Today' military faces an increasingly arduous commitment to maintain readiness for a multitude of taskings including full-scale conflicts, reconstruction and stability operations and humanitarian efforts. On a unit level, commanders often face this challenge within the constraints of limited resources - people, time and funding. As a result, many are turning to training alternatives to help them meet their readiness goals better, smarter, faster and cheaper. The use of military simulations provides a viable solution, but often, the use of these tools are not cost effective. Because of this, military leaders are turning to the commercial gaming market for potential solutions to bridge cost and training requirements. Games, both commercial and government off the shelf, are not a panacea for training resource shortfalls, but they can be used in conjunction traditional training tools to meet readiness requirements within a resource constrained environment. The challenge now is to define how to map military tasks to a game, how to select a game that meets the training need and how to conduct an event on the unit level using games. These hurdles can be easily overcome, but a deliberate methodology must be used in order to ensure success.
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