R-2A Activity · President's Budget PB2027

Advanced Cyber Operations Studies and Concepts

FY2027 Request
$14.8M
▲ 204% vs FY2026
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This activity requests $14.8M in FY2027, 24% of project AET-03, up 204% on FY2026. The R-2A exhibit describes it across FY2026–FY2027, including what the FY2027 money is planned to buy.

FY2027 Request
$14.8M
▲ 204% vs FY2026
FY2026 Enacted
$4.9M
In law
Planned work

What the FY2027 request buys

Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project AET-03 of PE 0603469E. 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.

FY2027 planned work

- Develop techniques for reasoning about the circuitry inside devices. - Develop automated operational cyber reasoning to enable decisive cyber maneuver warfare. - Develop an automated exploit development platform. - Develop cyber weapons with provable performance guarantees. - Develop techniques to cause hallucinations in adversary AI agents. - Develop persona systems for use in highly engaged virtual environments. - Develop a synthetic red team that probes adversary cognitive and behavioral vulnerabilities. - Model adversary decision rules to craft paradoxical situations that induce logical paralysis. - Develop high-fidelity emulations of adversary individual and group psychological processes.

FY2026 to FY2027 change

The FY 2027 increase reflects studies and concepts initiations including, but not limited to, the advancement of new technologies to support development of automated operational cyber reasoning to enable decisive cyber maneuver warfare, to model adversary decision rules to craft paradoxical situations that induce logical paralysis, and to support development of cyber weapons with provable performance guarantees and techniques to cause hallucinations in adversary AI agents.

Before the request year

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.

FY2026 plans — current year

- Discover logic flaws in security protocol implementations. - Develop algorithms that identify latent vulnerabilities in complex systems.

Money

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.

04.9FY26ENACTED14.8FY27REQUEST
Enacted Request
Fiscal YearEstimate TypeAmount ($M)
FY2026Enacted4.9
FY2027Request14.8

This activity is 24% of project AET-03's FY2027 request and 4.5% of PE 0603469E'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.

Where this sits

5 activities in project AET-03

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.

Constellation$25.0M ▲ 25%Advanced Cyber Security Studies and Concepts$16.1M ▲ 412%
Advanced Cyber Operations Studies and Concepts — this activity$14.8M ▲ 204%
Resilient Software Systems Capstones (RSS Capstones)$5.4M ▼ 66%
Carcosa▼ 100%
Source
FY2027 Office of the Secretary of Defense RDT&E Budget Justification · Exhibit R-2A · PE 0603469E, project AET-03 (President's Budget PB2027). Congressional marks are recorded on the program element, never on an activity.
Machine access
Markdown twin /programs/0603469E/AET-03/a2.md · MCP mcp.hitchintel.combudget_get_activity