Colloquy Podcast: Laboratories of War

In the years following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, thousands enlisted in the US military, were deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and became embroiled in conflicts that were often fought not on the battlefield but in rural villages and in cities. To prepare for that type of warfare, American troops often trained at bases in the southwestern United States (US), where the government constructed replicas of Afghan and Iraqi towns. There, the US military hired people of Arabic descent to portray civilians working in markets, driving their cars—and being insurgents and terrorists.

In this episode of Colloquy, the scholar Adam Longenbach discusses the normalization of military violence in civilian spaces and the role that architecture plays in that process. Longenbach traces the trend back to its beginnings in World War II to show how the built environment, augmented by Hollywood stagecraft, has been used to turn city streets and urban neighborhoods into battle zones. (This talk was originally given during the Harvard Horizons Symposium in 2023.)

Take a look at these four photographs of the same city. Where do you think this place is located? What are the clues in the photographs that would point you towards your guess? Is it the buildings, the streetscape, the arid climate? Maybe it's the people, their skin color, or how they dress.

In the top right, we can see graffiti spray painted on a building. In Arabic, it reads lift your head up. You are Iraqi. But I can tell you that this place isn't located anywhere near Iraq. If we take a closer look, a recurring detail throws off the scene. Each building has an identifying marker. They label these buildings as property of the US military.

That's because not only is this city not in Iraq, it's also not a city at all. Rather, it's an enormous stage set, where the US military rehearses operations before deploying them in actual theaters of war. Otherwise known as a mock village, these are full-scale replications of cities and regions under US military occupation. So this particular mock village is located not in the Middle East, but over 12,000 kilometers away at Fort Irwin, a remote US military base in the Mojave Desert of California. It's just one of roughly 100 military mock villages in the United States.

These so-called laboratories of war prepare military personnel for real conflict in urban environments, and yet, the mere existence of mock villages affirms how violence in civilian spaces has become a normalized and accepted component of modern warfare.

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PhD student Adam Longenbach presents his research at the Harvard Horizons Symposium on April 11, 2023.

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Tony Rinaldo

How did this come to be, and why am I as a trained architect and historian studying this topic?

Well, my interest in military mock villages began about a decade ago. I was living in Seattle at the time, and that's where I learned about how, during the Second World War, the US military used a fake suburban townscape to hide the nearby Boeing aircraft plant from an aerial attack. As I conducted more research on this particular fake town, I then started to learn about the other, more sinister uses of mock villages. I also began to learn about who oversaw their design and construction. It was the US Army Corps of Engineers, but also, architects, landscape architects, and set designers from Hollywood studios, like Warner Brothers and Walt Disney.

Now, based on my historical research in the archives, I examined what I have identified as four distinct ways that the US military initially appropriated architecture for wartime purposes.

First, as I mentioned, mock villages were used for visual deception. They camouflage key military sites on the American home front.

Second, mock villages were used to create public propaganda. Replicas of Tokyo, for example, were theatrically destroyed for films and photographs in order to mobilize the nation for war.

The third, mock villages were the subject of military science. Military personnel studied how German and Japanese homes were made in order to understand how they could be unmade using lethal force.

And lastly, mock villages were used for the physical and psychological conditioning of troops. Also called combat towns, these were highly immersive environments for exposing soldiers to the harsh realities of fighting in foreign cities. A key component of that immersion was called hate training. This is a strategy in psychological warfare that attempts to vilify and completely dehumanize entire nations and ethnic groups in order to label them as enemies deserving violence. Here, the architecture of foreign cities is used by US military personnel as a kind of visual cue to elicit feelings of hostility and bloodlust in American soldiers.

So since the 1940s, mock villages have changed, and they continue to change to reflect regions around the globe. They are, in effect, a portrait of the world as seen through military eyes. Today, for added realism, the US military hires people of the Afghani and Iraqi diaspora to populate its simulated environments. These individuals might act as everyday people going about their lives. Others play the role of insurgents or terrorists. The point is there remains this underlying assumption that civilians are part of the battlefield, and now, in addition to conditioning troops, mock villages are used for everything from practicing aerial maneuvers to weapons tests and drone warfare.

But what began as a US military technology has since become a global instrument of war. No longer confined to the United States, there are now an estimated 400 mock villages around the globe. For example, since 2005, US Marines and Israeli defense forces have trained together in a mock Palestinian village in the Negev Desert. Ukrainian troops are using mock villages organized by American and British troops. Meanwhile, there's evidence that Russia is doing the same. Satellite imagery tells us that the People's Liberation Army of China is constructing mock US warships and bases in the Taklimakan Desert, and mock villages are also no longer just for military use.

In response to the civil unrest of the 1960s, police departments began using mock villages to practice so-called anti-riot tactics, and today, police continue to train using these operations that, as I've shown, are rooted in military logistics. As we speak, protesters are trying to stop the development of Cop City, a proposed police training facility outside of Atlanta, Georgia.

So here's my overarching point. In the 1940s, the invention of a novel form of architecture, the military mock village, coincided with the invention of new forms of mass violence that we're still dealing with today. This is an ongoing case of construction begetting destruction, of simulated hostility enabling real harm. At stake in my research then is a critical understanding of how anybody, any building, or any city risks being replicated and repurposed by militaries and police in order to enact violence against it.

Thank you so much.