text: ______________________________________________________________________________Introduction
  Cold War OPFOR
  When the Army established its OPFOR program in 1976 with Army Regulation
  350-2, it could hardly have envisioned today’s computerized constructive and vir-
  tual simulations, or even the evolving requirements of live simulations. It de-
  fined an OPFOR simply as “an organized force created by and from U.S. Army
  units to portray a unit of a potential adversary armed force.” Thus, all OPFORs
  were originally threat-based, in the sense that they replicated the forces, capa-
  bilities, and doctrine of a particular country officially recognized as a threat or
  potential adversary. In the midst of the Cold War, the 1976 regulation identified
  only one potential adversary against which to train: the Soviet Union; by 1978, a
  revision of the regulation added North Korea as a second threat for replication by
  an OPFOR. Over time, the Army developed other OPFORs to replicate other
  threats emerging in places ranging from Latin America and Southwest Asia.
  In its time, the threat-based OPFOR served the Army very well, particularly for
  units targeted against specific threats. The benefits of this training were borne out,
  for example, in Operation Desert Storm. Techniques and doctrine, including deep at-
  tack and the intelligence preparation of the battlefield, developed to cope with spe-
  cific threats and honed against the OPFOR, enabled the Army to achieve decisive
  results on the battlefield. However, the OE is dynamic, and the pace of that dynamism
  has increased with the end of the Cold War and the rapid advancement of informa-
  tion technology.
  Contemporary OPFOR
  Training U.S. forces for the COE re-
  Contemporary OPFOR
  quires a different kind of OPFOR from
  that of the past. The contemporary
  A plausible, flexible military and/or
  OPFOR must be less predictable and
  paramilitary force representing a
  not based on the armed forces of a par-
  composite of varying capabilities of
  ticular country. In today’s world, the
  actual worldwide forces, used in
  U.S. Army must be prepared to go into
  lieu of a specific threat force, for
  any OE and perform its full range of
  training and developing U.S. forces.
  missions. It must be ready to do so in
  the face of a wide variety of possible threats and at the same time be prepared to
  deal with third-party actors that may have other interests. Not all threats are
  purely military in nature. Therefore, the U.S. Army now defines an OPFOR as “a
  plausible, flexible military and/or paramilitary force representing a composite of
  varying capabilities of actual worldwide forces, used in lieu of a specific threat
  force, for training and developing U.S. forces.”
  Thus, in some training environments, a military force alone may be the OPFOR.
  In other cases, military forces may have paramilitary forces acting in loose affilia-
  tion with them, or acting separately from them within the same training environ-
  ment. These relationships depend on the scenario, which is driven by training re-
  quirements.
  Various agencies and experts have different lists of real-world threats the United
  States might have to face. If the U.S. Army were to pick any one of these threats
  as the threat against which to train, that threat would almost certainly not be
  the one it would actually fight. What is needed is a composite that is representa-
  tive of the full range and variety of possible threats and OEs. It must have a bit