What project AET-01 buys
The Advanced C4 project develops and demonstrates technologies that will provide effective communications, information integration, and decision support to U.S. forces. The success of military operations depends on timely, reliable, secure, and synchronized dissemination of command and control and relevant situational awareness information to every military echelon. Technologies are intended to support highly distributed crewed, uncrewed, and human machine teams in all domains and across the entire spectrum of conflict, specifically end-to-end kill chains. While leveraging advancements in commercial technology development, novel approaches promote adaptability, resilience and reliability to overcome environmental challenges while countering a highly capable and dynamic adversary. Prior to FY 2026, efforts in this Project were funded in PE 0603760E, Project CCC-02.
Project AET-01 funding, FY2025–FY2031
Prior years are actuals, the budget year is the request, and the outyears are the FYDP plan. Estimate types are colored and never summed into one figure. Projects carry the full five-year plan; the activities inside them stop at the budget year.
| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | Actual | 0.0 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 30.9 |
| FY2027 | Request | 32.5 |
| FY2028 | Outyear | 97.2 |
| FY2029 | Outyear | 110.0 |
| FY2030 | Outyear | 114.9 |
| FY2031 | Outyear | 127.1 |
5 accomplishments / planned programs
The R-2A exhibit — the only level of the budget that describes work that has not happened yet. Activities carry the prior, current and budget year only, no five-year plan. 1 of them describes FY2027 work in enough detail to have its own page; the rest are shown here in full. Coverage is partial across the corpus, so count activities, never total them.
- Investigate fully homomorphic architecture for secure artificial reasoning on platforms in the field. - Develop planning capabilities with artificial intelligence to support operational preparation. - Conduct design study on impacts to integration with current mission planning software. - Investigate forward-looking, machine-driven…
Read the FY2027 plan →FY2027 planned work - Transition DARPAVERSE technology.
FY2026 to FY2027 change The FY 2027 decrease reflects the shift from development to technology transition.
FY2026 plans — current year - Develop generalized and composable methods of automatic reduced order model development from existing models. - Enable artificial intelligence aided definition and orchestration of custom multi-model environments with a single operator.
FY2026 to FY2027 change The FY 2027 decrease reflects program completion.
FY2026 plans — current year - Continue development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) to test and validate integrated network services and network architecture. - Demonstrate network services and architecture with transition partners in operationally representative scenarios. - Assess technical compatibility and ability for third parties to independently integrate framework into both complementary and transition partner systems.
FY2026 to FY2027 change The FY 2027 decrease reflects program completion.
FY2026 plans — current year - Improve data processing and fusion capabilities. - Transition operational capability for real-time situational awareness.
FY2026 to FY2027 change The FY 2027 decrease reflects program completion.
FY2026 plans — current year - Finish development of the SCEPTER technologies for use in demonstrations and transition it to U.S. Government stakeholders.