What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project 010 of PE 0601110D8Z. 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.
• Expand the scale of FY 2026 efforts • Develop strategies and implement pilot programs for improving basic research collaboration with key international allies and partners as well as partnerships between university-government-industry.
The increase of $13.974M between FY 2026 to FY 2027 represents a redistribution of resources across the PE, with the elimination of the Minerva Research Initiative, and will allow the office to expand international research collaborations with allies and partners focused on high priority emerging scientific areas; develop university-government-industry collaborations; and facilitate the transition of transformative university-based basic research into the DoW environment.
FY2025–FY2026: what came before
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 the Bilateral Academic Research Initiative (BARI) with South Korea on advanced robotics, and build an academia-industry network to accelerate technology development, for new generations of humanoid and other robots to counter China’s lead. Continue the BARI program with Finland on future wireless/IoT technology that could support Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2). Continue trilateral security partnership between the US, Australia, and UK (AUKUS)-coordinated research efforts based on a BARI-like framework. Start university-government-industry collaboration program on selected research topics (current targets: quantum computing, analytical and AI-supported wargaming, optical meta-computing), leveraging Bush Fellows Research Study Team (BFRST) within the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (VBFF) program to create knowledge base of military operations and challenges from the COCOMS and define and execute research topics that need deep exploration by university researchers. SSBR includes a broad scope of continued activities to support DoW mission-oriented basic research, explore pilot programs aimed at accelerating the discovery and transition of scientific breakthroughs, and develop strategies for S&T workforce development. These activities include research programs, technical exchanges and workshops.
Continues the scope of activities performed during FY 2024 in support of basic research (SSBR), and extends them to include: 1) the Bilateral Academic Research Initiative (BARI) program to leverage intellectual and laboratory capabilities in allied and partner nations and enhance the breadth and depth of selected basic research directions in areas of high importance for future DoD missions; 2) a program on computational Modeling, Artificial Intelligence, and wargaming for Decision Support (MAIDS), designed to discover and develop revolutionary and fundamental approaches to the understanding and prediction of security-relevant scenarios at multiple scales; 3) Other pilot programs aimed at enhancing discovery of scientific breakthroughs, workforce development and university-government or university-industry engagements, or fundamental research toward the creation of revolutionary manufacturing capabilities and infrastructure. These pilot programs lay down the foundations for knowledge creation and exploration of new S&T strategic directions and capabilities. The BARI program will start four new strategic projects in FY 2025: one with Finland on future wireless communication technology and architecture; one with South Korea (ROK) on autonomous soft robotics with new, enabling materials and sensors; two on quantum algorithms, respectively with the UK and Australia, the first joint academic research projects for AUKUS-Pillar 2. Other BARI projects will be investigated and negotiated in FY 2025. Starting in FY 2025, the MAIDS program will broaden research in mathematical, computer and technical sciences to enable the development of future analytical and predictive tools to support asymmetric and irregular warfare.
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 | 20.6 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 15.2 |
| FY2027 | Request | 29.1 |
This activity is 100% of project 010's FY2027 request and 33% of PE 0601110D8Z'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.
1 activity in project 010
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 project page.