To address a couple of your questions that didn't get addressed:
Our leadership roles within the unit are 100% active combat roles. It's one of the reasons our rank cap is CPT as an Infantry Company Commander as it's the highest rank that should conceivably be getting trigger time in a real world scenario. I/We encourage a "lead from the front" type of leadership for several reasons, but largely because we don't go straight to officers here, so all of our leadership positions have come up through the enlisted ranks and are "riflemen first", and are often the most experienced shooters on the battlefield for us.
Also, 100% of our assets are in-game and being run by real players. If the players miss an operation, we either have someone fill-in for them or we don't have use of the asset. One of the draws to the unit is that nothing on the blufor side is simulated when we're in-game. If you see it, it's being manned by a real person in real time.
As for this:
My point is, it’s rare to get all the tools you would normally have outside of real combat. And even when you do come close, that maybe be during a CTC rotation or something that comes around once a year or once every other year.
You guys are doing this what? Twice a week?
How is this not a thing? I mean, I feel like this would be a gold mine training tool for a lot of units sitting around in garrison or a great teaching tool for Doctrine Command or Center for Army Lessons Learned. Even some of the videos you guys are putting together could be a decent training tool if they were distilled down and edited a bit for that purpose—
The army pays big bucks for simulations. They even have a whole MOS dedicated to it. The problem is most of their stuff sucks and is in the Stone Age compared to what you guys are doing with Arma3. Has anyone in the Arma community gone to DoD and been like “hey we got an off the shelf solution in the form of a super realistic combined arms simulation?”
I wouldn't even know where to start. I've had personnel in the past approach me passively with stuff like this, and am currently working with someone more actively, but overall I absolutely agree. Instead of units spending their days pretending to do work in the motorpool because there's literally nothing for them to do, I feel like the US Military could and would absolutely benefit from a combination of airsoft and video gaming to increase real world skills. It boggles my mind that it's not done across the board. Probably held up by bureaucracy and contractors demanding big bucks for something that could be integrated by anyone with a pair of brain cells that could be rubbed together and knew the systems.
Airsoft would absolutely promote equipment familiarization and handling, as well as massive improvements of cqb/MOUT skills, and battlefield awareness, across the board at an incredibly reduced cost, and is something that could be done on a daily basis.
Gaming like arma would promote a wider battlefield awareness, terrain reading/landnav, give real world situations/scenarios that could be reacted to so the first time someone experiences it isn't on a real battlefield, etc, etc, etc. The benefits would be endless, especially compared to, as I said, sitting in a motorpool and pretending to work because there's literally nothing for you to do, which was a significant part of my time on active duty across two different units.
Nothing to do? Let's pull the airsoft equipment and run a scenario or two. Or go back to your barracks and fire up your provided laptops and let's run some simulation scenarios. Problem solved. Lethality and awareness are increased on the real battlefield due to "train like you fight"... Other than the airsoft rounds only having ~75m max range
Lots of solutions, but who wants to hear them, and who can actually do something about it?
