British Army Launches £2B ACTS Training System to Prepare 60,000 Troops for High-Threat Warfare.

Rheinmetall Electronics UK will deliver a major share of the British Army’s future collective-training system under the £2 billion ACTS contract awarded to the Raytheon UK-led Omnia consortium, with the Ministry of Defence confirming the deal on 10 July 2026. The 15-year programme will give commanders and combat units a connected training environment that can replicate complex, high-threat operations without the cost and safety limits of large conventional exercises.

Rheinmetall said on 13 July that its work is worth just under €1 billion and will support training for up to 60,000 soldiers each year, from company-level forces to headquarters directing as many as 50,000 personnel. By linking live field exercises, crew simulators, computer-generated formations and performance data, ACTS is designed to improve command readiness and prepare British forces for division- and corps-scale warfare.

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Rheinmetall will help deliver the British Army's £2 billion digital training programme, linking live exercises, simulators, computer-generated forces and AI-assisted analysis to improve large-scale combat readiness (Picture source: Rheinmetall).

Raytheon UK is the prime contractor and Strategic Training Partner, responsible for integrating the service and its data architecture. Rheinmetall is the Land Collective Training Partner and will support training delivery, physical infrastructure, system configuration, logistics, and management of government-furnished equipment. Capita contributes large-scale military training management and assurance; Cervus supplies performance analytics already used by British, Dutch, and US forces; and Skyral provides modelling and simulation software. The Ministry of Defence says the consortium includes 44 British suppliers, will create 270 skilled jobs, sustain approximately 150 existing positions, and establish 100 apprenticeships. Spread evenly across 15 years, the announced ceiling represents about £133 million annually, although the government has not published annual availability targets, guaranteed exercise hours, payment milestones, or a cost-per-soldier benchmark against which Parliament could assess value for money.

The technical basis is a live, virtual, and constructive training architecture. In the live element, soldiers, vehicles, weapons, and buildings are instrumented so that position, movement, firing events, casualties, and equipment status can be recorded during field exercises. Rheinmetall’s Legatus system can track participants and vehicles indoors and outdoors in real time and simulate the vulnerability of personnel, armoured vehicles and structures, including in urban training areas. The virtual element places crews or command teams inside simulators representing vehicle interiors, sights, controls, and communications. The constructive element uses software-generated friendly, enemy, and civilian entities to expand an exercise beyond the troops physically available. Rheinmetall has identified its Osiris constructive simulator, used for headquarters exercises and operational research, as part of its contribution. Skyral’s software can create digital representations of terrain, infrastructure and human behaviour, while Cervus converts exercise data into measures such as detection time, decision time, engagement sequence and unit performance. The contract announcement, however, does not identify the common simulation standards, security classifications, or interfaces that will be used to connect these components with Army command networks.

ACTS does not procure weapons, but its usefulness will depend on whether it can represent the sensors, ammunition, communications and engagement logic of the Army’s new combat equipment. Challenger 3 is the clearest example. The programme will convert 148 Challenger 2 main battle tanks with a new digital turret and Rheinmetall 120mm L55A1 high-pressure smoothbore cannon, replacing the Challenger 2’s rifled gun. The L55A1 can fire NATO-standard kinetic-energy anti-tank ammunition and programmable high-explosive multipurpose rounds, giving crews different engagement options against tanks, fortifications, infantry and targets behind cover. A valid collective-training model must reproduce more than gun range and ammunition effect: it must account for target identification, ammunition selection, sensor handover, turret orientation, reaction time, communications latency, and the point at which a commander authorises engagement. This matters because the operational value of the tank is increasingly determined by how quickly it receives and acts on targeting information from reconnaissance units rather than by gun performance in isolation.

The same requirement applies to Ajax, the British Army’s first fully digital armoured reconnaissance vehicle family. The £5.5 billion programme covers 589 vehicles in six variants, including 245 turreted Ajax reconnaissance vehicles armed with the stabilised 40mm Case Telescoped Cannon. The cannon can fire while moving and uses compact cased-telescoped ammunition, including armour-piercing and high-explosive rounds; British Army reporting also describes planned programmable airburst ammunition for targets such as troops in trenches or behind limited cover. Ajax has a maximum stated speed of 70 km/h and combines electro-optical sights, acoustic detection, 360-degree local awareness cameras, and digital communications intended to pass target data to tanks, artillery, and command posts. During Exercise Iron Storm, an Army Ajax instructor described recording imagery, lasing a target to produce a ten-figure grid reference, and transmitting the combined target package to artillery. ACTS therefore needs to measure whether reconnaissance information reaches an appropriate weapon before the target relocates, whether the receiving unit understands the target classification, and whether communications remain usable under jamming or network congestion.

Digitalisation is required because the Army cannot routinely assemble the personnel, ammunition, airspace, training land, and opposing forces needed to test a division-sized formation under realistic conditions. Live exercises remain necessary for gunnery, fieldcraft, maintenance, casualty evacuation and physical endurance, but they cannot repeatedly generate dense drone activity, electronic attack, disrupted satellite navigation, massed indirect fire, civilian movement, cyber incidents and the loss of multiple command posts without high cost and safety restrictions. A connected training system can insert these effects, record the response, and repeat the same tactical problem after commanders change their procedures. It can also combine real soldiers with simulated artillery batteries, attack helicopters, air-defence units and allied headquarters that are not physically present, permitting larger NATO command exercises without deploying every participating unit.

The principal test for ACTS will not be the amount of artificial intelligence used, but whether the data are accurate enough to support defensible conclusions. Automated analysis can identify delayed fire missions, excessive ammunition expenditure, repeated exposure of headquarters, poor dispersion, or failures to share targets, but incorrect threat models can train units to exploit weaknesses that would not exist in combat. The Ministry of Defence will therefore need independent verification of weapon effects, electronic-warfare assumptions, adversary behaviour and performance scoring, together with controls over classified operational data and supplier access. ACTS could provide a more consistent measure of readiness than observer reports alone, but it will only do so if live results, simulation outputs, and operational lessons are continuously compared. The program should consequently be judged by measurable changes in decision speed, combined-arms coordination, exercise frequency, and NATO interoperability, not by the number of soldiers who pass through the system or the volume of data it produces.

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