The Long Tail in Training Systems.

Chris Anderson’s book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, explains a new side of the economics of music downloads and other digital businesses. In summary, when a product is digital and requires no physical storage, production, and shipping, then it is possible to profitably deliver millions of songs, movies, games, and software apps. We are not limited to the Top 1,000 in each category because we have to recoup costs associated with physical products.

The idea can also be applied to military training systems. We have historically focused our training systems on the people who go into combat and have done so with projects that are $50M or larger. At this price tag we can only afford to address the needs of a small portion of the military – hence the focus on those who are in harm’s way. But if we could lower the cost of training systems significantly, we could potentially acquire training systems for every single Army MOS. In the future, when every soldier has a laptop computer and every unit has a decent network connection, there could be a training application on every single Army desktop. These applications could be as ubiquitous as MS Office. To accomplish this, the training systems must be much smaller and less expensive - $1M, $100K, or even $10K to develop. If we can create valuable training systems at these prices that run in a desktop computer environment, then we may be able to serve all 400,000 soldiers in the Army.

Anderson’s original article in Wired Magazine and his Blog.

Roger Smith's "The Long Tail in Military Simulation Systems" article which explores in more detail how this can be done.