The recruits practice their war skills with capture the flag games. Each participant carries visible-laser weapons (color coded to match the team color) to fire at members of the other team, and wears a special vest that detects when it is hit with a laser, flashing briefly with red lights on the front and back and thereafter delivering a debilitating shock to the wearer until the game is over.
The interface is pretty solid. It presents a real but non-fatal risk. The lights on the vest sends a quick and unambiguous signal to others that stands in for the…um…otherwise gory signal they would receive in the field when a solider was shot down. The weapons are very similar to what they will be using in the field, so it’s good basic psychomotor practice for using them. And capture the flag is a simple, focused game that stresses field tactics along with mastery of physical skills.
The main reason this isn’t perfect is that these recruits are not going to be facing other humans in the field, but rather giant and ferocious space arachnids. The differences aren’t superficial. Bugs behave differently. They’re of a different size. Their distance weapons in the field are ropy, arcing jets of biological napalm rather than perfectly straight beams of light.
Certainly, what is being learned here is more abstract than practical, and might be a stepping stone to games with more verisimilitude, but if you only had a short time to train soldiers for real-world combat, I would structure even early games to be more like the real world.