Zero rules of engagement

Stu Segall is president of Strategic Operations Inc., which offers hyper-realistic training using Hollywood-style special effects is Interviewed by TSJ.

How did a Hollywood producer get into the military training business?
I have a TV studio here in San Diego. I came down here from Los Angeles in 1991, to do a TV series called “Silk Stalkings.” That went for about eight seasons. I also did “Renegade” and other series — probably about 1,000 hours of TV. After 9/11, my business took a hit simply because the networks were getting away from action-adventure TV, and reality-based TV was starting to blossom. Through circumstance, the Drug Enforcement Administration Southwestern headquarters were my next door neighbors. One day I was cleaning out one of my stages, and I found these crates of cocaine. Obviously not real cocaine, but I called my neighbors to see if they could use them for educational purposes. They came, walked through the sets and asked if they could come through with a team and train there. I watched them train, and thought, “If I were a bad guy, I wouldn’t do it that way.” Because of my history producing cop shows, I think better as a bad guy than a good guy. So I became the OPFOR [opposing force]. For the first year after 9/11, I hosted a lot of federal agencies: the DEA, the Department of Justice, the local San Diego SWAT. I would always say to them, “You have rules of engagement. I don’t. I can do anything I want.” When the U.S. went to war in Iraq, the DEA training officers were reserve Marine officers, and they would call me up and say, “I’ve got 150 Marines sitting on the tarmac going to Iraq, can you help us out?” Because of my experience, I could bring in real Iraqis that we were casting in TV shows. I would inject myself in there as the old man with the two wives and the goats.

Hyper-realistic training is a term that was trademarked by Strategic Operations. What distinguishes hyper-realistic from plain old realistic?
Hyper-realistic is really sounds, smells, touch. All the senses that you have, we really amp them up because we get to the adrenaline part of your brain. When you get into a gunfight in our village, for that moment of time, it’s really a gunfight. I’ve seen them freeze. When the gunfire and the loud sounds are going off, your senses are telling you, “This isn’t training.” We wired up some civilian SWAT guys, and you could see their heart rates going crazy. You can see it in their eyes, you can see it when they shake when they’re trying to stop someone from bleeding from a movie-type wound, and the actors are screaming, “Don’t let me die!” It becomes more than, “let’s pretend this guy is wounded and we’ll put a bandage on him.” I get immersed in this stuff because I know what works. It’s the minutiae, the little details I see that most people don’t.

What can Hollywood provide that the military can’t?
The detail, the quick response time. I’ve been doing this for 35 years. It’s only a few degrees different than what I did before we went to war. There is no rehearsal in what we do. Everything is by surprise. We salt the villages with lots of different devices. We try never to do the same thing twice because these guys will tell the next squad coming through. We’ve kidnapped people out of a base. We’ve done all kinds of things to get people to understand that this is a serious business. We also know how to be safe. When you deal with actors, there is no group more concerned about their own well-being. We have run 500,000 soldiers, sailors, Marines and Coast Guardsmen. We have never, ever hurt anyone with a pyrotechnic device. Our stuff is black powder. Black powder allows you to get very close. Theirs [the military’s] are devices that use small amounts of TNT, as well as flares, which throw sparks everywhere. Those devices are dangerous. They use compressed-air devices they think are safer, but are actually more dangerous because of how they are made. We use command detonation over hard wires. We tend to stay away from remote-control devices for a number of reasons. Anything can trip that thing, or you can hit the button and it won’t go off. A hard-wire is instantaneous. If you watch our videos, you’ll see a fire, a ball of dust, hear a sound. All are separate. If somebody turns the wrong way, and they turn into something instead of away from it, the pyrotechnican won’t hit the button. If a guy lies down and his head is on top of it, it’s not going to happen. We also don’t use BFAs [blank firing adapters]. We plug the barrel inside, so you can see the flame and it’s louder. We once had a house-borne IED where we had a 1-ounce lifter [explosive] inside the house and 15 ounces on the roof. You couldn’t do this inside the house because it would make everyone’s ears bleed. As two soldiers went in, we triggered the devices and knocked them on their butts. It also knocked their colonel on his butt. He got up and yelled, “Yeah, that’s what we’re looking for!”
 
The essence of Hollywood is suspending the disbelief of an audience for an hour or two. What is the trick to suspending disbelief for a group of young soldiers?
An explosion is an explosion is an explosion. You physiologically react to that. They buy into it because their senses buy into it. As a civilian, I was amazed that the military trained the way they did in 2001. I thought they would be cutting edge. We try to bring them into the future. We talk to people, we get emails from in-country, feedback from the troops that have been there. There were troops in Fallujah who would email me while they were in the fight, and tell me that they were having problems with staircases. The next day I put staircases in my training sites. The military doesn’t work that way. It’s not all about explosions and blowing stuff up, though that will certainly get your attention. We cook them meals that they’ll eat in-country. We’ll have them meet a sheikh, and after an hour, he’ll ask, “Why did you kill my nephew?” We use real civilian amputees. They have all lost their legs to cancer or a motorcycle accident. They bring a lot of psychology. They bring it to the forefront emotionally. We did something for the Navy Riverine forces at Fort Pickett. There was a girl who was a double-amputee. We gave her a baby doll, and there was this massive explosion. She was supposed to look like she lost her legs and the baby was dead. The corpsman didn’t know what to do. He took this baby, this doll, and he was crying. I can’t say I never saw actors cry on a Hollywood set. But a set is so sterile. It’s sound, camera, action, cut. With what we do, once you start this, it’s on until the Marines call end of exercise. When we do what we do, we save lives. How you quantify that, I don’t know. But I can tell you that we have saved many. I get that from the commanders who come back from combat.

Hyper-realistic training utilizes the traditional side of Hollywood, with physical special effects. At the same time, Hollywood is using more virtual special effects like “Avatar.” How do you see these different approaches playing out in military training?
I’m from the old school. When you want to meet somebody, talk, look in their eyes, a cartoon character projected on the wall is not the same and never will be. They do that to save money. I understand it’s expensive to do some of the things that we do, but you have to spend the money in the right place. I’m not an “Avatar” fan. Part of it is I’m older. But I’ve seen it in operation, and I still shrug my shoulders and think it’s ridiculous. If you walk into a room and there’s an actor with a gun, and there’s a projected image on the wall that shouts, “Don’t move,” you’re going to shoot the guy with the gun. Your brain says the image on the wall is not a threat. You can talk to it, but you’re talking to a wall. You need to look into a guy’s eyes, he needs to look into your eyes, and that’s how you’re going to figure out what he is all about. We’re not fighting avatars. We’re fighting people who have guns and bombs.

As someone who comes from a creative industry, do you feel that you can apply that creativity toward a more systematic process like infantry training?
It goes back to one thing. I don’t have the same rules of engagement as the military does. I’m the OPFOR. I can do anything. I can put a stick of dynamite on a baby. However your mind thinks how bad you can be, we can be that bad because the enemy over there is that bad. We think about how to stress these young folks out, how to give them a basic understanding of what they’re going to come across, to inoculate them. If I go “Boo!” to you five or six times, pretty soon it’s not going to be the same to you. It desensitizes you just enough to let your forebrain think about what’s going on, to go for that flight-or-fight syndrome. In Hollywood, you’re bound by what’s on the page. Here, it’s what the unit needs.

It sounds like you’re in a sweet spot. You’re making money, you’re unleashing your creative impulses, and you’re helping your country.
There is a lot of personal reward in this. We didn’t make a lot of money the first couple of years, because the military did not understand our capabilities. Hollywood has always been a pejorative word in the military. But it’s turned around. I was very sensitive to using my background in selling what we do. I was like, leave the word “Hollywood” out. But it has actually worked to our benefit.