Jack of Harts

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.

Lower Janga is a breakaway province of Atropia with three nations trying to take control of it. Limaria wants to protect the ethnic Limarians in the region from foreign oppression. They remember it happening for many years before they started the war to protect them, so to them it is a matter of fact and history. Atropia considers the land to belong to them, and they have 800,000 Atropian refugees who they still contend have a right of return to their lands. Their goal is to retake the region and rule it once more. And Ariana considers Lower Janga to be a great opportunity to expand their influence and export their militant version of Islam to other nations. Those are three conflicting goals for the region that have contributed to twenty years of hot and cold conflict within Lower Janga. And those three goals affect all international relations with any of those nations.

The Independent Republic of Lower Janga is another very interesting fictional battleground American troops train in. Older versions of the Decisive Action Training Environment included in the background a Limarian Genocide at the hands of the neighboring Kalarians. This is removed in more recent DATEs probably due to real life international politics and how closely that dovetailed into the real life history of Armenia and Turkey. But that gives valuable background on why Christian Limaria attacked Muslim Atropia over the persecution of Limarians in the mutual border region of Lower Janga. Or Artzak in earlier versions. It was a three year war, twenty years ago, that created over a million refugees, wrested control of an entire province from Atropia, and has defined relations between Limaria, Atropia, and anyone who deals with either of them. It is an important region and event.