Army training contends with uncertain future.

• Author: Insinna, Valerie

In some ways, the fictional town of Dara Lam looked familiar. Townspeople shuffled past a mosque at the center of the village as drones buzzed overhead. U.S. soldiers made conversation with local residents, trying to build intelligence and sniff out the enemy. But when an enemy tank rolled through the middle of town, it became clear this foe was better trained and equipped than the insurgencies of the past decade.

"I never saw a tank in Afghanistan or Iraq," said Brent Prier, a specialist from 82nd Airborne Division's 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment.

This scenario was part of the first Decisive Action training rotation held in October at the Joint Readiness Training Center in Fort Polk, La. More than 4,800 personnel from the Army, Air Force and special operations forces participated.

Although the war in Afghanistan is scheduled to come to a close in 2014, the Army is already training its soldiers against a mix of near-peer conventional forces, insurgent elements and criminal groups.

If the last decade of war was defined by prolonged counterinsurgency operations and troop surges, new training hints that future combat operations could be shorter, with more integration across conventional and special operations forces, and force-on-force tactics.

In the past, training had been focused on a specific geographical area and enemy, said Lt. Col. Matthew M. Canfield, chief of staff of the operations group at the JRTC.

"If you're going to Kandahar province in Afghanistan, we replicate Kandahar province in the box," he said. "Then we moved into something maybe a little more general in its focus, without a specific geographical tie. We refer to that as full spectrum operations. And from that, now we've moved into the next generation of the doctrine."

The Decisive Action training environment is designed to be fluid and complex, taking place in a nearly urban environment with a civilian population and political infrastructure, said Capt. Dennis Grinde, operational plans officer at the JRTC.

Although the scenario involved five fictional countries in the Caucasus, the training incorporated situations that were strikingly similar to the recent attacks against U.S. embassies in Arab Spring countries as well as continuing counterinsurgency operations in the Middle East.

In the scenario, enemy nation "Ariana" seeks nuclear weapons, is hostile toward the United States and Israel, and wants greater control of the region's natural resources. After Ariana invaded...