What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project 675344 of PE 0101126F. This is the budget justification's own description of work that has not happened yet — the one thing no other level of the budget carries.
Continue airworthiness analysis, and test activities to support ground and flight test events. Finalize hardware design to include changes to Line Replaceable Units (LRUs) and wiring. Order Group A and Group B hardware for on-aircraft testing. Conduct software testing and ground testing. Each Group A Kit (Install Kit) includes an aircraft wiring harness kit and a hardware kit. Each Group B Kit (Equipment Kit) is a Load Adjustable Modular (LAM) Pylon and associated Group B equipment. Expand external carriage opportunities to Advance 5,000-pound (A5K) Guided Bomb Unit (GBU-72) to include Software and Hardware development.
The External Heavy-Stores Pylon Program is operating to an accelerated program schedule with Initial Operating Capability (IOC) targeted for Q1 FY 2029. In order to support these schedule commitments, the program requires increased funding to support FY 2027 activities.
FY2026: the year under way
Prior-year accomplishments and current-year plans from the same exhibit. Context for the FY2027 plan, not a series — an activity partitions its project exactly in the request year, but can under-cover it in earlier years.
Conduct Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) and wind tunnel testing of pylon/weapon combinations. Begin hardware design to include changes to aircraft Line Replaceable Units (LRUs) and wiring. Each Group A Kit (Install Kit) includes an aircraft wiring harness kit and a hardware kit. Each Group B Kit (Equipment Kit) is a Load Adjustable Modular (LAM) Pylon, External Multi-purpose Rotary Launcher (E-MRPL) and associated Group B equipment.
Three years, and no five-year plan
An R-2A activity publishes the prior year, the current year and the budget year. The FYDP outyears exist at project and program-element level and are deliberately absent here rather than inferred. Estimate types are colored and never summed into one figure.
| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | Actual | 0.0 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 49.8 |
| FY2027 | Request | 96.1 |
This activity is 35% of project 675344's FY2027 request and 35% of PE 0101126F's. In the request year the activities under a project sum to it exactly; in the current year they under-cover it in about 9% of cases, so an activity's delta can legitimately exceed its parent's and the two must not be compared row to row.
8 activities in project 675344
Every R-2A line of this project, largest FY2027 request first. Linked where the activity has enough of its own narrative to carry a page; the rest are shown in full on the program-element page.