What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project 3448 of PE 0603128N. 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.
MALE funding will advance the MQ-9A's capabilities by supporting the design, integration, and prototyping of payloads and sensors. These funds will also be used for ongoing development, testing, and the refinement of technical requirements to ensure the system's spiral development can rapidly integrate new technologies to counter evolving threats.
An increase from FY2026 to FY2027 of $9.222 million is requested, with the majority allocated to advancing the primary development of the MDA solution. This funding will support the continuation of platform, secure mission control element and ground control station integrations, the initiation of laboratory activities, and planning for flight demonstrations to validate maritime detection, tracking, and data fusion performance. Funding supports completion of system prototype, environmental validation, and airworthiness certification, cybersecurity accreditation, and developmental test and operational assessment. This budget increase also provides for spiral capability development to enhance and mature technology towards full operational capability, including the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to stay ahead of threats and for DAAS system design updates to support FAA safety certification.
FY2026: the year under way
Prior-year accomplishments and current-year plans from the same exhibit. Context for the FY2027 plan, not a series — an activity partitions its project exactly in the request year, but can under-cover it in earlier years.
MALE will support MQ-9A capability and payloads/sensors integration and continued development, Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE), design work, software upgrades, and Air Vehicle and Ground Control Station integration. MALE will also support programmatic, engineering, logistics, test, software baseline development and technical requirements refinement in support of spiral development and integration of payloads/sensors into the system required to pace evolving threats.
Three years, and no five-year plan
An R-2A activity publishes the prior year, the current year and the budget year. The FYDP outyears exist at project and program-element level and are deliberately absent here rather than inferred. Estimate types are colored and never summed into one figure.
| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | Actual | 44.7 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 9.9 |
| FY2027 | Request | 19.1 |
This activity is 54% of project 3448's FY2027 request and 54% of PE 0603128N'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 3448
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.