What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project 2292 of PE 0305232M. 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.
- Conduct System Readiness Assessments (SRAs) and evaluate emerging UAS platforms, software, payloads, and ancillary components for the Family of Small UAS (FoSUAS). - Perform third-party cybersecurity and compliance testing to meet National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and DoW drone policy requirements. - Test and validate M-Code GPS, 5G/LTE, anti-jamming, and SATCOM capabilities to ensure resilient Beyond-Line-of-Sight (BLOS) operations in contested environments. - Execute operational testing with Organic Precision Fires (OPF) to measure Target Location Error (TLE) and validate system lethality. - Assess advanced tactics including swarming, marsupial employment, and system performance in Counter-UAS (C-UAS) scenarios. - Validate Unmanned Common Controller (UCC) interoperability and conduct maritime testing to ensure systems are effective aboard USMC vessels. - Evaluate onboard edge processing and Alternative Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) solutions.
The increase in Test & Evaluation from FY2026 to FY2027 increase enables a critical shift from basic sustainment testing to a comprehensive, operationally focused evaluation required to prove the system meets the advanced performance parameters of the CDD. This funds a robust test architecture to validate system lethality, survivability, and interoperability in threat-representative scenarios. Key activities enabled by this increase include kinetic testing/certifications, performance validation in GPS-denied and contested spectrum environments, and operational assessments of advanced capabilities like swarming and C-UAS resilience.
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.
- Continue integration, operational assessment, and implementation of SRA for FoSUAS platforms. - Continue to perform NDAA sections 817 (FY2023) and 848 (FY2020) Compliance testing on systems; Cybersecurity and NDAA compliance testing is performed by a third-party vendor to ensure appropriate levels for data encryption, implementation of multi-factor authentication, and risk assessments. - Continue assessment of UAS, software applications, payload/sensor capabilities, and other UAS ancillary components. - Refine CDS integration alternatives.
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 | 0.4 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 0.2 |
| FY2027 | Request | 12.7 |
This activity is 64% of project 2292's FY2027 request and 64% of PE 0305232M'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.
3 activities in project 2292
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.