n a large cement building on a remote part of Camp Atterbury army base in south-central Indiana, a group of US soldiers prepares to visit a mock Afghan village. The village, part of a simulation, is populated by privately contracted role players acting as Afghan farmers, merchants, religious figures, elders, and other villagers. As part of their predeployment training, the soldiers will survey vil-lage needs to identify projects that could bolster local support for the provincial government—a key tenet of the counterinsurgency doctrine their team is imple-menting. The survey was designed by the US Agency for International Develop-ment (USAID), which hired and sent contractors to provide the military with instruction in international development “best practices.” Another contractor—an Afghan American woman working as a translator—wraps a pink headscarf around a female soldier and secures it under her chin. A second female soldier wearing a blue headscarf looks on, eager to learn how to wear the scarf under her helmet and draped over her military-issued camouflage blouse and body armor (figure 1).The two female soldiers are members of what the military calls a “female en-gagement team” (FET). The simulation includes a “women’s tent” populated by Afghan women actors crocheting, preparing food, and talking. In this context, “FET” denotes the two women on the deploying team who, based on their gen-der, are presumed to have access to any female villagers the team may confront during the simulation. It is 2011, the height of the US military’s FET program in Af ghani stan. The headscarves identify the soldiers as female to villagers and send what the military calls a “powerful and positive message” that its “intentions are good and that the United States is there to protect them.”1 The female soldiers plan to “engage” women they encounter, viewing this as an opportunity to make a positive impression as well as to gather any information about the village that might be strategically useful. This striking combination of actors came about when the US military integrated development into counterinsurgency training, a process that relied on military understandings of the colonial past and new forms of labor for private contractors and female soldiers.