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Every Room A Battlefield

[Image: Looking out over the center of “Razish,” a simulated city at the Fort Irwin National Training Center; photo by Geoff Manaugh.]

I had an opportunity to revisit the Fort Irwin National Training Center this weekend as part of a series of field trips I’ve put together for the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute’s Antikythera program. One of their major topics of discussion this spring is models and simulations.

[Image: Downtown Razish, part of the fictional nation of “Atropia”; photo by Geoff Manaugh.]

Fort Irwin is a U.S. Army base the size of Rhode Island, roughly three hours outside Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert. Already huge, Fort Irwin fits into a much larger jigsaw puzzle of other military lands, including Edwards Air Force Base and the Marine Corps Logistics Base Barstow, forming a truly vast, almost state-level presence in the mountains and desert.

Its scale and isolation make it an ideal setting for immersive training exercises, which are staged in a series of 14 simulated towns and cities.

[Image: A multistory reconfigurable plywood interior used for building-clearance operations at the Fort Irwin National Training Center; photo by Geoff Manaugh.]

My last trip to Fort Irwin was back in September 2012, long enough for significant changes to occur, both architecturally, in terms of the training center itself, and geopolitically, in terms of current events.

[Image: Views of “Razish” at the Fort Irwin National Training Center; photos by Geoff Manaugh.]

When I was there in 2012, our visitor group witnessed a staged combat scenario set in a small Afghan village; today’s geopolitical context has changed, resulting in a kind of theatrical shift in what—and who—is being simulated. In another post, I have referred to this as imperial dramaturgy: how we stage and engage with representations of our purported adversaries. Indeed, dramaturgy, stagecraft, and set design all offer a useful lens through which to understand politics—and, of course, also cast Fort Irwin in a different light, where members of the public are permitted to watch carefully orchestrated events whose purpose seems equally split between operatic braggadocio (“look what we can do!”) and practical fundraising (“here’s where your taxes go!”).

The city we visited on Friday is called “Razish,” the provincial capital of a fictional nation known as “Atropia.” With more than 750 individual buildings, some of which are five stories tall, and multiple tunnel complexes, Razish is not only much larger than the village market I saw back in 2012, but the signs are also now written in Cyrillic. Russian-speaking actors hired from a local jobs agency played live-action roles for us, including a gruff mayor and his monosyllabic chief of police; there were also upward of three dozen civilian residents whose job would soon become simply screaming out of sight for psychological effect as the simulated military operation began.

The aesthetic effect was that of a geopolitical uncanny valley: Razish was not Iraq or Iran, it looked nothing particularly like Russia, and it did not have Chinese characteristics, so to speak. It felt like a looking-glass version of a Central Asian breakaway republic, a windswept landscape of cinder blocks, cargo containers, and outdoor markets, with attack helicopters buzzing by in the distance. An ersatz mosque stood atop one hill, with strategic views of the surrounding terrain.

[Images: Photos by Geoff Manaugh.]

Idle speculation amongst some of my fellow visitors suggested that the Army was leaning into this portrayal of a Russian opponent as a deliberate feint or ruse, hiding the fact that the Army might be preparing for urban combat in Central Asia, sure, but likely with a different Asian nation-state in mind.

But rather than try to interpret what we saw in terms of its imperial messaging, I’ll stick with a brief description of the architectural experience. The building interiors were dense, modular labyrinths of rooms framed by plywood, their walls porous at various scales with doors, chutes, and openings. In some cases, trapdoors led up—or down—through the buildings along a different axis of approach, such that an unexpected ambush could be staged in nearly any spatial circumstance. Many walls were stenciled with warnings that they were load-bearing and not to be removed; others had “demo,” for demolish, spray-painted across them.

It seems highly likely that, upon future return, entirely different interiors would greet us, a continuously revised maze of threats and imminent violence.

[Images: Interiors at Fort Irwin; photos by Geoff Manaugh.]

We were able to speak with active-duty soldiers throughout the day, including over lunch, and I asked one of them about building-clearance operations and how it might differ from the simulated outdoor raid we had just seen performed. “Every room is a battlefield,” the soldier replied, noting that combat now often takes place inside architecture, not just on the muddy plains of vast continental interiors. This would be the “four-floor war” described elsewhere.

[Image: The back streets of Razish; photo by Geoff Manaugh.]

The Fort Irwin National Training Center offers public tours once a month, every spring and summer; interested visitors can sign up online.

War Simulant

[Image: From Battle: Los Angeles (2011)].

In an era when military action is increasingly shifting toward cities, it’s interesting to note that the U.S. Army is conducting drills in the skies above Los Angeles this week.

As NBC Los Angeles reports, the exercises are for “the purpose of enhancing soldier skills by operating in various urban environments and settings… Residents around the L.A. area may hear sounds associated with training, including aircraft and weapon simulations.”

Recall—as cited by Mike Davis in his book City of Quartz—that this is not the first time L.A. has been used as an urban-warfare simulator. “Scores of residents in the Bunker Hill and Civic Center areas complained of the racket Thursday night after several of the Army helicopters began maneuvering close to high-rise apartments and condominiums at about 10 p.m.,” the L.A. Times reported way back in 1989. At the time, these close-building maneuvers were meant to test “urban approach and departure techniques.”

(Thanks to Nicola Twilley for the tip!)

Project Iceworm

[Image: Camp Century under construction; photograph via Frank J. Leskovitz].

Camp Century—aka “Project Iceworm”—was a “city under ice,” according to the U.S. Army, a “nuclear-powered research center built by the Army Corps of Engineers under the icy surface of Greenland,” as Frank J. Leskovitz explains.

A fully-functioning underground city, Camp Century even had its own mobile nuclear reactor—an “Alco PM-2A”—that kept the whole thing lit up and running during the Cold War.

[Images: Camp Century under construction; photographs via Frank J. Leskovitz].

According to Leskovitz, the Camp’s construction crews “utilized a ‘cut-and-cover’ trenching technique” during the base’s infra-glacial assembly:

Long ice trenches were created by Swiss made “Peter Plows,” which were giant rotary snow milling machines. The machine’s two operators could move up to 1200 cubic yards of snow per hour. The longest of the twenty-one trenches was known as “Main Street.” It was over 1100 feet long and 26 feet wide and 28 feet high. The trenches were covered with arched corrugated steel roofs which were then buried with snow.

Prefab facilities were then added, with “wood work buildings and living quarters… erected in the resulting snow tunnels.”

[Images: Camp Century under construction; photographs via Frank J. Leskovitz].

Leskowitz continues:

Each seventy-six foot long electrically heated barrack contained a common area and five 156 square foot rooms. Several feet of airspace was maintained around each building to minimize melting. To further reduce heat build-up, fourteen inch diameter “air wells” were dug forty feet down into the tunnel floors to introduce cooler air. Nearly constant trimming of the tunnel walls and roofs was found to be necessary to combat snow deformation.

Camp Century went from a scientific outpost to a potential U.S. Army site for hosting battle-ready nuclear missiles underneath the Greenland ice sheet—the so-called “Project Iceworm” mentioned earlier.

The following four short videos, produced by the U.S. military, explore the site’s strange technical circumstances as well as its complicated defensive history.

“During this period of the Cold War,” Leskovitz explains, “the U.S. Army was working on plans to base newly designed ‘Iceman’ ICBM missiles in a massive network of tunnels dug into the Greenland icecap. The Iceworm plans were eventually deemed impractical and abandoned,” and, “due to unanticipated movement of the glacial ice,” the entire subterranean complex was eventually left in ruins.

The idea that the moving terrain of a glacial ice sheet could be considered a stable-enough launching point for nuclear missiles is astonishing, and the idea that the U.S. Army once ran a top secret—and rather Metallica-sounding—”city under ice” just shy of the North Pole only adds to the story’s disarming surreality.

[Image: The plan of Camp Century; via Frank J. Leskovitz].

In any case, more photographs, including of the Army’s mobile nuclear reactor, are available on Leskovitz’s own site.

*Update* In August 2016, a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters suggested that “climate change could remobilize abandoned hazardous waste thought to be buried forever beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet,” specifically referring to the ruins of Camp Century.

“Camp Century could start to melt by the end of the century,” the American Geophysical Union summarizes. “If the ice melts, the camp’s infrastructure, as well as any remaining biological, chemical and radioactive waste, could re-enter the environment and potentially disrupt nearby ecosystems.”

[Image: U.S. Army photograph, via the American Geophysical Union].

Here is a PDF of the complete paper.