What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project 625329 of PE 0602202F. 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 research on human-autonomy collaboration tools by executing an operationally relevant tech demonstration integrating advanced teaming assessment tools with novel HMI for distributed teamwork. -Continue research on NLP methods by collecting data in high-fidelity simulations to build models for assessing team communication effectiveness in air battle management exercises. -Continue research on adaptive communication management interfaces by refining and generalizing models that manage team communications and mitigate discrepancies. -Continue research on distributed teaming characteristics by conducting studies on team performance, adaptation, and resilience in mixed human-AI teams. -Continue research on enhanced conversational AI by testing and evaluating an adaptive text-to-speech system in an operationally relevant scenario. -Continue developing tools for integrating SA displays with language systems to enable bi-directional, conversational queries between humans and AI agents about COAs. -Continue development of the Intelligent Agent Teammate/Advisor by conducting experiments testing the effects of an Adaptive Teammate on human trust and team performance. -Continue to identify critical teaming factors for non-collocated teams by testing a high-fidelity resynchronization tool in a distributed teaming testbed. -Complete the refinement of guidelines for engendering trust in human-AI teams by finalizing design guidelines for trust elicitation, maintenance, and repair. -Complete the exploration of natural, ad hoc team coordination by preparing the final report. -Complete the R&D of nonintrusive metrics for assessing distributed team performance, culminating in a final report. -Complete research on integrating multi-domain information for JADC2, concluding with a final report. -Complete research on agent transparency for distributed teams, concluding with a final report. -Complete the exploration of test methods for bi-directional transparency, concluding with a final report. -Complete the collection and modeling of communication data from JADC2 domains, concluding with a final report.
FY 2027 decreased compared to FY 2026 by 15.668 million due to a reduced emphasis on optimizing team performance and the completion of work on JADC2 information integration, trust guidelines, and team performance metrics. This reduction reflects programmatic adjustments to the DAF Science and Technology portfolio for strategic realignment to optimize core research areas and improve resource efficiency.
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 research on distributed teaming solutions to maximize situation awareness and dynamic task management, including a joint experiment with the USAF Academy on an AI teamwork support tool. -Continue research on integrating multi-domain information for Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) by validating an interface suite to support non-kinetic duty officers in managing space and cyber Courses of Action (COAs). -Continue research on human-autonomy collaboration tools for resiliency by executing a human-in-the-loop study to evaluate the system's ability to manage team communications and mitigate discrepancies. -Continue exploring test methods for bi-directional transparency in human-machine teaming by integrating advanced human language technologies with novel JADC2 interfaces. -Continue refining guidelines for trust in human-machine teams by preparing a report from a study examining trust dynamics in a multi-agent C2 environment. -Continue research on natural ad hoc team coordination by refining and testing a high-fidelity interactive timeline display for distributed task management. -Continue collecting and modeling human communication data from live and simulated events, including an experiment on the impact of denied/degraded communications on teamwork, to improve models of natural language understanding. -Continue research into natural language processing (NLP) methods to improve teamwork assessments by integrating an NLP pipeline with an AI-driven ISR mission summary generator. -Commence development of an Intelligent Agent Teammate/Advisor by adapting cutting-edge AI to process multimodal inputs and create adaptive teammate technology. -Commence design of interface concepts for non-collocated teams operating in contested settings, including developing resynchronization tools to re-establish a common operating picture. -Commence research and development of novel, nonintrusive metrics and models to dynamically assess the performance of distributed ISR and Air Battle Management teams. -Commence research on adaptive communication management interfaces to enable resilient multi-mixed teams in JADC2 operations. -Commence research on enhanced conversational AI to enable high-bandwidth, human-like interaction with intelligent agents.
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 | 6.2 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 34.8 |
| FY2027 | Request | 19.1 |
This activity is 58% of project 625329's FY2027 request and 19% of PE 0602202F'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.
5 activities in project 625329
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.