6,000 Participants Training in Louisiana to Keep Peace : Military: The $3-million course focuses in part on solving problems without force. The games include representatives from the U.N. and foreign observers.

More than 6,000 troops, foreign observers and humanitarian aid representatives are in the midst of a major peacekeeping exercise being staged here at the U.S. military’s Joint Training Readiness Center.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright, who observed the $3-million exercises at Ft. Polk, in central Louisiana, praised the games as “very impressive. What they’re doing here is very good training for what they are going to have to face.”

Troops from aviation, infantry, armor and artillery usually simulate war games to maintain combat readiness.

But the current training course, which began July 31 and ends Aug. 22, focuses on peace enforcement and includes representatives from the United Nations, foreign observers and non-governmental aid groups, such as the Red Cross and Save the Children.

In the midst of “stressful, realistic” training and 11 days and nights of continuous simulated combat, troops learn how to deal with role-playing civilians and are taught to seek non-force, non-lethal solutions to difficult situations.

Soldiers are as likely to be treating refugees for cholera or dealing with renegade remnants of warring ethnic groups as clearing a buffer zone or wiping out a sniper nest in a civilian village.

Officers explained that the peace enforcement training has evolved from U.S. military experience in Rwanda, Somalia, the Gulf War and training Dutch peacekeepers for Cambodia at a U.S. training center in Germany.