In May 2025, a landmark partnership between Meta and defense technology firm Anduril Industries signaled a pivotal moment for military innovation. Their stated goal of creating “integrated XR products that provide warfighters with enhanced perception and enable intuitive control of autonomous platforms on the battlefield” heralds the strategic convergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Extended Reality (XR).¹ This collaboration repurposes high-performance commercial components to deliver advanced, cost-effective capabilities to the United States military and its allies.²
Both AI and XR are already making significant impacts. AI highlights crucial patterns in vast datasets, while XR transforms how military personnel learn and operate. To appreciate the potential of their integration, it is essential first to understand the strengths each technology brings to the table.
Virtual Reality: A Revolution in Military Training
VR has delivered measurable improvements in military training effectiveness, readiness, and cost-efficiency across multiple nations and service branches. The technology addresses fundamental challenges: limited training resources, constrained access to training environments, and prohibitive equipment deployment costs.
A prime example is the British Army’s Adaptive Virtual Reality Training (AVRT) system at its Larkhill garrison. The facility boasts a 4,300-square-foot free-roam VR training space where soldiers use their own service weapons, modified for VR, to maintain muscle memory while engaging virtual enemies in photorealistic environments. The Singapore army has adopted the system to prepare its soldiers for modern conflict scenarios.³
A pivotal comparative study on marksmanship found that weapons training in VR can achieve accuracy and precision statistically indistinguishable from live-fire exercises, validating it as a cheaper, less resource-intensive method.⁴ There is also a financial case for simulation. An hour of live flight training in an F-16, for example, costs approximately $7,500, while an hour in a corresponding traditional simulator costs just $900.⁵ The U.S. Air Force’s Pilot Training Next program used VR headsets to cut costs by 50% compared to traditional simulators, reducing pilot training time from a full year to just four months.⁶
VR also allows trainees to repeat scenarios, something that is impossible in real-world exercises. Pilots can practice emergency procedures without risking aircraft, while infantry units rehearse complex operations in virtual replicas of actual deployment zones. In a survey at Ellsworth Air Force Base, 84% of Airmen felt VR improved their medical skills, demonstrating the technology’s applicability across diverse military specialties.⁷
Artificial Intelligence: The Operational Game-Changer
While XR has revolutionized training, AI has transformed operational capabilities, particularly in intelligence processing. The volume of modern reconnaissance data from satellite imagery, drone footage, and communications intercepts has overwhelmed traditional human analysis capabilities.
Launched in 2017, the U.S. Department of Defense’s flagship AI initiative, Project Maven, uses machine learning to analyze reconnaissance data at unprecedented speed. A targeting cell that required 2,000 personnel in 2003, for example, can now achieve superior results with just 20 people.⁸ The system has also proven capable of identifying vehicles missed by expert analysts.⁹
There are limitations, however. Maven was trained primarily on desert data but proved less effective in settings it is unfamiliar with such as jungle or urban environments.¹⁰ This highlights a fundamental truth: AI systems require continuous training on geographically specific data to maintain effectiveness.
It is precisely this gap that an intuitive XR interface could help mitigate. Instead of viewing a 2D image, an analyst could use an XR headset to immersively “walk around” a 3D reconstruction of a flagged object, applying human spatial intelligence that AI currently lacks. This combines the machine’s scanning ability with superior human contextual awareness.
The Convergence Opportunity: Multiplying Military Effectiveness
Understanding how AI and XR function as complementary technologies reveals why their convergence represents a force multiplier. A useful framework positions AI as the “back-end” engine that processes data and adapts scenarios, while XR serves as the “front-end” interface for immersive interaction. User actions in XR generate new data, creating a continuous feedback loop that refines AI’s understanding.¹¹
When AI enhances VR training, it creates adaptive learning environments that respond to individual performance. AI can generate dynamic virtual adversaries that learn from a trainee’s tactics, ensuring scenarios remain challenging while identifying specific skill gaps for targeted improvement. This transforms training from standardized curricula to individualized development paths that maximize each warfighter’s potential.
The Meta-Anduril partnership specifically targets this convergence for operational use. Their systems will integrate Meta’s reality-rendering technology with Anduril’s Lattice AI platform, which “autonomously integrates [sensor data] to build a unified view of the entire battlespace.”¹ This integration could provide commanders with intuitive 3D visualization of AI-processed intelligence, enabling faster, more accurate decisions while reducing cognitive load.
Strategic Implications for the Defense Landscape
The convergence of AI and XR will reshape military power and create new paradigms for force deployment and operational effectiveness.
More Efficient Forces
Integrated AI-XR systems enable smaller, more capable forces. The 100-fold efficiency gain demonstrated by AI in intelligence analysis,⁸ combined with VR’s training effectiveness, enables a strategic shift from quantity-based to quality-based force structures. This transformation has profound implications for military budgets and alliance partnerships.
Accelerated Innovation Cycles
AI-driven simulations combined with immersive XR environments allow rapid experimentation with new tactics. Military doctrine that once evolved over years through costly live exercises can now adapt in months through virtual experimentation, creating significant strategic advantages.
Enhanced Operational Adaptability
Military units can rapidly retrain for different environments or mission types using AI-XR systems, enabling faster pivots between theater requirements and reducing the time needed to prepare forces for diverse operational contexts.
Compressed Decision Cycles
AI-XR integration dramatically reduces the time between information gathering and action. Where traditional command processes might take hours to analyze threats and coordinate responses, integrated systems could enable near-instantaneous situational awareness and decision-making, fundamentally altering the tempo of military operations.
From Human Supervision to Human-AI Teaming
Realizing these strategic advantages requires moving beyond the “simulation trap,” the risk of over-trusting AI recommendations delivered through persuasive XR interfaces. Military organizations must shift from simple human supervision to genuine human-AI teaming where operators maintain cognitive dominance.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Explainable AI (XAI) program addresses this challenge. Its goal is creating AI systems that can explain their rationale, characterize their strengths and weaknesses, and convey behavioral predictions, enabling warfighters to “understand, appropriately trust, and effectively manage” their AI partners.¹²
An XR interface integrated with XAI principles would revolutionize human-AI interaction by visualizing AI’s reasoning process. An analyst could see the specific data points, confidence levels, and decision pathways that led to AI’s conclusion, fostering calibrated trust rather than blind faith. This moves operators from being “in-the-loop” approvers to genuine partners who can interrogate and effectively manage AI capabilities.
Challenges and Concerns
Ethical concerns will intensify as AI makes more targeting recommendations through immersive XR interfaces, making lethal decisions more abstract and psychologically disconnected from consequences. This psychological distancing could lower inhibitions against violence while reducing accountability.
Research shows that some AI models in wargame simulations exhibit “difficult-to-predict escalation patterns,” including rare cases of recommending nuclear weapon employment without clear justification.¹³ Such behavior highlights the critical importance of maintaining human judgment in all lethal decision-making.
The privacy implications of the new technology are equally troubling. XR systems collect vast amounts of biometric and behavioral data that far exceed traditional training methods. Unlike conventional exercises that only record outcomes, XR platforms can continuously monitor eye movements, stress responses, decision patterns, and reaction times, creating detailed psychological and physiological profiles of each user.¹⁴ This intimate behavioral data, if compromised, provides adversaries with unprecedented insight into military thinking and decision-making processes, essentially creating psychological maps of personnel that could be weaponized through targeted manipulation, customized psychological operations, or exploitation of identified cognitive vulnerabilities and decision-making biases.
Intelligent Immersion: The New Paradigm of Warfare
VR and AI have each proven their military value independently. The key for defense organizations is not just buying these technologies, but integrating them thoughtfully while maintaining human control and ethical oversight.
The powerful combination of AI and XR demonstrates that the greatest military advantages lie in combining the technologies effectively under human oversight. The Meta-Anduril partnership signals a return to military-commercial collaboration, as XR technology, originally developed with military funding, now cycles back from consumer markets to defense applications with enhanced capabilities and cost efficiencies.
Nations that successfully integrate these technologies while building in transparency, maintaining human judgment, and embedding robust ethical constraints will possess decisive advantages on tomorrow’s battlefields. However, this technological convergence demands equally sophisticated approaches to training and doctrine to ensure these tools serve strategic objectives rather than supplanting human decision-making authority.
The age of intelligent immersion has begun, but its ultimate success will depend on maintaining human intelligence, wisdom, and accountability in an increasingly automated battlespace.
Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in the INSIGHTS publication series are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Rabdan Security & Defense Institute, its affiliated organizations, or any government entity. The content published is intended for informational purposes and reflects the personal perspectives of the authors on various security and defence-related topics.
References
¹ UploadVR. "Palmer Luckey Describes Anduril EagleEye Helmet That Gives Soldiers ‘Superhuman Senses’." https://www.uploadvr.com/palmer-luckey-describes-anduril-eagleeye-helmet-soldiers-superhuman-senses/
² Defense News. "Meta and Anduril work on mixed reality devices for the US military." May 30, 2025. https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2025/05/30/meta-and-anduril-work-on-mixed-reality-devices-for-the-us-military/
³ AVRT. "Virtual Reality Military Training V3 Unveiling." AVRT, January 23, 2024. https://avrt.training/virtual-reality-military-training-v3-unveiling/
⁴ Arcana, I Gede Agus P. S., et al. "Analysis of Human Performance and Potential Application of Virtual Reality in Military Marksmanship Training." International Journal of Technology, vol. 13, no. 2, 2022. https://ijtech.eng.ui.ac.id/article/view/5303
⁵ FAAC. "Air Warfare Simulation and Training." https://www.faac.com/simulation-training/military/air-combat-training/
⁶ "VR in Military Training." Euphoria XR. https://euphoriaxr.com/vr-in-military-training/
⁷ Cisneros, Delano. "84% of Airmen say using VR improved their medical skills." Ellsworth Air Force Base, June 21, 2024. https://www.ellsworth.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4069988/84-of-airmen-say-using-vr-improved-their-medical-skills/
⁸ "AI ‘unchained’: NGA’s Maven tool ‘significantly’ decreasing time to targeting, agency chief says," Breaking Defense, May 22, 2025. https://breakingdefense.com/2025/05/ai-unchained-ngas-maven-tool-significantly-decreasing-time-to-targeting-agency-chief-says/
⁹ Jones, Felicity. "Project Maven: Machine Learning in the Military Target Selection Process." Technology and Operations Management, Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard, November 13, 2018. https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-rctom/submission/project-maven-machine-learning-in-the-military-target-selection-process/
¹⁰ "Maven, A System That Analyzes Satellite Data to Identify Targets in Real-World Conflicts," The Batch, deeplearning.ai, March 27, 2024. https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/maven-a-system-that-analyzes-satellite-data-to-identify-targets-in-real-world-conflicts/
¹¹ Dalton, Jeremy. Reality Check: How VR and AR Can Supercharge Your Business. 2nd Edition, Kogan Page, 2025. https://www.koganpage.com/digital-technology/reality-check-9781398618749
¹² DARPA. "Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)." https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/explainable-artificial-intelligence
¹³ "AI-Driven Tactical Decision-Making in Wargames," arXiv:2401.03408. https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03408
¹⁴ "Deceptive Design in Extended Reality," arXiv:2503.22892. https://arxiv.org/html/2503.22892v1
