DD, you bring up a very important fact: experience in actual fighting is highly correlative with winning the fight, which happens to correlate well with survival.
Ken Murray, in his seminal book Training at the Speed of Life, used the examples of fighter pilots as proof that highly realistic combat simulations can get a warrior past his first 3 dogfights (the ones in which he is most likely to be killed) without actually risking death. If the warrior has enough realistic simulated fights under his belt before he ever goes into real combat, his chances of winning his first combat are exponentially higher than they would have been if he had gone into combat "cold".
This is the principle behind the highly realistic training we do in law enforcement now with SIMUNITION, Airsoft, and computer simulators. Cops who have been intensively trained in the art and science of gunfighting by these modalities not only have a higher success rate when/if they get into a real gunfight, they have better discriminatory skills that prevent them getting into a "bad shoot".
I've been using these training modalities as an increasingly important component of my LE classes, to the point where I won't do a class any more without having a computer simulator at least, and preferably with computer plus airsoft and/or SIMS. The speed at which people learn gunfighting thru these modalities continually astonishes me.
