What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project 225 of PE 0603225D8Z. 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 discovery and development of advanced energetic materials. • Continue development of fast running modeling capabilities for fire initiation and cascading ignition for maritime applications • Advance modeling & simulation capabilities for munitions analyses; refine high-fidelity capabilities in simulating lethality scenarios; and develop high-fidelity models to rapidly design, optimize and assess new munitions concepts. • Develop artificial intelligence models for predicting damage models for munitions and predicting the survivability of different explosives in extreme conditions. • Model and develop high-performance high-power fuzing technologies, increasing reliability and enabling more complex munitions and engagements. • Continue execution of classified technology development project.
The increase of $4.383 million between FY 2026 and FY 2027 begins to restore the buying power of the program. This allows for additional munitions technology development.
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.
• Develop physics-based models enabled by machine learning technology against hard and deeply buried targets. • Develop optical fragment measurement techniques with higher-fidelity, lower cost, higher throughput for DoW munition design and testing • Improve advanced reactive flow modeling capabilities to capture physics critical to assessing munition survivability and performance in extreme conditions. • Develop AI-informed additive manufactured Multi-Principal Element Alloys (MPEAs) possessing enhanced material and functional properties for munition structure performance under extreme conditions. • Improve material models and codes applicable for metallic materials for reliable simulations and warhead performance and lethality assessment. • Design multi-fidelity aerodynamics capability that uses techniques to construct an aerodynamics database that concentrates on calculations that will significantly speed up design work. • Demonstrate the use of X-Ray Diffraction to measure the thermodynamic behavior and late time burn of combined effect explosives to enable optimization of munitions with advanced energetics warheads. • Simplify the process to build robust fast-running models for lethality of emerging targets, munitions, and engagement scenarios and enable the rapid assessment of munition & target effects. • Develop a rapid, computation-driven capability to accelerate discovery and development of alloys that satisfy performance and manufacturing scale-up needs. • Design and fabricate supercapacitors with significantly improved performance and boost power available to munitions’ electronics, freeing up space for other advances in munitions function.
• Develop high fidelity simulations of combined effects explosive (CEX) warheads using recently validated main charge reactive burn models. • Develop macroscale reduced-order failure model for metals with documentation for transition to DoD. • Develop and evaluate prototype low temperature-compatible supercapacitor technology with 10x energy density over the state-of-the-art. • Demonstrate a new modeling and simulation capability for ship defeat in support of maritime lethality efforts. • Demonstrate capability to measure surface chemistry of thermal protection system (TPS) materials in hot, hypersonic flow representative of the aerodynamic shear and extreme heating rates found in hypersonic flight. • Demonstrate a suit of machine learning algorithms for a counter-unmanned aircraft system (CUAS) platform capable of autonomous detection, classification, tracking, and intercept of next generation UAS threats. • Deliver next generation shock-hydro-structure modeling and simulation (M&S) capability enabling blast loading of structures with complex internal components, blast induced material failure, and munition response during impact and penetration events.
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 | 19.2 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 18.3 |
| FY2027 | Request | 22.7 |
This activity is 50% of project 225's FY2027 request and 50% of PE 0603225D8Z'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 225
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.