Army training sites don’t simulate future battlefields: Analysis

Armies should train for the battlefields they fight on. But the U.S. Army’s training sites don’t replicate the terrain that the Army is most likely to fight on, such as the Baltic states, Korea and Taiwan, warns a U.S. Army officer.

For example, the Army’s largest training site — the National Training Center — is located in the Mojave Desert.

“But the Army will likely fight the nation’s primary adversaries in the forests and bogs of the Baltic, the mountains and farms of Korea or the beaches and rice paddies of western Taiwan,” wrote Maj. Robert Rose in an essay for the Association of the United States Army.

Rose fears that troops trained in the wrong terrain will end up using the wrong tactics. Desert, jungle, mountain and steppe offer very different conditions of concealment, mobili