Due to paywall:
The U.S. Army always knew defending Atropia would be a slog.
But officers didn’t expect allies to abandon the authoritarian regime. And they didn’t think war weariness would beset the troops so quickly.
“Candidly,” says Lt. Col. Joe Buccino of the 82nd Airborne Division, a veteran of multiple Atropia actions, “having liberated that place four times in 15 months, it is about time we let the Atropians provide security for themselves.”
Atropia’s problem, it seems, is reality. It keeps interfering with an elaborately constructed military-training scenario.
The U.S. Army’s training command in 2012 developed a rich back story for various ersatz countries in its war games. The fictional country of Atropia, according to the playbook, is a pro-western dictatorship. The Army ordered its training centers adopt the scenario.
Soldiers, like Col. Buccino, soon tired of rerunning the same old script. Bigger problems with Atropia arose when some European U.S. allies balked at the idea of propping up faux dictators—even if the blood on their hands was only stage paint.
The U.S., its NATO allies, Russia and other militaries around the world use fictional scenarios to make their military drills more sophisticated. They require soldiers to understand the political environment and motivations of the people they are trying to protect, and defeat.
In North Carolina, where war games often involve the People’s Republic of Pineland, locals who live near Fort Bragg sometimes serve as amateur actors in military drills. Some play good guys to be protected. Others play bad guys.
“I mock-assassinated the mayor of this bad-guy-held town,” says an Army Green Beret who was struck by how war games can intersect with local life. “It was actually the real mayor.”
The flag of Pineland, a nation spun from whole cloth, can be purchased online for $22 (U.S. dollars only).
Because the role playing can disrupt North Carolina communities, after the military exercise is complete, Army Special Forces sweep through the countryside, doing community service, repainting firehouses, rebuilding fences and tending to animals.
In Belarus, a war-game country created by Russia is being brought to life by none other than Belarus’s beleaguered political opposition.
Russian and Belarusian military planners invented the country of “Veishnoriya” for their Zapad war game, which starts Thursday. On maps of the exercise, the fictional country lies in the northwestern part of Belarus. Locals are embracing it.
Internet users created the virtual accouterments of a real country: a foreign ministry, passports, a national anthem, a currency and a flag. And they’re ready to defend their made-up turf.
“Veishnoriya will stand firm!” the unreal ministry wrote on its Twitter account, before offering “enemy soldiers” stew, honey, bread and lard to lay down their weapons.
In some cases, war games spark anxiety and conspiracy theories. Russia in 2008 used military exercises to obscure its invasion of Georgia. Russia repeated the feint in 2014 to intervene in eastern Ukraine. Moscow then helped carve out new autonomous regions inside Georgia and Ukraine—regions that most of the rest of the world views as fakes.
Russia said it acted in 2008 to protect civilians and denies sending its army into eastern Ukraine.
In Texas two years ago, fears of something similar proved exaggerated. Jade Helm, a U.S. special operations forces exercise, drew national attention when the governor of Texas ordered the State Guard, a volunteer group, to observe the drills. Some Texans had voiced concern the drill was practice for a federal takeover.
In Atropia, the problem was maps. The fictional country exists so that Western allies can learn to cooperate. But imaginary national boundaries superimposed onto actual geography stirred friction.
Atropia’s borders roughly coincide with Azerbaijan. Neighboring Limaria, a made-up country, coincides with Armenia. The fake country of Kemalia is roughly equivalent to Turkey. In 2014, Turkey’s top general wrote to the head of U.S. European Command complaining that a historically Turkish town was inside the boundary of Limaria, not Kemalia.
“They weren’t fooled by the fake names,” says a U.S. official. “It caused a diplomatic kerfuffle.”
Turkish officials did not comment on the episode.
The U.S. training center in Hohenfels, Germany, now bases its war games on a country called “Germany.” The alternate reality includes a fictional “Great Fatherland Party” that resembles France’s National Front and the like-minded Alternative for Germany.
“We don’t make stuff up,” says James Derleth, the senior interagency training adviser at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels. “We take the stuff and change the name so it doesn’t create umbrage to real politicians or political parties.”
The new scenario also doesn’t give soldiers a real-world adversary. Instead, North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops face off against the thinly veiled “Skolkan Alliance,” which was originally created by NATO in 2012. It has a fearsome propaganda television network, “The Voice of Reason.”
“They are dangerous, devilish,” Mr. Derleth says of the Skolkan forces. “It replicates a threat from the east.”
NATO allows its partners and members to take the Skolkan scenario and adapt it, but says it’s not responsible for any alterations. “We sell it as a boiled egg,” says German Lt. Col Michael Derksen of NATO’s Joint Warfare Centre. “You get it and we cannot unboil it for you.”
Russia’s fictional adversary Veishnoriya replicates an aspiration of sorts for some Belarusians. Its portion of the former Soviet republic is the region most opposed to Belarusian strongman leader, Aleksander Lukashenko, once dubbed “Europe’s last dictator” by the U.S. State Department.
“Veishnoriya is a country without Lukashenko, without Russian troops, a country that is friendly with its Western neighbors,” the not-quite-country’s “foreign ministry” tweeted last month.
Alexander Feduta, an opposition political analyst, composed an irony-laden national anthem for the fake country that riffs on themes including Belarus’s struggle to find foreign loans.
Aliaksandr Arsionau, a 28-year-old journalist who created Veishnoriya’s blue-and-white flag, says the fictional land is like a dream come almost true.
“People want to imagine being in a different country,” he says. “Then the government came up with one for us.”