What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project ACS-01 of PE 0602023E. 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.
- Explore research of novel tactical designs and build low-cost platforms that can be rapidly produced at scale and employ distributed effects on the battlefield, optimized for the environment of choice. - Investigate new propulsion technologies that offer improved thermal and thrust characteristics that will open new avenues of tactical maneuver efficiencies. - Explore new munition and launch capabilities that can be strategically placed forward into existing operating locations across domains. - Research reconfigurable, morphing robotic AI smart structures can be easily deployed from existing systems such as artillery launchers, ground vehicles, small surface craft, and other platforms. - Explore advanced system power capabilities that enable long-duration, untethered, all-weather transportation from sea to space. - Collect environmental noise data in austere, contested, or otherwise challenging environments. - Utilize collected environmental noise data to validate assumptions of physics models and phenomenology with novel applications for operational capabilities. - Develop algorithms and software to process collected data.
The FY 2027 increase reflects studies and concepts initiations including, but not limited to, applied research in new propulsion technologies, reconfigurable/morphing robotic AI smart deployable structures and advanced power systems.
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.
- Support the issuance of standards recommendation reports for lunar power infrastructure, communications infrastructure, and Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) infrastructure. - Initiate research into a program that will explore the combination of adaptive maneuver warfare with sustained, surging assets for faster-than-human offensive and defensive behaviors to enable a new way of fighting. - Initiate research into the novel application of artificial technology techniques, like foundation models and Graph Neural Networks (GNN), to enable a small number of humans to command and control significant numbers of cross-domain assets and effectors. - Collect data to support passive noise radar approach investigations and applications. - Investigate algorithmic development on radars. - Research environmental noise data.
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) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2026 | Enacted | 8.8 |
| FY2027 | Request | 33.5 |
This activity is 33% of project ACS-01's FY2027 request and 30% of PE 0602023E'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 ACS-01
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.