The award
The United States Marine Corps has awarded XR Training (XRT), an Orlando-based immersive-training company, a $5.1 million Other Transaction Authority (OTA) agreement to build a prototype Crew Gunnery Trainer for the Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV), the eight-wheeled platform that replaced the Corps' legacy assault amphibians. Announced in April 2026, it is the company's fourth OTA award from the service in three years — a sign that the vendor has become embedded in how the Marine Corps trains its amphibious vehicle crews rather than a one-off supplier.
What it trains
Initial development targets Table II crew gunnery, the qualification step in which a crew engages stationary and moving targets from both stationary and moving platforms, in daylight and in limited visibility. In practice it is the phase of gunnery training where a crew must hit what it is aiming at while everything — including the shooter — is in motion. The framework is designed to support instructor-led, performance-based scenarios as a bridge toward live-fire qualification, keeping a human instructor in the loop.
An opposing force that adapts
The trainer's distinguishing feature is its enemy. Rather than the scripted, patterned opponents typical of most simulators, XRT generates the opposing force with agentic, multi-modal AI. Built on the company's PRISM system architecture, the AI ingests doctrine and autonomously constructs behavioral hierarchies to produce what XRT calls a flexible-thinking enemy force — one that adapts to a crew's decisions in real time so a scenario cannot be memorized and gamed. AI-driven friendly units are designed to communicate and coordinate independently as well, reproducing the peer-to-peer dynamics of a contested, multi-domain environment.
Building on a fielded program
The gunnery trainer follows XRT's earlier Wave Warrior ACV Driver Training System, of which the company delivered 81 simulators to Marine Corps installations within an 18-month span, completed in 2024. XRT, founded in 2019 and a client of the University of Central Florida's business incubator, has separately been tasked with a next-generation maintenance training suite for the ACV. The gunnery award fits a broader 2026 pattern in which defense and industrial buyers — not the consumer market — are funding the most substantial extended-reality deployments, tying immersive hardware to AI that makes the simulated adversary smarter.
