Military Operation on Urban Terrain (MOUT) Training Facilities

Photo: NATO Exercise Cooperative Osprey 1996, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina

Bryan Finoki of Subtopia blog has an interesting post about "mysterious simulacrums of urban space":

… ghostly MOUT (Military Operation on Urban Terrain) training facilities where entire pseudo landscapes and quasi architectures are designed solely for the purposes of being conquered and reconquered, over and over again to help prepare the armed forces for counter-insurgency warfare in cities abroad–life inside a simulative architectural loop; landscape as militaristic prop.

The article goes on to talk about the "Mecca" of military urban training: a mysterious camp called CAMOUT being built deep in the middle of nowhere, USA:

So, what will a quarter of a billion dollars get you? Well, reading on we learn CAMOUT, if completed as planned, will include 1,560 buildings (some as high as five stories) in seven separate districts: the urban core (as previously described), east and west stadium districts, a hospital district, an ‘old town’ which will actually be modeled on Sadr City (a suburb of Baghdad), and finally an industrial district as well as a diplomatic district. “A city like no one has ever seen,” it will be “bisected by a river, already in place, that’s up to 80 feet wide in some spots,” even though in reality we are told it will contain absolutely no water. “Some areas will have buildings that have been reduced to rubble and there will be shanty towns around the city” …

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