At last year's (2007) Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation & Education Conference (I/ITSEC) Flag Panel, many leaders mentioned the need for improving realism, and that it was a topic of interest for their service or organization. However, a community-wide agreement or consensus understanding as to how realism is defined seems to be lacking. For example, realism may be defined as high-definition graphics in some cases, as realistic environmental factors (e.g., simulation of strong winds) in other cases, or even as culturally-sensitive battle and negotiation tactics in others. So precisely, what does someone mean when they use the term realism, and is the meaning consistent across disciplines and across services and organizations? In a related vein, there is wide community agreement regarding the need to advance the practice of non-kinetic effects representation to the same level as our abilities in kinetic effects. As such, it would be useful to understand the relationship between realism and the concepts and practices in the modeling and simulation of kinetic and non-kinetic effects. The paper provides some examples of how these concepts are related, and also addresses the concepts of fidelity, resolution, and verification, validation, and accreditation (VV&A). The objective of this paper is to systematically describe a scheme to characterize realism in a way that provides insight into its significance, the obstacles to achieving it, and methods to enhance it, with regard to modeling and simulation efforts employed in training and education curricula and programs. Principally, this paper intends to begin the discussion of representation primitives required to support the improvement of realism in order to enhance warfighter readiness, and to ultimately understand how to build more effective training and education products to maximize the Government's return on investment.