United States Army paying $3,700,000 for anti-smoking game.

From GamePolitics:

The image of the hard-bitten soldier grabbing a post-battle smoke may be a cliche, but it’s one that the U.S. Army hopes to change.

To that end, the Texas Medical Center reports that one of its researchers has been awarded $3.7 million grant by the Army to create an anti-smoking video game for military personnel.

Remember this the next time the Army says they don’t have money for soldiers’ body armor or to up-armor HMMWVs. It’s bad enough they’ve been wasting money for almost seven years on “America’s Army” — another video game they created in an attempt to improve recruitment — but this is just ridiculous. And as one commenter on GamePolitics pointed out, if there’s one group that should be able to smoke without being harassed it’s our military personnel.