Personnel requirements will certainly contract. More importantly, however, the skill sets required will change, with a greater requirement for information specialists. Whether this change can be accommodated within existing career patterns is unclear. Advances in technology, however, also offer new ways of satisfying training requirements. Simulators for the training of pilots are a familiar and mature system.
Similar techniques are available for many other forms of training.
Further, such simulators can be used remotely by personnel far removed from operational sites, providing opportunities for training by reserve forces or refresher training for regular forces on temporary duty elsewhere. As these technologies increase in sophistication, they may become so valuable in their own right that they will become state secrets. On the other hand, simulators may become so widely available and inexpensive that developing countries will have the opportunity to employ the most sophisticated training techniques, allowing maximum effectiveness to be gained from their weapons systems. A suggestion that this is less improbable than it sounds is the use of commercial entertainment software for training by the US Marine Corps. An important consequence of better communications is the complications they will introduce to the task of command.