This report documents findings and recommendations from a RAND Project AIR FORCE study that helped the U.S. Department of the Air Force (DAF) identify promising advanced training-technology investments and identified steps that the DAF can take to track and integrate the most-promising technologies. The authors provide an overview of the advanced training-technology landscape using a quantitative modeling approach based on hundreds of thousands of documents that reflect training-technology research and development (R&D) within the DAF, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), commercial industry, academia, and by allies and adversaries. The authors then describe stakeholder perspectives on advanced-training technologies in use as well as developmental priorities. This is followed by an online expert panels analysis in which training-technology experts rated and discussed the maturity, benefits, scope of applicability, and adoption barriers for a subset of training technologies.

The report concludes by providing recommendations for how the DAF can target its investments into specific technologies and for how it can improve the training-technology enterprise more broadly.