What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project 624920 of PE 0602204F. 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 development and maturation of positioning, navigation, and timing over satcom prototypes, focusing on enabling dissemination of precise timing and exploration into positioning dissemination, for transition and integration into critical platforms. - Continue research of software defined antenna electronics to complement software defined navigation receiver efforts; focusing on the exploration of advanced algorithms for software defined navigation. - Commence the demonstration of collaborative multi-ship precise time and frequency transfer in contested environments, show how these techniques enable coherent sensing and electronic warfare effects. - Commence the demonstration of trust techniques and operational concepts such as distribution of trusted satellite trajectories/information to enable blue force use of foreign satellite navigation signals, enabling implementation into embedded global positioning systems/inertial navigation systems test beds which will lead to future transition to programs of record.
FY 2027 decreased compared to FY 2026 by $0.692 million due to a reduction in the development of foundational collaborative position, navigation, and timing modeling and simulation, architectures, and technologies. This reduction is the result of a strategic realignment of the Department of the Air Force's Science and Technology (DAF S&T) portfolio, which aims 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 and demonstrations of integrated positioning, navigation, and timing alternatives of advanced satellite navigation user equipment and alternatives to satellite navigation; alternatives to satellite navigation include environmentally sensed magnetic gradient sensing & map generation, and sensor-derived vision aiding and wide-area vision position acquisition. - Continue developing technologies to support airborne precise time and frequency transfer in contested environments, to enable missions such as coherent sensing (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) and coherent effects (electromagnetic warfare). - Continue developing and demonstrating trust techniques and operational concepts such as distribution of trusted satellite trajectories/information to enable blue force use of foreign satellite navigation signals. - Continue research of software defined antenna electronics to complement software defined navigation receiver efforts. Continue to explore advanced algorithms for software defined navigation. - Commence mission thread modeling for collaborative and alternative navigation techniques. - Commence magnetic anomaly navigation simulation development and error modeling.
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 | 12.2 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 11.4 |
| FY2027 | Request | 10.7 |
This activity is 30% of project 624920's FY2027 request and 6.5% of PE 0602204F'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 624920
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.