Gardner stresses that nothing will ever replace "muddy boots" training. But he said the adoption of the technology was accelerating partly for practical reasons: Real-life training is expensive, and it is hard to find a place for it. The Millennium Challenge, a three-week real-life war game that took place in 17 locations simultaneously last summer, cost US$250 million.
"Back in the Cold War, with the threat of a potential adversary coming over the border, the Germans were more amenable to having tanks running through their towns," Gardner added. The possibilities of networked computers, combined with an increasingly remote-controlled military like the one Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has vowed to build, has spurred interest in adapting the architecture of multiplayer games like Everquest and Ultima to create a "persistent world" for training and perhaps more.
One notion involves a scenario torn from the pages of a science fiction novel, in which a virtual training system becomes the actual means of waging war. Ender's Game, a cult classic by Orson Scott Card, tells the story of a group of young soldiers battling aliens in a video game. In the end, they emerge to find that their victory has saved humankind, and that it was not a game.
"Ender's Game has had a lot of influence on our thinking," said Michael Macedonia, director of the Army's simulation technology center in Orlando, Florida, which plans to build a virtual Afghanistan that could host hundreds of thousands of networked computers.
"The intent is to build a simulation that allows people to play in that world for months or years, participate in different types of roles and see consequences of their decisions."
At the root of the high-tech training enthusiasm are some sobering facts about how quickly even the best-trained troops get rusty. A large proportion of casualties always occur in the first weeks of fighting, military experts say, because soldiers are essentially brushing up on their skills while in combat.
Computer systems like the ones the Marines here were training on could be taken on ships or even set up in remote locations so troops could train while waiting to go into battle.
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