What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project DAT-01 of PE 0603467E. 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.
- Initiate research approaches to acquiring new defense systems, including disrupting systems engineering and reimaging test and certification. - Develop new design approaches to make manufacturable designs or to dramatically reduce human engineering effort. - Develop new approaches to fabrication that enable rapid start-up, reduced production lead times, and frequent changes to military systems. - Test and validate approaches that dramatically shorten the timeline from initial delivery to full military utility. - Explore tools and processes enabled by automation to actively manage engineering uncertainty. - Accelerate fixture development enabled by physics-informed modeling. - Explore methods to accelerate analytics, decision-making, authoring, testing and certification enabled by Large Language Model (LLM) based automation. - Investigate ways to develop a game-play engine and reinforcement learning techniques to support course of action (COA) development. - Define simulation scenarios for COA inputs. - Demonstrate game-play engine and course of action (COA) generation for surrogate operational vignettes. - Integrate higher level intelligence products in COA generation engine. - Investigate new technologies for capturing space debris to include robotics, propulsion and remote pilot operation systems. - Determine feasibility of integrating novel technologies into spacecraft architecture and mission concepts and how to enable rapid deployment of spacecraft.
The FY 2027 increase reflects studies and concepts initiations including, but not limited to, the advancement of new technologies to capture space debris, new tools and processes to actively manage engineering uncertainty, and novel processes and architectures to enable the rapid manufacture and deployment of spacecraft.
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.
- Develop new methods of design space exploration that redefine system architectures, provide new insights into higher order interactions, and enable tailored testing. - Initiate research that enables seamless cross-domain communications into, within, and out of contested environments. - Initiate research into a program to demonstrate a semi-autonomous platform that provides sensing, tracking, targeting, and engagement capability. - Develop platforms for sub-domain access to enable novel access and operational envelopes. - Explore and refine advanced system concepts to deliver integrated, cross-domain platform autonomy at disruptive scale and unprecedented penetration capabilities. - Explore automated advanced sensing systems that leverage multi-modal computer vision and can be deployed on uncrewed vehicles and with squad sized warfighting units. - Explore concepts to provide a low-cost, easy-to-integrate, large-scale national infrastructure sensing system. - Examine concepts and technology to prevent the impacts, degradation and disruption of port operations. - Investigate rapid and ad hoc mechanisms for dynamic, composable, and adaptable uncrewed swarm systems.
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 | 80.4 |
| FY2027 | Request | 178.7 |
This activity is 44% of project DAT-01's FY2027 request and 11% of PE 0603467E'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.
16 activities in project DAT-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.