Book excerpt: An assessment of combat modeling & simulation technologies. Discusses simulators which allow military forces to practice & train in situations which would be too costly or risky to practice with real weapons. Chapters include: preparing for the next war; recent developments; simulators; types of simulations; the evolution of distributed interactive simulation; SIMNET; fidelity, fog & friction; verification, validation, & accreditation; standards for DIS scalability & scaling; funding for DIS systems. Graphs, charts, & photos.