The collective effect is potentially revolutionary. Game-based training can be tailored to specific scenarios as well as to an individual's own rate of learning, sped up or slowed down based on how quickly he or she acquires knowledge. The result is an enormous gain in efficiency. The Navy, for example, switched to such programs for its communications technicians and estimates that it saved some 58 man-years in training time. Virtual training is also appealing because it allows soldiers to learn and exercise their skills, again and again, without the accompanying physical risks. "Combat veterans live longer," Col. Matthew Caffrey, professor of war gaming and planning at the Air Command and Staff College, told National Defense. "One reason we use war games is to make virtual vets."

For the military as a whole, there are also tens of millions of dollars saved by conducting virtual training at the unit level. One recent war game, for instance, linked the crew of a U.S. aircraft carrier at sea, British and German submarines (docked in harbor, but the crews were on simulators), British airplane crews (sitting at simulators), and a set of Patriot missile batteries (working on practice mode). The players shared information and made joint decisions, just as if the exercise were real. The Navy estimates that its use of gaming at bases, in lieu of doing the same exercises at sea, saves it some 4,000 barrels of fuel a year, while simulated missile launches, rather than firing the real thing, save some $33 million annually.

Avatar Fatigue

Not everything about militainment is controversial: Who is going to complain, after all, about trying to find a better way to save soldiers' lives, help trauma victims, or prevent sexual harassment? And as Maj. Gen. John Custer told Training & Simulation Journal, the world has changed: "You have to realize what generation you're trying to teach. You know what? PowerPoint is not the way to go."

But there are many concerns about what these dramatic changes mean for war's future. With only so many hours in the day, some in the military worry that video games are beginning to edge out real-world training. Navy Capt. Stephen David complained in the service's in-house journal that the virtual vets arriving aboard his ship lacked "the requisite familiarity with even the most basic shiphandling skills." Others raise what is called the "O'Brien Effect," referring to the time talk-show host Conan O'Brien challenged tennis champion Serena Williams to a match, only to defeat her on the Nintendo Wii. At some point, piloting a plane in combat is different from piloting a computer workstation, just as hitting a real tennis ball is not the same as hitting the Wii version.

The real danger of militainment, though, might be in how it risks changing the perceptions of war. "You lose an avatar; just reboot the game," is how Ken Robinson, the Special Forces veteran who produced Army 360, put it in Training & Simulation Journal. "In real life, you lose your guy; you've lost your guy. And then you've got to bury him, and then you've got to call his wife."

This is not just an issue for the military, but also for a broader public that has less and less to do with actual war. As Celeste Zappala of Philadelphia, a mother who lost her son in Iraq, told Salon, "I've always believed when people participate in virtual violence, it makes the victims of violence become less empathetic and less real, and people become immune to the real pain people suffer." But for most parents, having to send their children to war is not something they worry about, even as it becomes something that more of them play at.

At the same time, the nexus of video gaming, war, and militainment is growing even fuzzier with the rapid growth in unmanned systems that use video-gaming technology to conduct actual military operations (the United States now has some 7,000 unmanned systems in its aerial inventory and another 12,000 on the ground). Indeed, the executive at robot-maker Foster-Miller worries that it is becoming too fuzzy. "It's a Nintendo issue," he told me. "You get kids used to playing Grand Theft Auto moving on to armed robots. Are you going to feel guilt after killing someone?"

With more and more soldiers sitting at a robot's computer controls, experiencing no real danger other than carpal tunnel syndrome, the experience of war is not merely distanced from risk, but now fully disconnected from it. One Air Force officer speaking to Wired's Noah Shachtman about his experiences in the Iraq war, which he fought from a cubicle hundreds of miles away, described the feeling: "It's like a video game.... It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it's fucking cool."

A commander of a Predator drone squadron based in Nevada probably best summed up to me the quandaries, for both the military and the public. A former F-15 pilot, the officer described the new generation of unmanned systems operators with awe. Years of video gaming had made them "naturals" in the fast-moving, multitasking skills required for modern warfare. But there was also a cost. "The video-game generation is worse at distorting the reality of it [war] from the virtual nature. They don't have that sense of what's really going on," he told me. This might be the essence of this new era of militainment: a greater fidelity to detail, but perhaps a greater distortion in the end.

Every day, this officer heads off to virtual war. But when he comes home, he doesn't let his own children play the many war games aimed at them. "We do the car ones instead."

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