The U.S. military is studying the way realistic combat video games (ex. "Halo" and "Doom") have transformed the way the United States military fights wars, as well as soldiers' ways of killing.

The U.S. government recently concluded its "Cyber Storm" wargame Friday, its biggest-ever exercise to test how it would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and bloggers.

The Pentagon marshals thousands of computer-generated soldiers, tanks, ships and networked flight simulators to make large-scale training exercises more realistic than ever before.

A lengthy interview with Dr. Michale Macedonia, the principal designer behind the U.S. Army's foray into MMPORG based training. The massively multiplayer simulation will be used by military personnel to train troops in urban situations before they are airlifted to a battle zone.

The US Army is building a second version of Earth on computer to help it prepare for conflicts around the world. The detailed simulation will be drawn from a real-world terrain database and will be drawn to the same scale as the original.

The project was recently disclosed in an online interview at the gamer website, homelanfed.com.

The possibilities of networked computers, combined with an increasingly remote-controlled military, have spurred interest in adapting the architecture of multiplayer games like Everquest and Ultima to create a "persistent world" for training and perhaps more. However, some military trainers worry that the more the games seem like war, the more war may start to seem like a game.

Virtual reality, that computer-driven replacement for the here and now, may offer a versatile proving ground for police officers and emergency crews training to respond to future terrorist attacks.

The U.S. military is spending millions to develop computer games that are _less_ violent than what is commercially available for training its forces for the challenges of peacekeeping and modern warfare.

The U.S. military is holding a forum to explore what lessons can be learned from MMPORGs for fighting terrorist networks. The hope is that the MMPORG model might provide new insight into how to organize military planning and operations.

Using computer simulations, experts from the Brookings Institution and the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense have devised a strategy to contain a smallpox attack. Based on the computer model, they have developed an alternative strategy for vaccinating against smallpox.