MoD signs £2bn AI ‘battle lab’ deal to train the Army

TL;DR:

• The Ministry of Defence has awarded a 15-year, £2bn contract for an AI-driven training system for the British Army.
• Up to 60,000 soldiers a year will train through a “Combat Laboratory” using AI, analytics and virtual environments.
• The deal supports around 400 UK jobs, including 270 skilled roles and 100 apprenticeships.

The Ministry of Defence has signed a £2bn contract for an AI-based training and analytics system intended to ready up to 60,000 British soldiers a year for modern warfare. The 15-year deal was awarded to Omnia Training, a Raytheon UK-led consortium of five British companies drawing on a supply chain of more than 44 UK businesses.

A digital platform for the battlefield

At its centre is a “Combat Laboratory” — a digital platform combining AI, advanced analytics and virtual environments to replicate the complexity of modern conflict, explicitly drawing on lessons from Ukraine. It integrates simulation, live systems and analytics to assess operations, spot patterns and support commanders’ decisions across formations from 100 soldiers up to 50,000, as part of the Army’s wider Collective Training Transformation Programme.

Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis framed the award as both a readiness and an industrial-strategy move, tying it to the Government’s £298bn Defence Investment Plan over four years and an ambition to make the Army “ten times more lethal by 2035”. The contract supports around 400 UK jobs, including 270 skilled roles and 100 apprenticeships developed with Wiltshire College and the University of Staffordshire, with routes reserved for veterans in Warminster.

Notably, ministers stressed that two of the consortium’s platforms — Skyral’s software and Cervus’s systems — are sovereign, UK-developed capabilities backed by more than £2m in government innovation funding, with the intellectual property “firmly under UK control”. That emphasis is deliberate: it lands amid warnings that the UK lacks a coherent strategy for sovereign AI, and defence is one arena where the Government can direct procurement to build home-grown capability rather than depend on foreign suppliers.

Looking forward

The contract signals that AI adoption in UK defence is moving from pilots to funded, decade-long infrastructure. For British AI suppliers, it is a template for how large public-sector spending can anchor sovereign capability — and a test of whether that spending translates into training outcomes and exportable technology rather than simply a headline procurement figure.