FORT IRWIN, California (Reuters) - This neat military town lies 7,500 miles from Baghdad but drive west down the road into the desert and the landscape resembles western Iraq. The hazards are similar, too: roadside bombs, ambushes, suicide bombers, hit-and-run raids, kidnappings.
Fort Irwin is home to the U.S. Army's National Training Center, covering almost 1,200 square miles in the Mojave Desert. The base serves as the last stop for tens of thousands of U.S. troops before they ship out to Iraq and put into practice what they hope to learn here -- how to fight ruthless and innovative opponents without creating new enemies from the civilian population and without taking sides in Iraq's internal conflicts.
"What we provide here is military training at the graduate level," said Brig. Gen. Robert Cone, the training center's commander. "It builds on what we are learning from Iraq. It's counterinsurgency, small-unit action. A fundamental change from the past."
In the past, the Mojave Desert served as a training ground for tank warfare. Exercises pitted American armored forces against "Krasnovians" in tanks modified to look like Soviet T-72s. Parked in neat rows, the tanks are still here, standing idle.
They last went into action in a big army-on-army exercise in June 2004 as the insurgency in Iraq gathered pace and the U.S. death toll stood at around 800. It now exceeds 2,300. Widespread sectarian killings have added the prospect of all-out civil war to an already complex situation.
Once the emphasis switched from training for conventional war to counterinsurgency, the army built 12 mock Arab villages and populated them with 1,600 role players, including 250 men and women recruited from the Iraqi communities of San Diego and Detroit. Their roles range from sniper and suicide bomber to police chief and mayor.
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During the three weeks of a "rotation," or training course, U.S. soldiers live full-time in the simulated Iraq, in conditions more spartan than on U.S. bases in the real Iraq.
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