Jack of Harts

The Republic of Cortina is an American ally on the fictional island of Aragon. As many of our allies are in these training environments, Cortina is rich in natural resources. It is also rich in political corruption and ethnic violence. This makes them an easy target for the Cortina Liberation Front that wants to topple the government and bring in a new era with them or their masters in charge. This would obviously not be good for our Cortinan allies, so American troops are often sent in to protect our fictional allies from their dastardly foes. Those foes are funded by the Peoples Democratic Republic of Acadia, which absolutely wants to take over the entire island of Aragon. If my information is accurate, the 509th Infantry Regiment often plays these guys against visiting Army regiments, making them a valuable training aid for the US Army.

The Islamic Republic of Attica has many enemies in their neighborhood. First there is the Islamic Congress of Attica that wants to overthrow the government and bring their far more radical version of Islam into power. Then there is the Islamic Brotherhood of Jihad that wants to use Attica as a base for international terror campaigns. And never forget the Ellisian Army that enjoys taking day trips into Attican territory for fun in the sun. And of course there is the previously mentioned Wolf Brigade who spend their time industriously hacking anything they can find. There are many opportunities for American soldiers to learn and perfect procedures in the Attican training environment. All while getting a bit of the American South West sun themselves.

The Decisive Action Training Environment is an impressive fictional training system with a thousand pages of information just in the publicly available document that I have. That one deals with the Caucasus Region, but from what I understand there are now African, European, and Pacific settings, and an Arctic setting is in the works. If they put the same detail into those other settings as the one I’ve been describing lately, I will be impressed. The thing to remember about America’s fictional enemies is that they have to be as real as possible for our soldiers to train against them. And yet they also have to be fake for various reasons. We don’t want to kill people in training if we can avoid it. And sometimes the more thinly-veiled enemies can annoy people we are trying to be friends with. And sometimes, real-life developments simply make the enemy irrelevant.