WARGAMES: Young Marines Training US Diplomatic Security Agents

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/after-benghazi-learning-to-defend-us-consulates-through-more-intensive-training/2014/06/06/c7feca9a-eb3f-11e3-b98c-72cef4a00499_story.html

The terrorists threw everything they had at the U.S. consulate: a truck bomb, grenades, rockets, mortars and 15 black-clad attackers armed with AK-47s, including one fighter strapped with a suicide vest trying to blow out the back door.

It could have turned out badly — another Benghazi — but it wasn’t scripted that way. This time, all 20 personnel inside the five-story consulate would survive. None of the attackers did, mowed down by agents from the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, who responded crisply with automatic weapons spewing fiery, loud bursts in the early-morning haze.

The terrorists were, in fact, excited young Marines fresh out of infantry school, role-players in a rapid-fire training exercise in a mock town built for war games on a Virginia military base. Replete with Hollywood-style explosions and actors chanting anti-American slogans in Arabic, it was the culmination of an intensive training program that owes its existence to the fatal 2012 attacks by Islamic militants on U.S. installations in Benghazi, Libya.