The facility, built on the grounds of Fort Pickett, a Virginia Army National Guard base, will train the service’s 2,000 special agents on an ongoing basis, as well as up to 10,000 additional engineers, couriers, technicians, and security professionals from the State Department and the US foreign service community. It consolidates the work of 11 existing sites, making it the largest and most comprehensive of any US law-enforcement training resource.

“We put as much into a course as we can, so they have tools that they can use for that worst-day-of-your-life scenario.”

The site, which opened this month after three years of construction, is meant to adapt to emerging security threats and imparts the lessons of recent traumas. The elevated median that runs down the MOUT’s main boulevard, a feature typical of African and Middle Eastern cities, is the kind that almost ensnared the vehicles of agents responding to the 2012 attacks on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya in 2012. A seemingly harmless motor scooter by the side of the road holds an improvised explosive device of the sort that has menaced the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. The “smokehouse” too comes from Benghazi: It was fire that killed American ambassador Christopher Stevens, and that training has been a priority for the service since. The facility also incorporates learnings from the simultaneous bombings in 1998 of the US embassies in Tanzania and Nairobi, which permanently altered the State Department’s presence overseas. Embassies have been designed more like fortresses ever since, and the security measures protecting them rigorously maintained..

So much for having fun. A pronounced aura of menace colors exploration of even the empty facility, as I discovered during a visit the day before it officially opened. As I went from door to door and floor to floor at twilight, it was easy to sense what agents will face: uncertainty and unfamiliarity, speckled with chaotic radio chatter, aggressive crowds, small arms fire, even pyrotechnics. “It’s designed to make it as realistic as possible, in order for the brain to really make the synapses kick together and go ‘Yeah, this is real life,’” said facility director Bob Weitzel.

This is no Call of Duty romp, to be sure. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a game-like flow to the proceedings conducted here. After all, because the training areas are built in close proximity, instructors can link several together for single exercises—progressing, for example, from the MOUT and the smokehouse to the open roads. Once out here, agents are trained in one of the contexts more familiar to them and the casual observer: driving.

The site, which opened in November after three years of construction, is meant to adapt to emerging security threats, and imparts the lessons of recent traumas like the attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Photograph: Eric Adams

But the training itself, whether in one of the 55 identical white Dodge Challengers, an armored vehicle, or a Jeep, looks nothing like the average track course. Learning to control the vehicle at high speed and power-sliding around wet corners is the basic stuff. Agents are trained to speed away from ambushes in reverse, to ram a pair of vehicles out of the way, to push a motorcade through a crowded thoroughfare, and to balance brake and throttle to slowly and steadily take a vehicle up a seemingly impossible rocky incline. Instructors go over the proper way to sit behind the wheel and where to look, as well as how to best employ your toes and fingers.