Today, significant use of simulation technologies is seen for all services within the US military, at almost all echelons, and for most kinds of military roles and missions. Simulation's primary role today is to provide practice experiences that approach real world fidelity. Simulation enables more frequent and sustained practice than the real world often allows and contributes to the transfer of training to operational environments.
Using simulation for realistic practice should remain central to simulation's role in training. However, simulation can be applied throughout all phases of the training cycle. Historically, the primary bottleneck for additional uses has been the time and resource cost of content development. We show how existing simulation technologies can be readily exploited and extended to enable the use of simulated experience across a much broader span of the cycle of instruction. We outline interworking technologies (Simulation2Instruction) that, in combination, remove the primary bottleneck of content development by automatically capturing all student (and instructor) activity in a simulation. These simulation recordings then become "content" for demonstrations, assessments, and stand-alone instruction. Content development activity shifts to search rather than construction. Search is both faster and simpler, which extends the audience of content developers because less technological skill is required.
We illustrate Simulation2Instruction technologies with examples of demonstrations, assessments, and stand-alone instruction (used for remediation) in a simulation environment in use at a US Navy schoolhouse. We also offer recommendations for modest requirements for existing and future simulation platforms that will result in enabling similar uses and benefits to others wishing to exploit simulation for all phases of instruction.