What military and sporting simulations have in common is that they are not Discrete State Games.
Chess is a Discrete State Game2. There are a finite number of possible positions3; it is an extraordinarily large number but it is a definitive number. If one had a computer, or a book or a file cabinet that was capable of storing every conceivable position in chess with the best possible move to make at every discrete state in the game then you would have the ultimate, unbeatable chess master. Call it AI, call it an expert system, or just call it a giant look up table but it would be definitive and unbeatable.
Indeed, any Discrete State Game strategy or Discrete State problem can and will be solved. It does not matter what methods are used in the short term — neural nets, genetic algorithms, or brute force — there is a definitive solution waiting out there.
This is not the case of simulations. Computer simulations, by definition, are emulations of the real world. The real world rarely rests in discrete states.
2 Also sometimes called an NxM game. “NxM game: A normal form game for two players, where one player has N possible actions and the other one has M possible actions. In such a game, the payoffs pairs to any strategy combination can be neatly arranged in a matrix, and the game is easily analyzable.”
3 The number is frequently given as : 