Do you think that the military should invest in Virtual Reality as a safe and cost efficient way to train troops?

I don't think that you can expect a soldier to be ready for combat with VR training. There needs to be a physical stress that VR can never provide. Another thing to think about is that there needs to be some danger involved in training. That's why we do live fire exercises. You need to have confidence in your ability to make good decisions in a dangerous situation. One final reason is that you will have these soldiers training in a nice room, but there are environmental factors in training that are important. A soldier should be able to do their job in any weather. Rain, snow, cold, heat , humidity are all elements to training that can't be discounted. So ultimately VR is just an expensive toy with limited training benefit.

My Guard unit used it a couple of months ago and it was fun, but it was cumbersome and not very practical in my opinion . We spent an hour going over the equipment and the safety brief. We spent another hour and half trying to get all issues resolved and everyone online in the game (simulator). By the time all of that happened and we had all issues resolved we had maybe 30-40 minutes of time to run thru a simulation before our reserved time was up. In my experience I have felt more accomplished and proud of what I had done for the day when we finished the shoot house or something of that nature.

I would say Simulators should just be used for crawl and walk concepts of training.

We use them for familiarization training and to run through what to do out on the live fire range, like moving shooting and transition shooting. Using Sims is a good way to make sure they are comfortable with movements, they will do in live fire. The sims also let you run through things like gun jams, running guns a other malfunctions you will face. This is another way to read your troops and get a grasp on who needs more training or one on one and even maybe have to pull from training, instead of finding out with live rounds. This is a requirement for us to use sims for going to range and the CAT III shooting course before they go live. The other thing is you can take your Platoon (PLT) or Squad (SQD) and run through drills and or practice patrol planing and other thing like that. I would send my platoon through before we went out on FTX so we run through drills and practice calling ADDRACS(Alert Direction Description Range Assignment Control) and other commands. This is a good way to work on communication and to understand strengths and weaknesses of the SQD or PLT.

We also have convoy sims use the same way and these are pretty real even down to the comms and weapons on the Trucks. You can fell the weapons just like doing a real convoy. The purpose here again is to run through before you go live and familiarization training.

So in the end they are a good supplemental, to increase training, but not to replace the live training that everyone needs.

Yes and I don't know what they are doing but it looks cools and I'm jealous I don't get to Play.

Good advice from all the posts so far, and I fully concur with them. I've never used it, the only "simulator" I've ever used was the weaponeer. It was good to get a private the basics of firing, but there's nothing like being on the line for real.

We were using MILES gear in the 80's for small unit training. This would allow even more in-depth training scenarios.

There exist simulators, but I suspect they are for complex vehicles and aircraft.

In many ways, the military has already been doing that with the many realistic simulators that are available. I think it's only inevitable that the technology expands to other areas of training across the services. VR should complement realistic training, but it should not replace realistic training.

It surely is, but at this present time, setting it up WOULD break the bank, I'm afraid. Give it 10 years, though.

It has a place, but it is not the be all end all. Real live, at combat speed needs remain on the table.