Actually for most of the cadets it was more of a leadership exercise. We spend two semesters basically going over how an Air Operations Center runs and how to plan an air campaign. Well Hostile Skies allowed us to actually do that with real people working for us. If you will remember Sabre's post after frame three, that is basically how we usually set it up. It was a great learning tool, but it was very stressfull. By the end of the campaign, I had personnally planned like 3 air campaigns, written aroung 250 to 300 pages worth of papers, was working with my engineering group to finish up our ENG410 project, and had to prepare for finals. It was down right crazy, and this why a lot of the planning was kind of poor there towards the end. As I said before, though I am avctually going to write up a talking paper for the academy and suggest using Aces High as a training tool for the MSS courses. These are my suggestions and opinions, but I think the MSS classes at the academy are learned in a vacum. What I mean by this is, for example, in the Senior MSS course we do a Battle staff exercise that is support to be at the Unified command level. Well in my opinion I think they cut most of the training out when the remove the lower levels. It works in the military because the people in the exercises usually know what to expect. But to answer your questions, I think it is a good too to teach leadership and operational planning. It can show you aerial combat manuevers, but at the time we planned most of the cadets (other the Preon and a few others) had not flown and decided that after they got gunned down in the first five minutes that it would be better to let the experience Flight leads take charge in combat and they would relay orders, and man defensive guns.
Well that is my 2 cents hope it helped. Mystic or Preon or Mjionrin can jump in here at any time.
