White House, Redux

[Image: Via Wikimedia].

The U.S. Secret Service might construct a back-up White House—or, more accurately, a "fake White House to help protect the real one," the New York Times reports.

It would be an $8 million "detailed replica" of the presidential residence constructed 20 miles from the existing White House. Secret Service agents could then train in a more accurate environment; at the moment, according to Secret Service director Joseph P. Clancy, "train on a parking lot, basically... We put up a makeshift fence and walk off the distance between the fence at the White House and the actual house itself. We don’t have the bushes, we don’t have the fountains, we don’t get a realistic look at the White House."

This White House redux, so to speak, would join a long list of other proprietary microcosms, or military and security-themed surrogate landscapes used for training purposes—but it also raises the question of where other, unofficial bootleg White Houses might already exist, sitting quietly inside vast Russian warehouses, for example, or inside camouflaged aircraft hangars in the outer regions of China's own military-industrial complex.

Read more at the New York Times or NPR.