FBI builds Alabama cyber training town for real-world attack drills

Hidden inside Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, the FBI has built a small town for a new kind of attack drill. The 22,000-square-foot Kinetic Cyber Range opened in February 2025 and had already trained more than 1,400 students by June 9, 2026, giving agents and partner agencies a place to confront cyber threats that no longer stay on a screen.

The facility is run by the FBI’s Operational Technology Division and is laid out like a neighborhood: houses, hotel rooms, a power company, a hospital, a gas station, a data center, an arcade and a business center. Inside each space, the systems are wired to behave like real-world environments, including Active Directory, email and firewalls, so trainees can work through incidents such as vehicle forensics, home searches involving internet-connected devices and network intrusions before they face them in the field.

Dave Beachboard, who manages the range, said the point is realism. The old model of FBI cyber instruction leaned heavily on classrooms, where students handled cellphones or loose media at desks and learned about servers in a largely theory-driven setting with some hands-on work. At the Kinetic Cyber Range, trainees move through a physical environment and decide what to seize, what to preserve and how to follow digital evidence through a mock scene that looks and behaves like the real thing.

The training ground reflects how the FBI now sees its mission. The bureau says it is the lead federal agency for investigating cyberattacks by criminals, overseas adversaries and terrorists, and it has treated cyber as a core priority of its program. The same approach is visible in Huntsville, where the FBI has maintained a presence at Redstone Arsenal for more than 50 years and says more than 1,300 personnel work there today.

The cyber range also fits into a broader expansion on the Arsenal. In June 2021, the FBI broke ground on an Innovation Center that was designed to include a kinetic cyber range, a virtual reality classroom, multi-purpose classrooms and labs. In November 2022, the bureau held a ribbon-cutting for the North Campus and Operations Building, which was planned to house more than 1,300 personnel from a dozen FBI divisions. The site gives the bureau nearly 1,600 acres of secure land and access to nearby federal partners including ATF, NASA, Army Materiel Command, the Missile Defense Agency and the Defense Acquisition University.

For the FBI, the appeal is both operational and strategic. Huntsville offers a dense federal ecosystem, lower costs and a recruiting pitch aimed at retaining cyber talent. More importantly, the Alabama town shows how the bureau expects the next generation of investigations to unfold: with hacked systems, physical spaces and public safety all colliding at once.