While this is true, from what I've seen in real-world shooting videos, concealment used as cover obviously isn't as good as cover but it's surprisingly useful. I don't know why, exactly--maybe people, when they get really stressed have trouble aiming for center of mass through concealment and only aim for the visible part of the assailant. Anyway, for whatever reason, it works way better than intuition suggests.One problem with most sims/airsoft/paintball training is it teaches you to use concealment as cover.
If you have a choice between concealment and cover, definitely choose the cover. But if there's no cover, take the concealment--from what I can tell it's likely going to be almost as effective, in practice, as actual cover.
Simunitions may not be perfect (nothing is) but it's certainly good enough to allow the premiere elite special forces/anti-terrorist groups around the world to develop virtually super-human abilities through continued training. The problem isn't that effective training techniques don't exist, the problem is that they are expensive and not widely available.... there needs to be a system that can provide a significant consequence for getting "killed" and I'm not aware of any of those.
I think that FOF is valuable as long as participants and instructors are careful to interpret the results. I say that because from what I've seen, FOF scenarios tend to result in "mutual suicide" FAR more often than is seen in the real world. Probably part of this has to do with what hdwhit has pointed out--there's not quite the same incentive to remain unshot that would be seen with live-fire and therefore people spend more time shooting than freaking out and trying to get out of the line of fire.I agree, the basics are important before FOF. Otherwise, it becomes paintball!