CFB Wainwright — Elders leading the funeral procession are not only bearing the weight of a shrouded, prone figure on their shoulders, they now have the future of their village on their backs.

Up until two days ago, the community of Todan had largely avoided the cross-border conflict seeping deeper into the tiny nation of Atropia from the east.

Forty-eight hours ago, villagers rode bikes along the market-lined streets while chattering locals contented themselves with playing cards on makeshift wooden tables and drinking weak local coffee from even weaker polystyrene cups.

Today, boots are kicking up plumes of dust on the main street as the funeral sweeps towards the makeshift cemetery on the edge of town.

If not for the wailing women at the rear of the cortège, the town would be silent. Instead, their howls of anguish bleed off into the distance.

After funeral prayers, Mayor Subhi Oroki Fardavgi chats with locals to try and sway public opinion about the street clash between Canadian troops and insurgents that claimed the lives of six civilians, including four police officers.

Before the fighting, insurgents plastered the town's walls with anti-Canadian propaganda.

“People were nervous,” Fardavgi tells me.

“The propaganda worked. But the Canadian Army came to my village and they are bringing peace. That’s what I want here. When peace is not here, that means there is no life here.”

In burying their loved ones, Fardavgi hopes they are not also burying their last chance for peace.

At the edge of town a company commander from 1 Royal Canadian Regiment explains to the police chief through a translator why they are here and tries to reassure him the coalition forces are there to help.

Word of the firefight doesn’t take long to reach reporters who drift into town with cameras and questions.

Soon their stories — good and bad — will be on the newswire. The videos will reach TV stations and find their way onto social media and the distrust felt in a town of hundreds could spread across an entire country.

Thanks to social media, a lot can change in 48 hours.

There's just no avoiding social media

The impact of social platforms like Twitter and Facebook on the theatre of war is no longer an ancillary concern for the military.

That dynamism is not lost on the folks at the Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre, the brains behind Canada’s largest military training mission, Exercise Maple Resolve, which acts as the final confirmatory exercise on the "road to readiness" for Ontario-based 2nd Canadian Mechanized Brigade and 450 Tactical Helicopter Squadron.

Starting last Sunday and continuing until the end of the month, around 4,000 Canadian soldiers and another 1,000 soldiers predominantly from the United States, but also from Australia, New Zealand and Britain, are training together at CFB Wainwright in a fully immersive force-on-force battle scenario.

Among the troops are hundreds of actors -- like the 67-year-old native of Afghanistan, Hassan Iraqi, who plays the mayor of Todan -- there to add friction to the war games.

There is also a small cabal of experienced "in play" journalists sent into the battlefield daily or embedded overnight with troops and whose job it is to interview, report and produce either positive or negative media reports.

Those reports were traditionally circulated across the exercise in the evening via a locally-printed "newspaper."

This year, however, the training centre established its own internal social media platform, suitably dubbed Fakebook, to disseminate real-time news reports into the field to simulate how most of us here and abroad now consume news — digitally and immediately.

Training centre commander Col. Peter Scott said the online news was used to help sway the opinions of the local population and is something that "commanders have to take into account in all of their planning going into any operations."

"This is something we must incorporate into all of our exercises going forward because it is something that all of our soldiers use daily," Scott said.

It's also a good time to explain to troops the "ramifications of living in a social media world," not just for them but for their families back home, said Maj. Michael Miller of 2 Royal Canadian Regiment.

"It’s out there, everything you do, everything you say, it’s going to be tracked, it’s going to be monitored," he said.

"If we are going into a certain part of the world, you can be guaranteed that the adversary is going to be interested to know who is coming in there, what we are coming in with and they’ll start looking and trying to connect the dots.

"Cyber warfare ... it’s now a reality of war."

From insurgency to near-peer enemy

For most of the Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre's existence — it began operations in 1999 — the scenarios focused on counter-insurgency training and preparing troops for the war in Afghanistan against Taliban fighters.

Scott says past tasks were tailored to what the soldiers would face in Afghanistan based on what they knew at that time.

Things have changed.

"What you are now seeing is full spectrum," he said.

The focus has shifted from counterinsurgency combat training to near-peer combat and the fight against a modern force with similar weaponry and technology.

That also includes both combating the use and perfecting their own deployment of electronic warfare and cyber warfare techniques which, like the social-media aspect of training, is now integral to everything that happens during the exercise.

"As long as we’ve been trained for the worst-case scenario, it’s easy for us to transition to other types of operations," Scott said.

Those future operations will likely be hybrid warfare, a combination of conventional, asymmetric and cyber warfare that also increasingly includes use of elements like influence activities.

As much as each side now has symmetrical abilities in near-peer conflict, sometimes it comes down to simply carrying the right message to the right person, said Maj. Martin Lamontagne-Lacasse, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan.

"There has been an evolution of media and social media in many ways," he said.

"But we've had propaganda since the Second World War."

Psychological operations and CIMIC

Part of the motivating drivers for actors to take part in the three-week exercise is that they have borne witness to conflict in their home countries and encountered, first-hand, how foreign troops have entered their towns and villages and interacted with locals.

Some were good experiences. Others, not so much.

An increasingly important part of military activities is to better improve those interactions through the use of troops from groups like Psychological Operations (PsyOps) and Civil-Military Co-operation (CIMIC), which fall under the umbrella of Influence Activities.

Acting as the mediators and negotiators between military, locals, non-profit groups and non-governmental organizations, the use of PsyOps and CIMIC to navigate complicated peacemaking scenarios is indicative of the "complexity of the modern operating environment," said Lt.-Col. Ben Irvine from the 2nd Canadian Mechanized Brigade.

Think of them as the marketing arm of the military.

Master Cpl. Andrew Baker said many NATO nations have been using PsyOps to great effect and the strengths are clear.

Their role is to "win the hearts and minds" of the local population, Baker said, through everything from face-to-face interactions to using loudspeakers or leaflet drops.

"Whenever we deploy anywhere, it’s never in a vacuum," Baker said.

"The days of lining up in files in a field where there is no civilian interference are over.

"Everywhere we go there are civilians and populations who are aren’t involved in the actual war effort and someone needs to be there and for that to be their focus.

"We’re those people."

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