Think Like the Enemy: The U.S. Military’s Terrorist Training Exercise

A photo from the CODIAC training guide depicting military trainees participating in a "think like the enemy" exercise. The caption reads: "Trainees carry out this exercise as if they were radical Islamic terrorists; they attempt to recruit the class to join their jihad."

Public Intelligence


One particular section in Unit 4 of the course focuses entirely on a concept that is described as “combat profiling, which involves utilizing observation and analysis to obtain a greater understanding of one’s enemy.”  In order to fully understand the roots of terrorism, the section titled “Think Like the Enemy” advocates mental experiments designed to put the trainee into a terrorist’s mindset.  This involves “looking at the world through their eyes, walking in their shoes, and having a day in their skin” in order to understand the roots of their radicalism.  Trainees are asked to consider terrorist groups’ manifestos and iconography as a reflection of their recruitment messages and fundamental motivations.  Trainees are then asked to engage in an exercise where they are divided into teams and asked to form their own hypothetical terrorist group.  Each group must consider what their fundamental ideology and message is, complete with a terrorist “brand” that is designed to win the “hearts and minds” of their classmates.

Following a brief overview of terrorist planning techniques and procedures, CODIAC trainees are asked to “Plan Like the Enemy” by constructing their own hypothetical terrorist attacks.  After being divided into teams, trainees are assigned “a real-world terrorist organization” for which they will “seek out a real-world target for their fictional terrorist attack.”  The teams are encouraged to consider the logistics of the attack: how it is to be conducted, how supplies are to be acquired and how it is to be financed.  The training guide encourages instructors to “give trainees sufficient time to plan and research their attacks” and “ask them to create concept-diagrams of their operations” including videos or photos of their potential target, as well as drawings of their target’s layout.  Trainees are then asked to give a fifteen-minute presentation to the rest of the class describing their hypothetical terrorist attack, including “why this target, and its attack plan, offer the highest cost-to-benefit ratio for the terrorist group.”  After all of the presentations are complete, the class is asked to select the “optimal target” from all of the teams’ proposals.  The “hypothetical attacks” are then used for discussion purposes following the exercise’s completion, examining how such attacks could potentially be thwarted or prevented entirely.

Excerpts from the CODIAC Course:

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