This Secretive Island Has Fake City For Navy SEALs To Train On
Tyler Rogoway
This Secretive Island Has Fake City For Navy SEALs To Train On
Navy SEALs are known for their incredible abilities to sneak into well guarded places undetected and taking down enemy threats with incredible violence of action. One of the places they practice such capabilities is in a custom built city located on a secretive wind-swept island off the California coast.
This Secretive Island Has Fake City For Navy SEALs To Train On
*All photos and drawings shown are of the facility described in this article
Operation Iraqi Freedom changed the way America's military trains to fight. After the "Blackhawk Down" incident in 1993, urban warfare became something to be avoided almost at any costs as terms like "bloodbath" and "cluster-bleep" were closely associated with it. A decade after the tragic events in Mogadishu, we were mired in a seemingly never ending and largely urban-based war, and our forces were scrambling to adapt.
MOUT, or Military Operations in Urban Terrain, has been the central focus of US ground forces for the last decade. Iraq, and to some degree Afghanistan, with their archaic yet crowded cities and towns, have made the average American soldier train for battle in a much more dynamic and fluid fashion than ever before.
This Secretive Island Has Fake City For Navy SEALs To Train On
On an urban battlefield, every corner, doorway, window, rooftop, or even sack of garbage can be a major tactical vulnerability. Simply patrolling an area of responsibility can go from a slow-paced march, aimed at implying goodwill and a show of force to the local populace, to a chaotic firefight in a fraction of a second.
Service members of all levels and expertise have talked at great lengths about their urban warfare experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, where on one street they could have been handing out candy to the local children and on the next street the inhabitants would suddenly evaporate from view, just like in a high-noon spaghetti western movie, and in no time bullets and RPGs would start raining down on their position. The enemy could move from building to building, dropping weapons and picking up others as they go, and at any time they could simple melt back into the local populace.
This Secretive Island Has Fake City For Navy SEALs To Train On
With all these challenges in mind, the US Department of Defense and its industry partners have come up with creative ways to train for such dynamic and deadly war-zones, as well as developing technologies to help US soldiers survive engagements within a foreign metropolis' unforgivably dense cityscape.
MOUT training has been around for decades in some fashion or another, but since the aforementioned "Blackhawk Down" incident in Mogadishu, and especially after the Global War On Terror kicked off, it has grown in scale, complexity and scope. This can include everything from simulating standard patrols, riots, ambushes, hostage situations, EOD situations, embassy evacuation and even public affairs and psychological operations. Then there is one of the most challenging urban warfare missions of all: Neutralizing ghost-like enemy snipers.
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