The front line has changed. Training must change with it
For most of military history, a soldier could only be prepared as well as the world around them could be physically staged. The British Army still does this seriously, with purpose-built training villages and role-players hired by the dozen; sometimes, whole settlements are populated by people playing the residents. It works, and it matters. But the limits are physical. A few dozen role-players cannot stand in for a city of millions, and no live exercise can safely fill a street with casualties, trigger a real panic, or be replayed under changed conditions.
Last month’s announcement matters more than its headline figure. The Ministry of Defence has awarded the Army's Collective Training Service to Omnia Training, a consortium of five British companies led by Raytheon UK, in a fifteen-year commitment worth around two billion pounds. Skyral is proud to be one of the five, providing the AI-enabled Modelling and Simulation platform at the core of the new system. At its heart is a Combat Laboratory, combining AI, analytics and virtual environments to recreate modern conflict and train up soldiers at an unparalleled size and scale. The Defence Secretary has cast it as a boost to readiness and to skilled UK jobs, and it is both.
It is a genuine step change. RUSI argued last year that training can no longer be an afterthought but belongs at the centre of military training strategy. A commitment like ACTS, on the scale of ACTS, is that argument made real. The ability to model how a population behaves under fire is now a capability in its own right. And our adversaries know it. This is because they operate against civilians deliberately and they count on Western hesitation to do the same. The only honest way to prepare is to have faced these challenging experiences many times before, in simulated environments, until the response is instinctive.
Picture a patrol taking contact near a market. The crowd does not freeze. It scatters, some running straight into danger. Families with children move differently from young men, older people shelter differently from those who can run, and a few take the moment straight to social media. A serious synthetic environment does not just draw a city. It populates it with people who have ages, jobs and histories and who respond to an armed presence the way real people do: unpredictably. Given the right data, the same approach works for almost any city on earth.
We know conflict is changing faster than training systems were built to keep up with, through drones, contested information and the speed at which an ordinary street becomes a battleground. A package built for last year's war is already out of date. The strength of Modelling and Simulation technology is that it does not stand still. These simulations are live, updating as the world does. That speaks to the clearest lesson of Ukraine, that the side that can adapt in minutes beats the side that adapts in years.
Plus, a synthetic training capability is never really finished. It is built and rebuilt for as long as it serves, which takes patient investment and the institutional understanding that only comes from years inside the problem. That is why the British Army’s investment into a programme that holds spiral development at its core matters. It means delivering a usable capability early and improving it continuously, alongside the people who use it, rather than waiting for a perfect system that arrives too late. Better yet, Skyral's software is a sovereign capability built in the UK, with the intellectual property held here at home. Capability like that is not just bought once. It is home grown.
The Ministry of Defence, I am pleased to say, is beginning to grasp this, treating capability less as a one-off purchase and more as a partnership that evolves as the threat does. That instinct needs to become the rule rather than the exception, because a fifteen-year commitment is only as valuable as the will to keep it, through changes of government and budget cycles.
The front line has changed. The lasting advantage now belongs to those who have faced the worst version of the day before it arrives, and who keep facing it as the threat evolves. That is not built on a training ground, and it is not bought once. It is grown, over years, by a country prepared to keep adapting for as long as the threat does. That is the choice Britain has just made, and it is the right one.
Skyral’s Naomi Hulme explores what AI-enabled Modelling and Simulation means for the future of defence.
