Presumptive Intimacies and the Politics of Touch: “Strategic Culture” in Simulations of War

In 2004, in order to engage in force-on-force combat against insurgents – a move that required a discursive shift away from our country’s nationalizing tenets of peacekeeping to peace enforcement¹ – the Canadian Armed Forces established the Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre (CMTC). CMTC is a $500 million, full-immersion war games facility at Canadian Forces Base Wainright in rural eastern Alberta, where soldiers engage in ten-day training intensives in an environment that replicates the conditions of asymmetrical warfare² in Afghanistan. Role-players drawn largely from the Afghan diaspora in Edmonton create a “pattern of life” in mock Afghan villages, training soldiers’ powers of observation as they try to build an “intelligence picture”³ of possible insurgent activity in each village. Chief military personnel collaborate with former film industry professionals in a “story-boarding” of scenarios to inoculate soldiers against stress, while increasing their cultural intelligence through encounters with Afghans in role. This chapter examines the ways in which the military’s instrumentalist use of “strategic culture” – the development of a more robust cultural intelligence of local populations as a “force multiplier” – structures the scenarios that unfold in these immersive simulations.⁴ It focuses its attention on scenarios designed to prepare soldiers for engagements that turn on a seemingly irreconcilable paradox of punitive, yet culturally sensitive, militarism and asks how the immersive simulation, as a rehearsal for the future, habituates and potentially de-habituates structures of cultural, racial, and political difference.