Defence is one of the oldest and best-funded adopters of simulation technology — and it’s also one of the spaces where XR is making the fastest inroads right now. The combination of high training costs, live-fire safety constraints, and increasingly complex multi-domain operations has pushed militaries worldwide to invest heavily in spatial computing. Here’s what’s actually being deployed in 2026.

Why Defence Took to XR Faster Than Most Industries

Military training has always been expensive. A single fast jet flying hour costs upwards of £30,000. Armoured vehicle crews need to rehearse scenarios that are genuinely dangerous to run live. Special forces units train for hostage rescue in environments that take weeks to construct and seconds to complete.

XR addresses the cost, safety, and repetition problem simultaneously. A synthetic training environment can be reset in seconds, run indefinitely, and modified to introduce variables — communications failures, unexpected civilian presence, degraded visibility — that are almost impossible to replicate consistently in live training. Crucially, physiological stress responses in high-quality XR environments have been shown to transfer meaningfully to real-world performance, which is the key metric that sceptical military training establishments have demanded before adopting new approaches.

Synthetic Training Environments

The most mature military XR application is the synthetic training environment (STE), where troops rehearse operations in photorealistic reconstructions of real terrain and built environments. Modern STEs combine LiDAR-captured environments, satellite data, and procedural generation to produce mission areas that match the physical world down to building interiors.

The US Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) programme — built on HoloLens hardware — has been the most visible example, though it’s had a rocky development history. More reliably deployed are room-scale simulation centres where crews walk through virtual environments in physically tracked spaces, used extensively for urban operations rehearsal.

UK defence contractor QinetiQ has developed similar synthetic environments for British Army units at Salisbury Plain and Catterick, focused on dismounted close combat training. The technology allows platoon-level exercises to run scenarios that previously required hundreds of support personnel and days of preparation.

Aircrew and Vehicle Crew Training

Aviation simulation has used synthetic environments for decades, but XR is changing the economics. Standalone VR headsets allow mission rehearsal without fixed simulator bay infrastructure. Crews can review a target area in spatial 3D the night before a mission rather than studying 2D imagery and satellite photos.

For rotary wing operations — where low-level flight in complex terrain is the primary hazard — VR training environments have demonstrated measurable improvement in crew situational awareness. Babcock International has been running VR-based preflight mission planning and threat rehearsal for UK Wildcat and Merlin crews since 2025.

Ground vehicle crews present a different challenge. Armoured vehicle simulators are large, expensive, and limited in number. Compact VR systems now allow individual crew stations to be replicated at lower cost, enabling gunnery training and convoy operations to run in barracks rather than requiring dedicated range time.

Maintenance and Technical Training

Beyond combat operations, XR is finding a significant role in platform maintenance training. Modern military aircraft, ships, and vehicles are exceptionally complex — and technical documentation for a Type 26 frigate or an F-35 runs to millions of pages. AR-assisted maintenance, where technicians see step-by-step overlays on the actual platform they’re working on, reduces errors and speeds up training for new maintainers.

BAE Systems has deployed AR maintenance support for Typhoon aircrew equipment, with overlays indicating panel access sequences, torque specifications, and fault identification. The approach reduces reliance on printed manuals and has shown improvements in task completion time and error rates for less experienced technicians.

Battlefield AR: Where It’s Actually Useful

Heads-up AR overlays for dismounted infantry remain technically challenging. Current hardware is too heavy for sustained wear in field conditions, and battery life doesn’t match operational tempo. IVAS has illustrated that point well — brilliant in garrison, problematic in the field.

Where AR is delivering real value in the near term is at command level rather than squad level. Brigade and above headquarters units use AR-enabled situational awareness tables — essentially spatial displays of the common operating picture, overlaid on physical maps or as standalone 3D representations. Officers can manipulate unit dispositions in 3D space and see sensor feeds, air picture, and logistics overlays in a single view.

At the tactical edge, AR is more useful in structured environments than open terrain. Building clearing, vehicle maintenance bays, and command post setup have all proved suitable use cases where the hardware demands align with the operational context.

The Capability Gaps That Still Matter

Outdoor AR for infantry remains the hardest problem. Display luminance that works in direct sunlight, optics that provide adequate field of view, and processing power small enough to be carried without fatigue are all still being solved. Most serious military AR programmes targeting dismounted infantry are still three to five years from field-ready solutions.

The other constraint is network. XR systems that share synthetic environments across multiple participants — essential for combined arms training — require reliable low-latency connectivity. Deployed operational environments often have degraded communications, which limits the utility of networked XR outside garrison training contexts.

What 2026 Looks Like

In 2026, the realistic picture of defence XR is: mature for training, increasingly capable for technical support and command functions, still developing for tactical edge use. The economics are compelling enough that investment has continued to scale even through procurement cycles that would typically squeeze technology budgets.

NATO member states have been coordinating synthetic training environment standards to allow multinational exercises to run in shared virtual environments — a development that’s significantly boosted the case for standardised XR infrastructure investment across alliance nations.

For the UK specifically, the defence XR budget is channelled primarily through the Army’s Integrated Soldier System programme and the Air Mobility and Rotary Wing commands. The outcomes aren’t measured in hardware shipped but in training days generated per pound of defence budget — and on that metric, XR is already making a case that traditional simulation can’t match.