WHAT WARGAMES ARE TEACHING AMERICANS ABOUT WAR: Some valuable stuff, according to an article in Salon by Wagner James Au:

And what’s impressed him, playing America’s Army, is how many competitors he’s fought who come to the game without his experience base, but learn usable tactics on the fly: “You could tell in some cases you have significantly younger people, probably junior high or so … they’d be saying things back and forth that indicated to me that this was sort of an extension of guys who grew up on Rainbow Six and other first-person shooters … the techniques they would use just by figuring it out would end up being very similar to what we would do in real life.” He found himself up against kids staggering their formations, using smoke to cover their approach, closing on the enemy with fire and maneuver, individual movement techniques (IMT) — in short, acquiring through gameplay knowledge that was once available only through military training.

If this interests you, you might also like this piece that Dave Kopel and I wrote just over a year ago on the impact of wargaming on the citizenry.