, I see. And it's...

Right. And what is the population of a river? 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. 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? This is Captain Steven Covey. And when you drive that 30 minute drive down the road from Barstow, you do really feel like you're going to know where. And which is kind of a helpful feeling out here that you do feel like you're just in its own, its own world for the scenarios that we create out here. And that's major Robert Roads. The three of us sat down and spoke after the tour. They told me that denovia and atropia have been a fixture military simulations since the 80s.

And these fake countries have their own lore within the military's culture. I had a t-shirt that said, American blood isn't worth a trophy and oil or something like that. And that's the idea behind it. It's just everyone understands it. You'll see a trophy and veteran bumper stickers and stuff

like the cabinets. It's an inside joke for that reason. Captain Covey and Major Rhodes also emphasize that these simulations have only become more psychologically and logistically complex in recent years. 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. 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. 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 denovians who are the so-called

bad guys in the scenario might be trying to propagate. So now they have to react to disinformation, firemen, and kind of help shape the narrative and get their story on the truth out of what's going on in the training event. And it's absolutely something that the modern day soldiers going to have to continue with, both good and bad. The Army isn't just preparing for possible conflicts

in Eastern Europe. The New York Times reported that the US Army is now training in the Hawaiian jungle to prepare for the possibility of conflict with China. The US 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 is also Turbia, Cortina, the Republic of Ireland, the People's Republic of Pylon, just to name a handful.

I even came across current job listings for role players on ND.com. When seated at 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. 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 US militarism and so many places around the world. Mustafa says he had no qualms about being a role player.

He wanted to make sure that US troops were trained to be as culturally competent as possible before entering Afghanistan. But when the U.S. military withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, 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 Stance Working as a role player, and he remains invested in helping the Afghan community. So when thousands of Afghan refugees were coming to the US, 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, Musoffa saw that the US Army had placed warring ethnic tribes inside by side living quarters. One kid gave another kid a black eye and lots of tension and I understood quickly right away. This was a very bad combination and a bad thing to do. And then I looked at a social army, it was just looked like it was a deer caught in a headlight. It was just so confused and disoriented. He didn't know how to deal with that situation.

They were unprepared for the crisis that happened, the highway equation, and then having to deal with resoupling 72,000 people with a couple of months. It was not an easy task. It was very, very challenging. The military had prepared to fight in Afghanistan. It had trained in fictional villages like the one Mustafa worked in. But to Mustafa, it didn't look like they prepared

for what would come after the occupation, once they were gone and preparing for the next war. 99% of visible was reported this week by Sonya Paul, edited by Vivian Leigh with help from Delaney Hall, with additional production by Jacob Moldenano Medina. Mixed in sound design by Martin Gonzales, music byohlstedt, is our digital director. The resident includes Chris Barrupe, Jason Dalyone, Emmith Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Lashemma Dawn, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, Sarah Baker, and me Roman Morris. The 99% of his well-known logo was created by Staffin Lawrence. Special thanks this week to the National Training Center and Fort Irwin, and to Wasam Albadri, Lidia Mugyanis, Justin Garrison, Keith Emanne, Jenny Gammaj, Terrence Brown, Kimberly Hackbarth,

Ben Wadenbo, Stephen Graham, Selene Ellsway, and Nomi Stone. We are part of the Stitcher and Serious Ex-M 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 99 Empire dot org.