U.S. Army starting up its own Video Game Studio

If you want to fly an A10 try the Desert Combat mod for BF1942 it has one, it may not be the most realistic simulation but it is multiplayer.

And look how good it works in Iraq. I'm all for them giving up the sham of a belief that the sims aid in the real world and just selling the things off to the US entertainment consumer.

at first I read that as "with Sandoz National Laboratories."

hahahahah. this reminds me of those Concerned Parents freaking out years ago, shrieking that video games caused violence, and Doom was JUST LIKE the military trainers!

That was seriously the best LL's ever been in any movie ever.

And then they can get blown up like everyone else by a mortar that was made in 1956 or fragged by an RPG round that's 25 years old.

If military sims were really accurate, they wouldn't be fun or a challenge.

Anything that purports to simulate US Air Force capability is a non-game. The US Air Force has no competitors, everyone has left the arena of combat and those still there in token ways can't fight a modern war. So a game should just have endless hours of flight tasking, a variety of boring turkey shoots where the enemy can't see or detect what is destroying him, and bombers in holding patterns, waiting for "actionable intelligence" on the blower ordering them to drop JDAMs on buildings or other geographical points, all undefended.

Just for sport, one supposes there could be more bombing missions of
airfield, bridges, train tracks, old decrepit Soviet tanks, chicken coops thought to be harboring stockpiles of WMDs but which don't, bunkers thought to be harboring political leadership but which don't.

A good army sim would have, in full combat mode, an armored column complete with air support stomping through an urban conclave, suffering no casualties and smashing anything that even looks a little threatening. The rest of the game should have the player driving a hummvee hither and yon to no apparent purpose with a random chance of being wounded or killed by an improvised roadside bomb.
Alternatively, you could have the gamer as a soldier sitting in his bivouac, doing soldierly things like sweeping the parking lot, with short periods of excitement caused by a random mortar attack.

A good navy sim would have the US Navy sailing around, aircraft carriers conducting pointless flight operations, with the occasional skiff or dhow thought to belong to al Qaeda drug smugglers being sunk with heavy machine gun fire.

And, of course, as above -- a couple friendly fire incidents would be key. One game could simulate running a Patriot battery: No real targets, but lots of false alarms and opportunities to shoot down friendlies. The advanced computer software running the battery would be programmed to randomly run wild, not respond to user input, and shoot down a friendly, just like in real life. The rest of the game would have the player deal with the press.

And, of course, the best game would be called "Abu Ghraib." Lots of opportunities for realistic interaction: decisions on how many digital cameras to make available to soldiers and rules under which they can and cannot be used, a brain-storming session among lawyers in the Pentagon and DoJ on what exactly the legal of definition of "torture" is, how to handle sexual fraternization among soldiers, how many private Pentagon contractors to allocate to interrogations, how to handle internal investigations without alerting the press...