ITEC 2026 - Training in the Age of Accelerating Technology

MS&T's Special Correspondent Andy Fawkes reports from ITEC 2026, held at ExceL London, 14–16 April.

Defence training and simulation event ITEC felt different this year. With the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East providing a constant backdrop to every discussion, the three-day gathering of military practitioners, NATO officials, industry and academia carried a hard-edged urgency.

What emerged was a clear tension: while operational technology is advancing at pace, training systems, structures, and mindsets are still catching up. Across sessions and show floor conversations, delegates returned to the same underlying question: how to ensure that training not only reflects today’s capabilities, but anticipates tomorrow’s demands. The consensus was that adapting content alone is not enough; training must evolve in how it uses data, integrates new technologies, and prepares personnel to operate effectively in increasingly complex and fast-moving environments.

A Morning of Hard Truths

In the opening keynote Air Vice Marshall Ian Sharrocks CBE, who commands the Royal Airforce’s No.22 Group, drew a direct line between the Battle of Britain's radar and today's training challenge, saying technology alone confers no advantage. What matters is how it is woven into people, doctrine and command.

"Training is no longer a mere precursor of operations," he argued. "It is becoming a decisive component of operational capability itself."

On data, Sharrocks was unequivocal. "Operational advantage will not come to those with the most data," he warned. "It will come to those best able to structure it, understand it, share it and then act on it." Data literacy, he concluded, is now a warfighting skill.

The panel that followed, with Lord Lancaster, who also serves in the Army Reserve as a Major General, and Commodore Andrew Ingham, Commander Fleet Operational Standards and Training, Royal Navy, discussed the structural problem: without a digital backbone to track skills, neither reserves nor regular forces can be optimally employed or rapidly regenerated. Ingham cited the Royal Navy's shift toward skills-tracking by capability rather than seniority.

Learning at the speed of war

In the final day keynote, Myroslav Popovych, representing the Ukrainian Council of Defence Industry and a recent combat veteran, reported that 70% of all Ukrainian kills and targets destroyed are achieved exclusively by inexpensive first-person view (FPV) drones with a kill zone stretching 25km either side of the line. Artillery has effectively been silenced on both sides, as any system that fires immediately draws a lethal response. The most important tactical principle, he said simply, is not to be seen. Wing Commander Ben Goodwin MBE, now an adjunct fellow at the Council on Geostrategy, reinforced the structural implication: the drone-saturated battlespace now constitutes a distinct layer in which air superiority is, in his words, almost impossible. Sir Stuart Atha, Head of UK NATO Industrial Advisory Group and a Director with BAE Systems, offered the sharpest framing of the conference: in previous decades the concepts outran the technology; today the reverse is true and the gap is widening.

Exhibition, Conference and 2027

The exhibition felt busy much of the time. The DualTech Theatre hosted the DualTech Challenge, run in collaboration with the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), with finalists biometrics company BioRICS NV, machine learning company Intelligent Artefacts and Swiss simulation and training software company Nordfen illustrating how non-traditional companies are bringing dual-use capability to the space. Cato Leenders, a PhD researcher with BioRICS, spoke about human-centric AI and took the prize.

Looking ahead, the question is not just whether the training community will close the gap with current operations, but whether it can keep pace with the accelerating rate of technological change that is reshaping the battlespace. As systems and their software evolve faster than doctrine and training cycles, the challenge will be to ensure that training is no longer reactive, but anticipatory, capable of preparing personnel for capabilities and threats that are still emerging. By the time ITEC reconvenes in London in 2027, the expectation will not simply be progress towards this goal but that it has been achieved.