The US army has built a fake city designed to be used during combat training exercises.
The 300 acre ‘town’ includes a five story embassy, a bank, a school, an underground subway and train station, a football stadium, and a helicopter landing zone.
Located in Virginia, the realistic subway station comes complete with subway cars and the train station has real train cars.
The subway cars even carry the same logo as the cars in Washington DC!
There are also bridges and several other structures which can be transformed into different scenarios.
Is this just another boondoggle to misuse taxpayer money, or do they have a sinister purpose?
(Was it built by…maybe Halliburton?)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10634411/US-army-builds-fake-city-to-shoot-at-during-training.html
Yet another excellent use of
Yet another excellent use of our tax dollars. How many families do think could have been housed,fed, clothed and received medical care for the money spent on this project?
Crisis of creativity
The main failing here isn’t outright waste, it’s the squandering of opportunity.
A townful of worthy of people in need could have been housed and assisted in exchange for the slight inconvenience of a little psy-ops and bit-part-playing for tactical trainings.
Burning money
It only cost us $96 million.
“Colonel John P. Petkosek, the commander of the group said of the new training city :”This is the place where we can be creative, where we can come up with solutions for problems that we don’t even know we have yet,””
Of course, we could use the money to solve problems we know we have, as spinoza and KAlden note.
$96 million would provide $200,000 a year for Project Feed the Thousands for 460 years.
due credits
KAlden actually pointed out the ways money could be better spent on real problems.
My comment was a sloppy attempt to say (only slightly satirically) it would be interesting to populate the town with real people in need, and then practice helping them as part of learning how to do that on a wider scale.
Corrected
Thanks.
I think I need to use some of that $96 million for a break… : )
Maybe there’s some nice new town to go visit.
I happened to be the first
I happened to be the first person to post that idea -certainly not the only one to feel that money would be much better spent actually helping people.
I frequently think I’ve reached the point of saturation with how inept and short sighted the government is. And then something like this comes along and I read it and the anger and disbelief comes roaring back. $96 million.
In a country that cannot find a way to feed it’s own;cannot provide shelter or equal education or new jobs or any of the other necessary and vital provisions that guarantee a decent and humane standard of life – we choose to build a pretend city to train our military to deal with pretend problems.
To use a phrase that, I think, sums it up nicely: WTF??
Pretend problems
If they continue to ignore the real problems of real people, these pretend problems might become real.
Very few in congress concern themselves with the 99%. We don’t contribute enough to their re-election stashes, so they ignore us.
Money spent on a congresscritter has been shown to have a higher return on investment, than almost anything else.
When enough of the real people feel the hurt, they might be tempted to do something about it.
Is the army training for potential civil disorder?
BTW, how many subways are there in Moslem countries?
Paul Craig Roberts reports on this:
– American taxpayers have built an entire city in Virginia so that the Pentagon, can practice occupying American cities and putting down protests by US citizens. This fake city is the training ground for the doctrine outlined in a leaked US Army document http://info.publicintelligence.net/USAMPS-CivilDisturbanceOps.pdf that describes how soldiers are to be trained to put down domestic disturbances and process prisoners through detainment camps where prisoners will be re-educated to appreciate US policies. In situations of “extreme necessity” the training embraces deadly force: “Warning shots will not be fired. When a firearm is discharged it will be fired with the intent of rendering the person(s) at whom it is discharged incapable of continuing that activity or course of behavior.”
“Amerikan Stasi Police State Staring Us In The Face” – http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37691.htm
Representative Town Meeting
Representative Town Meeting in Brattleboro has built a fake city designed to be used as a backdrop during President Obama’s speeches. The 300 acre “Town” includes a $50 per hour minimum wage, free unlimited healthcare for the asking, free housing for the asking, unlimited food stamps, and a UAW union pension plan even if you have never worked a day in your life. Located in Windham County, the police cars are all Cadillac Escalades with their own car wash inside their new 15 million dollar fake police station. There are also fake bridges being torn down, fake traffic lights, fake executive session meetings, but a very real 20 million dollar high school budget that provides real children with a feel good about yourself fake education. All of the people in the photograph are also fake. Because of real property taxes, real people can no longer afford to live in the fake town.