Fast Company

Military Training, Hollywood Style: Robots, Simulated Amputations, Laser Explosives

Black smoke swamps the check point. Marines are crouched, shouting orders at one another. A car bomb just went off, and bullets are whizzing overhead. Wounded soldiers are screaming for help. The next second, an RPG shrieks into the side of the platoon's humvee, blasting heaps of shrapnel on the troops. The Marines are preparing to counter when, suddenly, it's all over. The shooting stops. The smoke disappears. The scene goes silent, as if a movie director yelled "CUT!"

In many ways, the scene described above is from a movie. It's part of a program developed by Strategic Operations, a little-known tactical training firm that specializes in "Hyper-Realistic" training for military, law enforcement, and homeland security forces. Since 2001, Strategic Operations has trained more than 160,000 Marines and 150,000 soldiers. Other Hollywood-influenced military trainers use video, 3-D and mechanical simulations. But Strategic Operations blends advanced special effects, actors, and rapidly reconfigurable sets to create training grounds so real that troops feel the stress of the battlefield--and hopefully innoculate themselves against it.

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