Canada is building the most sophisticated simulation and training ecosystem in its history. The timing has never mattered more.
The first Canadian F-35s are coming. RCAF pilots will soon be training on the aircraft in the United States, and infrastructure at Cold Lake and Bagotville is already under construction. This year, Canada’s most capable fighter aircraft will land at a Canadian base for the first time.
That moment will be celebrated as a procurement milestone. What will matter just as much, and receive far less attention, is whether the full training ecosystem is ready when it happens.
Canada is in the middle of the most significant defence investment cycle in a generation. New spending commitments are being backed by real procurement activity across all three services. But hardware alone does not produce military capability. The gap between an expensive platform and an effective one is filled by training, and increasingly, by simulation.
What simulation and training actually means
When most people hear “military simulation,” they picture a flight simulator: a pilot in a cockpit mock-up, screens instead of windows. That is part of it. But modern simulation and training encompass something much broader.
At the individual level, simulation trains operators on specific platforms: aircraft, armoured vehicles, naval combat systems. A soldier learning to operate a LAV 6.0, a naval officer working through combat management scenarios on a River-class destroyer, a remotely piloted aircraft operator flying surveillance missions over a synthetic Arctic environment. All of that is simulation.
At the collective level, simulation brings units together in shared synthetic environments to practice the kind of coordinated operations that cannot be replicated cost-effectively in the field. A battle group exercise that would require thousands of people, dozens of vehicles, and weeks of preparation can be conducted in a networked simulation centre at a fraction of the cost and with far greater control over the scenarios being trained.
At the joint level, simulation connects all three services in a common synthetic environment, allowing an F-35 pilot, a destroyer combat systems officer, and an Army brigade commander to train together as they would actually operate. This is part of the mandate of the Canadian Joint Warfare Centre, which leads modelling, simulation, and wargaming across the CAF to prepare joint forces for operations.
The technical term for the integration of live training, virtual simulation, and constructive simulation is LVC, live-virtual-constructive. It describes a training environment where real assets, simulator-based participants, and computer-generated forces all operate together in a common tactical picture. It is the direction the most advanced military training programs in the world are heading, and it is the model underpinning Canada’s Future Aircrew Training program.
Why it matters more now
The case for simulation has always been partly economic. An hour in an F-35 simulator costs a fraction of an hour in the aircraft. Fuel, maintenance, airframe wear, range availability: simulation eliminates all of it for the training tasks it can replicate. As platforms become more sophisticated and more expensive, that calculation becomes more compelling.
But the more important argument is capability. Simulation allows training scenarios that live training cannot safely or practically replicate. System failures, multi-domain threat environments, degraded communications, mass casualty scenarios, nuclear, biological, and chemical environments. A crew that has worked through those situations in simulation arrives at real operations better prepared than one that has not, regardless of how many live training hours they have logged.
Modern military operations have also become significantly more complex. The CAF is expected to operate across multiple domains simultaneously, sharing information in real time with allied partners, making rapid decisions in degraded and contested environments. That kind of integrated, joint, allied interoperability cannot be trained effectively through live exercises alone. It requires synthetic environments sophisticated enough to replicate the full operational picture.
Where Canada stands
Canada’s most advanced expression of simulation and training is the Future Aircrew Training program. FAcT, awarded to the SkyAlyne team, a joint venture between CAE and KF Aerospace, consolidates all phases of pilot and aircrew training under a single long-term contract worth billions of dollars. It is the largest training investment in Canadian aviation history and one of the most sophisticated training program structures in the world. The digital-first model it establishes, where simulation is a primary training tool rather than a supplement to live flying, sets a standard for what Canada’s other services are working toward.
For the Army, the Land Vehicle Crew Training System will deliver networked simulation centres at five major garrisons across the country. The program will replicate all crew stations across the LAV 6.0, Leopard 2, and TAPV fleet, enabling collective training up to the combat team level in a networked synthetic environment. Initial operating capability is expected later this decade.
The Royal Canadian Navy is building training solutions for its River-class destroyers in parallel with ship construction, the right model for ensuring crews are ready when the ships enter service. CAE is developing training systems covering the communications, integrated bridge, and navigation systems for the new vessels. The MQ-9B SkyGuardian, now in production, brings its own training requirement: operators flying a sophisticated remotely piloted aircraft in support of NORAD and Arctic missions need a training pipeline built for that specific mission, and that work is underway.
The conversation that needs to happen
The programs are moving. The investment is real. But the questions at the centre of Canada’s simulation and training enterprise, about pace, integration, and whether the ecosystem being built matches the ambition of the platforms it supports, are not questions any single program office or service can answer alone.
Those are the questions on the table at the Simulation and Training Forum on April 28 in Ottawa. Military, government, and industry voices in the same room, with one shared focus: what does it take to turn Canada’s defence investment into genuine operational capability, and how do we get there faster.
The opportunity ahead
The countries that get this right do not just field capable equipment. They field capable crews who know how to use it, how to recover when things go wrong, and how to operate alongside allies in conditions that no live exercise could replicate.
The F-35s are coming. The destroyers are being built. The training ecosystems are taking shape alongside them. If the programs deliver on their promise, Canada will field not just the most capable platforms in its history, but the crews ready to use them. The Simulation and Training Forum takes place April 28, 2026 at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.