How VR Is Being Used in Military Firefighter Training
A practical look at where VR fits across military base fire brigades, Navy shipboard firefighting, and ARFF at air stations.
Military firefighter training is a category most people outside the fire service and the military don’t think about much. Yet, it’s also one of the highest-stakes training programs anywhere. Aircraft fires, shipboard fires, hazmat incidents on base, structural fires next to fuel and ammunition storage. The consequences of getting it wrong are enormous, and the opportunities to practice on the real thing are limited by cost, safety, and the environmental impact of every live burn.
That’s where VR comes in.
At XpertVR we build VR training for firefighters, and over the past year our conversations have shifted. Where we used to talk almost exclusively to municipal fire departments, we’re now talking to base commanders, DND stakeholders, and Navy training officers about how VR fits into military firefighter training programs.
We’re not experts on military doctrine. We’re experts on VR training for firefighters. What we’re seeing is 3 specific use cases where the two overlap in a real way.
1. Military base fire brigades (structural, hazmat, everything else)
Most people don’t realize every DoD installation in the US has its own fire and emergency services program. Under the current NDAA, staffing standards require 4-person structural fire companies and 3-person ARFF companies at every base. Canadian Forces bases run similar dedicated fire services under CFB fire departments, often working alongside civilian firefighters.
Those crews handle everything a municipal fire department handles, plus everything unique to a military base. Fuel and ammunition storage, hazardous materials associated with military operations, live-fire ranges, and even potential attack or security incident scenarios. Base firefighters carry certifications for Firefighter I, Firefighter II, HazMat Awareness, HazMat Operations, and Airport Firefighter. That’s a lot of ground to cover, and most of it is hard to practice in a live environment.
Where VR fits. Everything a municipal fire department uses VR for applies here: search and rescue, incident command, hazmat scenarios, decision-making under pressure. But base firefighters also need reps on scenarios that don’t exist anywhere else. Fuel storage fires next to hardened structures. Coordinated response during a security incident. Kitchen fires in a dining facility during a base attack. Those are the kind of scenarios that can be built in VR without ever putting a crew or a facility at risk.
2. Navy shipboard firefighting (every sailor is a firefighter)
This is the part that surprised us the most when we started digging into it.
In the US Navy, every single sailor receives General Shipboard Firefighting (GSF) training in boot camp. It satisfies the Navy’s Level 1 firefighting requirement and applies to every sailor stationed on a naval vessel for 6 years. The reason is simple. If your ship or submarine catches fire in the middle of the ocean, you and your crew are the only fire department there is. There’s no 911 to call. There’s no mutual aid rolling up in 3 minutes.
Damage Controlmen (the Navy rating specifically dedicated to damage control) get additional advanced training in firefighting, ship stability, and chemical/radiological/biological defense. But the baseline expectation is that every sailor on the ship can suppress a fire, control damage, and keep the vessel operational until help arrives (if help can arrive at all).
Where VR fits. Repetition. Every sailor needs to keep those skills sharp, but you can’t set fires on a live warship. Shore-based damage control training facilities like the ones at Great Lakes exist, but access is limited by geography and schedule. VR can put a sailor in a shipboard fire scenario at their base, on their duty day, in the pockets of downtime between shifts. It sits alongside the live-fire training that already happens at damage control schoolhouses and adds reps between formal training cycles.
Submarine crews face an even harder version of this problem. They can’t ventilate the way surface ships can, and the compartment sizes make everything different. VR is one of the only realistic ways to give submariners a feel for a compartment fire, smoke behaviour, and evacuation decision-making without staging a live simulation on an actual submarine.
3. ARFF (Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting) at air stations
ARFF is where the international momentum is loudest right now. Aircraft fires are rare, high-consequence, and expensive to simulate. Aviation fuel behaves differently from most other fuels, every airframe has its own hazards and egress points, and the crew has minutes at best to make the right decisions.
Australia’s Fire and Rescue Service Academy has been running mixed reality ARFF training with commercial partners for over a year. The US Air Force posted a Security Forces Squadron VR training opportunity on SAM.gov earlier this year. Several NATO partners are evaluating VR trainers for base firefighter certification programs. This is happening now, not in some distant future.
Where VR fits. Airframe familiarization, hazard identification, foam application decisions, coordinated crew response. A single VR kit can put a 3-person ARFF crew through 10 different aircraft types in an afternoon. That’s not something a live burn program can offer at any budget.
Where VR complements live training, not replaces it
We want to be direct about something. We build VR for firefighters, and we’re the first to say VR doesn’t replace live burns. Live-fire training is the gold standard for a reason. The sensory pressure, the heat, the weight of the gear, the crew coordination under real physical stress. None of that gets fully replicated in a headset.
What VR does is fill the gaps between live burns. It adds reps at low cost, it creates repeatable scenarios that don’t put people or facilities at risk, and it lets a crew practice decisions before their next live evolution (which makes that live evolution more valuable). For scenarios that can’t be practiced live at all (submarine fires, ammunition storage fires, ARFF on airframes that aren’t sitting on the training pad), VR is often the only option.
Where we see this heading
Military firefighter training is at the same inflection point municipal fire training was at 5 years ago. The technology works, the research base is catching up, and the operational cost/benefit conversation is starting to make sense to commanders and procurement officers.
Over the next 2-3 years we expect to see:
- More NATO and Five Eyes partners running VR trainers alongside their live-burn programs
- More formal DoD procurement of VR fire training kits at the base level
- Consortium-based Canadian and allied capability offerings for defence and public safety training
- Better data capture and standardization tools from research funded by NFPA, UL FSRI, and academic partners
The last one especially. We recently covered a peer-reviewed study out of Brazil that measured VR firefighter training performance across 126 firefighters. The findings on who succeeds in VR training (and who doesn’t) are worth a read if you’re evaluating this for your own organization.
Where XpertVR fits
XpertFire is our standalone VR training platform, built over almost 10 years of work with firefighters across North America. Standalone hardware, multi-user crew scenarios, real-time fire and smoke physics, a built-in authoring tool for department-specific scenarios. It’s already deployed at fire departments across Canada and the US, and it’s the piece of the training stack we’re bringing to defence conversations.
We’re also part of the Canadian Training Technology Consortium, a group of 4 Canadian companies (XpertVR, Cognitive3D, Frontier Metrology, Decisolve) that covers the full training pipeline: environment capture, VR delivery, spatial analytics, and AI-driven adaptive training. Purpose-built to respond to Canadian and allied defence procurement.
