The outposts of the wars that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks have been named many things and have been built in many places. But despite America's longest-running conflicts in two different countries, the fortifications have, for the most part, retained a brutal similarity right down to the kid in the second platoon who has never learned, and probably never will learn, to take a shower.

However, a class at Iowa State University hopes to change that. "In Harm's Way: Interior Design for Modern Combat" was recently created by Lee Cagley, a professor and chair of Iowa State's interior design program. The graduate-level course involved six students imagining and designing a "combat outpost" that could house about a company's worth of soldiers (120+) set in Afghanistan in 2022. The class's work was recently featured in Interior Design magazine's March issue.

"The idea for the class was to rethink the outpost so the combat experience can be mitigated in some way by the environment," Cagley said in a campus news release in December. "I've been working on this for several years, since watching a TV feature on PTSD. Soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan spoke eloquently about the fact that they were never able to relax; the outpost tents never felt really safe. They couldn't talk about their fears or feelings and felt that their needs were not valued."

To research the project, Cagley and the rest of his students interviewed ROTC students on campus and visited a nearby Army National Guard base where they observed a combat outpost that was used for training.

Prerequisites for the students' designs were that their creations had to use materials not yet widely available and include the inner-workings of a typical base, including billeting, laundry and medical facilities.

Though described as a combat outpost, the amenities featured in their design would be more prevalent in a larger forward operating base, as combat outposts are often smaller (holding one or two platoons of 30 people) and more rudimentary.

Some of the designs the students came up with included an "underground zen center" and living quarters that enable "soldiers to control their environment through light and sound."

"Soldiers have been living in the same conditions since pretty much the 1940s," said Maricel Lloyd, an Army veteran who took the class, in a recent interview. "There's nothing invested in their living conditions, and, if there were, it could maybe help with coping with the situation that they're put in."

Lloyd said that the class wrestled with how much privacy their design allowed for the individual soldier, adding that too much might isolate someone who might be enduring something traumatic, while not enough could also be detrimental to their morale and welfare.

"It was very challenging, and I found it to be really exciting because no one else seems to be addressing this," Lloyd said.

While some of the class's ideas might seem far-flung to the men and women who have frequented some of the U.S. military's less desirable locales, the idea of a designated "communal area" is something that many forward positions could benefit from.

Though oftentimes brutally similar, combat outposts, especially those built in haste during offensive operations, are usually the byproduct of the environment and what materials are immediately available for their construction. This often means units take over abandoned houses or use whatever is nearby to shore up their defenses. Only then, and maybe even a few months later, do supplies arrive to reinforce and properly expand their positions.

Besides logistical hurdles, building a futuristic outpost for the wars of 2022 could very well be an effort in futility. War is dynamic, and while combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have often involved units patrolling from well-constructed Forward Operating bases and combat outposts, it is unclear if the next conflict will be so forgiving.

