The use of single champions rather than full armies to conduct conflict has both Biblical and Classical antecedents, even if the practice has now fallen into disuse. The gap between these practices and simulated conflict, with both sides agreeing to accept the result, would be a chasm. Unfortunately, the realities of war and the fantasies of simulation make poor bedfellows. Much of warfare will depend on each side's ability to fool the other, to learn systematically from what works well and what poorly, to disseminate the results into doctrine, and, by so doing, to move up the sophistication of the game notch after notch. These operations are precisely the ones least amenable to simulation.
Mutual simulation requires adversaries to agree on what each side's systems can do.
The reader may be forgiven for wondering whether two sides capable of this order of trust could be even more capable of resolving disputes short of war. The attractiveness of today's simulation technology is its ability to model the battlefield from the viewpoint of every operator. Marrying operators and complex platforms in simulation is being promoted just when operators and their complex platforms are shuffling off the combat stage. Private war games and the National Training Center do this. That no war in memory has ever been replaced by a war game casts doubt on whether, despite great advances in simulation, any future war will be either.