There is a lot of discussion and examination about the live tissue training that takes place for military medics. In short, these training scenarios take animals and uses them as patients in high stress evolutions to provide realistic training. As is typical there are two extreme views to this type of training.
Over at Kit-Up there is a GOOD article about the practice, its benefits and the differences between this training vs. simulators. I tend to fall on the side of realistic training. You need to be able to feel the flesh, experience the smells and the warmth of the flowing blood, and have the additional stress of holding a life in your hands before you have to perform these techniques with a human life on the line. As a result of this type of training, the combat medics of the US Military are outstanding first line responders to traumatic injury.
In business we put a lot of emphasis on experience. People who have been in specific circumstances, and worked (successfully) in similar environments are the folks that are perceived as having the highest probability for success.
In the military we spend a ton of timing training skills, tuning equipment, and general preparation. During peace, live fire training is limited and done with extreme levels of supervision and observation. Back in the day, we would have a live fire ex maybe once a year. One of the reasons that it was so frequent was that we were the top missile battery in The Corps. As a result we participated in a lot more testing of avionics, and jamming equipment than most batteries. The photo on the header of this blog is a test fire that we did at San Nicholas Island in ’84. Everything was tightly controlled, and we had an army of Raytheon tech reps tied into the central bus on the BCC and ICC to monitor the test and telemetry (we still got the drone). The reason that I relate this is that nothing simulated can prepare you to fight against live opponents except live situations. The roar and shock of that missile actually being fired vs. a “smoky sam” launch is something that you need to become accustomed to in order to do your job.
Live tissue, is the same. You have to become accustomed to the actual conditions in which you are going to be expected to performed. It is called experience and there is no substitute.