New York Times – America’s Army, a video game developed as a Pentagon recruiting tool, has gained an avid following. Now the Army has put the game developers through a boot camp to acquaint them better with the soldier’s world.

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The Atlantic – Soldiers, spies, and diplomats conduct a classic Pentagon war gameówith sobering results. From James Fallows, a fascinating look at the options available to the U.S. to counter Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.
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Wired – You’d hardly expect to find dozens of defense strategists setting aside two weeks at a time to play a video game. But then, Urban Resolve is no ordinary video game. Developed by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, or JFCom, a division of the Department of Defense, the $195,000 program is a combat simulation on a massive scale. It pits two opposing teams of soldiers against one another in a fight for control over a city under siege, and it’s capable of modeling the behavior of the nearly 1 million entities — the soldiers, civilians, cars, tanks and so on — that might exist in such a conflict.
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Fire and Movement – Thomas P. Barnett on what he thinks the role of the commercial board wargame industry might be in the new world war in which we find ourselves.
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US Naval War College – The Newport Papers are extended research projects that the editor, the Dean of Naval Warfare Studies, and the President of the Naval War College consider of particular interest to policy makers, scholars, and analysts, and judge worthy of extensive, selective distribution.

Here are two Newport papers that trace the evolution of the US Navy’s Global War Game and its effect on US policy and strategy during the Cold War. Fascinating reading. Both papers are in PDF format.

Global War Game: The First Five Years (1979-1983)

Global War Game: Second Series (1984ñ1988)

Air & Space Power Chronicles – An outstanding overview of the history of wargaming.
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New York Times Magazine – The military has quietly become an industry leader in video-game design, creating games to train and even recruit the soldiers of the PlayStation generation. Will virtual boot camp make combat more real or more surreal?
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Wired – Inside the fully immersive proving ground where tomorrow’s soldiers are being trained by coalition forces of the Pentagon, Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
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