The US Army will conduct drills known as Robin Sage in North Carolina starting 23 January to prepare young recruits for the Special Forces to take part in guerrilla warfare against a "numerically superior enemy".
The two-week-long exercise will see recruits put inside of a "politically unstable" fictional country known as Pineland, where they will be helping local guerrillas to carry out reconnaissance missions, conduct raids, and organise ambushes against the forces of an "illegitimate government". Their endgame in this drill is to overthrow the ruling regime.
The exercise also teaches future Special Forces soldiers how to work with their guerrilla partners: from training and helping them with missions, to preventing them from committing war crimes.
The Robin Sage drills, named after US Colonel Jerry Michael Sage, who escaped from Nazi captivity after more than a dozen attempts, have been held since 1974 and serve as the final exam for Special Forces recruits. However, they only recently became known to the public.
The US Army has been coordinating these drills with local authorities, and even has been attracting local civilians as "actors", since 2002. The exercises' shift to transparency happened after an incident in which one recruit was killed and another injured by a local sheriff's deputy, who had mistaken the armed troops not wearing US Army uniforms for criminals.