The Telegraph looks at a new city created by the US Army in Virgina to be used for training purposes:
The 300 acre ‘town’ includes a five story embassy, a bank, a school, an underground subway and train station, a mosque, a football stadium, and a helicopter landing zone.
Located in Virginia, the realistic subway station comes complete with subway carriages and the train station has real train carriages…
There are also bridges and several other structures which can be transformed into different scenarios.
The $96 million is designed to meticulously “replicate complex operational environments and develop solutions”.
Lots of movies portrays scenes of fighting in American streets, often facing aliens, but I assume the military has some strong ideas about what works and doesn’t work military in the average American big city. How do US cities fare in battle situations? In other words, I assume most American urban planning doesn’t think much about creating defensible positions or providing ways to best move troops and supplies. Instead, it was guided by ideas of how to create certain kinds of streetscapes, how to efficiently move cars through cities, and leaving spaces for both private and public settings.
I wonder if the Army has some advice about how better to plan cities once they start going through exercises.
Legally Sociable 