Background
The British Army's collective training - the stage where units and formations train together rather than as individuals - has long been delivered through live exercises on the UK training estate. The Collective Training Transformation Programme (CTTP) was established to replace that model with a digitally enabled one, and the Army Collective Training Service (ACTS) is its delivery vehicle.
On 10 July 2026 the Ministry of Defence awarded a £2 billion, 15-year ACTS contract to Omnia Training, appointing it the British Army's Strategic Training Partner. Operational implementation began in summer 2026.
The Combat Laboratory
At the centre of ACTS sits a digital platform the Army calls the Combat Laboratory. It combines AI, advanced analytics and real-time virtual environments to reproduce the complexity of modern warfare, integrating simulation, live instrumented exercises and battlefield data into a single system that assesses operations, spots patterns and monitors performance.
Up to 60,000 soldiers a year are expected to train through it, across every level of command - from teams of around 100 personnel up to formations of 50,000. The stated aim is to let commanders and troops train anywhere and at any time, applying lessons drawn from the war in Ukraine.
The synthetic environment
The virtual side is built on layered digital twins of real places rather than generic game maps. One environment models Riga, Latvia down to its street names and landmarks, and populates it with simulated civilians of differing demographics and attitudes, alongside working models of infrastructure such as electrical grids and power stations.
The purpose is to expose second-order consequences: what a tactical decision does to logistics networks, critical infrastructure and civilian behaviour, rather than only to the immediate engagement. Skyral's leadership has described the result as closer to a heavily extended commercial game world than to a conventional military simulator.
The technology stack
- Combat Laboratory - the integrating digital platform for simulation, live systems and analytics
- Osiris (Rheinmetall) - constructive simulation, reported as the consortium's selected solution for future Combined Arms Virtual Simulation
- Skyral - the modelling and simulation platform behind the digital-twin environments
- Hive and XCALIBR (Cervus) - the analytics engine and marksmanship analytics tooling
Skyral's software and Cervus's platforms are sovereign, UK-developed capabilities, seeded with more than £2 million of government innovation funding including from the Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA), with the intellectual property held in the UK.
The consortium
Omnia Training is a consortium of five UK-based companies - Raytheon UK (prime contractor and consortium lead), Capita, Cervus, Rheinmetall UK and Skyral - drawing on a supply chain of more than 44 British businesses across Wiltshire, Leicestershire, Hampshire and beyond. Rheinmetall Electronics UK holds the Land Collective Training Partner role, integrating live, virtual and constructive simulation systems and managing the physical training infrastructure, configuration and logistics; its share of the contract is worth just under €1 billion.
Delivery and impact
Delivery is enabled through four UK sites: Warminster, Bristol, Southampton and Newport on the Isle of Wight. The contract supports around 400 jobs over its 15-year term, including 270 new skilled roles in software engineering, AI, cloud engineering and data analytics, and sustains a further 150. A hundred apprenticeships are being developed with Wiltshire College and the University of Staffordshire, and some Warminster-based roles are reserved for applicants with prior military experience.
