By Joshua Krause

Did you know that the Navy SEALs just started a series of wargames that will take place in dozens of locations all over the coastline of Washington State, and will go on for at least another 2 years? I didn’t hear about it until recently. Unlike the notorious Jade Helm exercise, which was widely reported by both alternative and mainstream news sources, this operation has received very little attention since it started on January 14th, and virtually no attention before it began.

There’s a shocking reason why there has been so little awareness about these training exercises. The operation was first reported by Dahr Jamail from Truth-out.org, and only because an unnamed source leaked it to him. All the documents surrounding these wargames were labeled by the Navy in such a way that no FOIA request would ever discover them. No public notice was given, and no relevant government agency was alerted at the local, state, or federal level.

Obviously, the Navy SEAls are a very secretive organization, but given the nature of these training exercises, you’d think it would be prudent to at least alert local police departments. The SEALs will be equipped with simulated weapons, and they will be popping up in state and national parks, residential areas, tribal lands, beaches and marinas, with little regard towards public perception and awareness and without alerting any of the officials that run these public areas. As many of these officials have since pointed out, this is actually illegal to do without consulting them.

Could you imagine what this would be like if you lived in the area? What would you think if you were walking through a park or looking out your front window, and you saw special operators with guns creeping around? I know the Navy SEALs are sneaky as hell, but they’re not invisible. They’re bound to run into frightened and unaware civilians at some point. Unfortunately, that’s probably the whole point of these training exercises. In a recent interview with mintpressnews.com, Dahr Jamail explained how this operation is designed to interact with civilians.

It’s really, really troubling. Not only are they just disregarding the federal law. They basically are actively finding ways to completely subvert it, and then that would allow them to do what they were poised to do, which is conduct what they call realistic military trainings where—And this is why I say in the title of the piece the Navy uses U.S. citizens as pawns in domestic war games.

I mean that quite literally because by the Navy’s own documents that we published—and they’re online right now for folks to check out—they talk about using U.S. citizens as a way of training their soldiers to say, hey, these could be terrorists. We don’t know the people you might run into during these war game exercises. So, they’re literally using U.S. citizens as pawns to train their soldiers how to react in certain ways.

They’re not carrying weapons with live ammunition in them, but nevertheless, this is a very, very disconcerting step, where they are actively using U.S. citizens in their war games without our consent, without even our knowledge, and certainly without any advanced notification of what they are going to be doing. And then this sets up a situation, where literally you will have Navy SEALs swimming in teams through marinas where people are living on boats. They’re not going to know what’s happening. They’re not going to know who these people are.

You’re going to have Navy SEALs going through residential neighborhoods potentially in the middle of the night with simulated weapons, going through state park and hiking trails at night during the day with simulated weapons, some times even carrying out active war gaming exercises. Needless to say, you don’t have to use a lot of imagination to see the potential for disaster, for someone being shot, for someone else getting afraid and pulling a gun on these people, since we live in such a heavily weaponized country that the potential for accidents is very high—not even to speak of just basic civil rights and civil liberties that are going to be infringed upon by these exercises.

Much like Jade Helm, providing real-world training for our military personnel is only one small part of this mission. The real overarching objective is to acclimate our soldiers, sailors, and marines to the idea that, one day, they may be ordered to use their skills against Americans. And it goes both ways of course. These training exercises are designed to acclimate the American public to a constant military presence, in all the places where that would have previously been unheard of.

Though this operation is smaller in scope compared to Jade Helm, it’s another step forward in our government’s goal to get everyone used to living in a military police state. With Jade Helm, everyone knew it was coming. Now they want you to feel like it’s perfectly normal to see troops on the streets without notice.