Army's New Training Center: A Fake Town

US soldiers in northern Virginia have a new training center—and it looks a lot like your town. It's got a bank, a school, an embassy, a mosque, and even a football stadium, all spread across 300 acres, the Telegraph reports. And all of it fake. "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," says the commander of the Army Asymmetric Warfare Group, which is behind the new Asymmetric Warfare Training Center at Fort AP Hill in Caroline County—a $96 million project that officially opened late last month.

The center even has a subway with real cars—cars that derailed in Washington, DC, last year and were salvaged, Gizmodo notes. It's not the first fake town, the site points out: California's National Training Center at Fort Irwin has fake Middle Eastern villages. So what is asymmetric warfare? The Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg explains: The term refers to "conflicts between nations and groups with disparate resources and strategies." The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are key examples, the paper notes. (More US military stories.)