Synthetic Training as Europe’s Readiness Multiplier
How LVC, digital twins and XR are reshaping multi-domain preparedness under EU and NATO frameworks
European and NATO planners now treat synthetic training—live-virtual-constructive simulation integrated with extended reality and digital twins—not as a budgetary convenience but as a structural enabler of readiness in an era of munitions scarcity, platform fatigue and multi-domain complexity. High-fidelity LVC ecosystems allow forces to rehearse high-intensity scenarios without consuming ammunition stocks, exposing sensitive capabilities or degrading equipment, while simultaneously integrating land, air, maritime, cyber and space effects in ways that live ranges cannot safely replicate. This analysis examines how EU instruments such as the European Defence Fund and SAFE intersect with NATO’s digital transformation agenda to build federated synthetic training networks, and assesses the industrial dependencies—cloud infrastructure, GPUs, game engines, rad-hard electronics and secure data standards—that will determine whether Europe can scale a sovereign, interoperable training architecture through the 2030 horizon.