There's a game of street soccer under way when the soldiers from the Army's 1st Infantry Division arrive in Shar-e Tiefort. Vendors selling vegetables, teapots and toys shout to the troops who are here to meet with town leaders. The greetings in Pashto and Dari don't sound like taunts—just a noisy welcome.
The place seems safe.
But chaos comes fast, delivered by a roadside bomb that explodes beneath a Humvee. Downed soldiers lie in the road. Survivors take cover.
An enemy sniper shoots through a second-story window. The Americans return fire and the brat-a-tat-tat of machine guns is followed by the clinking of shell casings raining on the ground of this small mountain town.
From a nearby rooftop, Stanford scholars watch the unfolding action—at Fort Irwin's National Training Center, a sort of graduate school in California's Mojave Desert for combat troops going to Afghanistan.
The bullets aren't real. Neither are the bombs and the casualties. The soccer players, street vendors and sniper are either soldiers stationed at Fort Irwin or role players hired to populate Shar-e Tiefort and the 14 other mock towns and villages built to replicate communities in Afghanistan.
"You watch them train, and you become aware that the soldiers and the military supporting them are doing the best they can [to limit casualties]," says Norman Naimark, a history professor and senior fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies who had the rooftop view.
Yet despite the training, he notes, "you know some people are going to die."
Karl Eikenberry knows that tension better than any civilian. Now at FSI as the Payne Distinguished Lecturer, Eikenberry was the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011. Before that, he was an Army lieutenant general overseeing American-led coalition forces.
Eikenberry has delivered several talks and had countless conversations with scholars about the war in Afghanistan and how adept the Army is at meeting the needs of modern warfare. Organizing a trip to the National Training Center gave him the chance to show a group of about 20 historians, doctors and political scientists from Stanford exactly what he's been talking about.
"I wanted them to have the opportunity to see the technology and the networked approach to combat," he says. "And I also wanted them to realize that—beyond all the technologies, beyond all the equipment—the most decisive force on any battlefield for the U.S. Army remains the individual soldier and the individual leader."
Trips like this inform a scholar's work. "Even for someone like me who's been studying the military for more than 15 years, I learned things I didn't know before," says Amy Zegart, an affiliate of FSI's Center for International Security and Cooperation and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
"I hadn't appreciated how hard it is to coordinate the human element when you're going in and doing counterinsurgency operations. You can think about it abstractly, but to see it makes it more tangible."
After about an hour of simulated combat, the troops are sitting in a room watching a videotaped rerun of the mission they just carried out.
"What are the things that worked better this time or need to be modified or fixed?" Maj. Peter Moon, the combat trainer, asks the soldiers.
First, they report the good: Vehicles were positioned to provide cover from enemy fire. The unit did a better job responding to casualties than during the morning exercise.
Then, the problems: Too much radio chatter. Not a good enough job marking secured buildings. Poor communication.
For many in the Stanford group, the debriefing provided some of the best insight into how the military trains for war.
"That's what really sticks out," says Katherine Jolluck, a senior lecturer in history and FSI affiliate. "You see the leaders trying to draw real insight from the soldiers. They're not just being told what to do; they're being encouraged to think for themselves and come up with solutions."
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Adam Gorlick is communications manager at the Freeman-Spogli Institute.
