Another Link in the Chain?
Last week in New Jersey there was a bit of an uproar over an urban assault training session. Residents were woken by the sound of gunshots, helicopters, and bomb blasts. Needless to say they were pretty upset and flooded 911 with calls, only to later find out that it was a scheduled military drill.
The exercise wasn’t the first of it’s kind in the last several months. There was the very public event in Tampa recently, that involved foreign soldiers and a simulated hostage situation. In that case it was during the day and all the school children got to watch and cheer. A couple of weeks before that, however, there was a nighttime urban assault training at an abandoned Miami hotel, which not all of the neighbors were informed about. As in New Jersey, people were pretty upset. Your average American isn’t really used to being woken in the night to the sounds of heavy artillery.
These urban drills have been happening in many cities, as a matter of fact, though you may not have heard of them all. Recently they have been conducted in Chicago and Los Angeles as well as the three locations already mentioned above. This activity has some people concerned about what is going on and why.
This isn’t a new type of training, as it turns out.
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