What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project 635280 of PE 0603680F. 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 to enable advanced manufacturing processes, techniques, and equipment availability through automation, robotics, mixed reality and digital transformations for reducing materiel weapons acquisition, maintenance and repair costs. - Continue the development and demonstration of digital engineering concepts into manufacturing processes for reduced design through production cycle times, and reduced weapons systems costs. Examples include 1) the development of tools to utilize block chain technology for seamless and secure share manufacturing throughout the Prime manufacturer's supply chain and with the Department of the Air Force (DAF) Program Office and 2) the development of digital design and modeling tools that enable rapid, high quality assembly of parts from multiple manufacturers. Activities include: -- Testing and validation of pre-assembled kits for large-scale composite assembly approaches. - Accelerate the development, demonstration, and evaluation of additively manufactured aerospace components and subcomponents to address diminishing manufacturing sources issues of original designed parts no longer available/produced and to produce previously unmanufacturable part geometries/shapes for increased performance. Activities include: -- Demonstration of autonomous robotic forming for production of long-lead forged components. - Continue the development of tools to rapidly develop digital models of parts under depot repair to enable rapid automation of repair processes currently completed through touch labor. Activities include: -- Demonstration of the ingestion of as-manufactured geometries into computer aided design (CAD) packages to advance data exchange and interoperability across aerospace primes and their suppliers to lower costs and increase rate of downstream processes. - Commence lab-scale demonstrations to identify the limits and optimal use of large language models to simplify human programming of robotic systems for manufacturing. Activities include: -- Investigation of agile programming approaches on commercial robot systems for rapid insertion into manufacturing environments.
Funding in FY 2027 decreased compared to FY 2026 by $0.538 million due to completion of research in technologies enabling factory of the future, digital supply chain management, and the industrial internet of things.
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.
- Continue to enable advanced manufacturing processes, techniques, and equipment availability through automation, robotics, mixed reality and digital transformations for reducing materiel weapons acquisition, maintenance and repair costs. - Continue the development and demonstration of digital engineering concepts into manufacturing processes for reduced design-through production cycle times, and reduced weapons systems costs. Examples include 1) the development of tools to utilize block chain technology for seamless and secure share manufacturing throughout the Prime manufacturer's supply chain and with the Department of the Air Force (DAF) Program Office and 2) the development of digital design and modeling tools that enable rapid, high quality assembly of parts from multiple manufacturers. - Accelerate the development, demonstration, and evaluation of additively manufactured aerospace components and subcomponents to address diminishing manufacturing sources issues of original designed parts no longer available/produced and to produce previously unmanufacturable part geometries/shapes for increased performance. - Complete the development and demonstration of technologies that enable the factory of the future, digital supply chain management, and industrial internet of things. - Commence the development of tools to rapidly develop digital models of parts under depot repair to enable rapid automation of repair processes currently completed through touch labor.
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 | 13.8 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 17.1 |
| FY2027 | Request | 16.5 |
This activity is 17% of project 635280's FY2027 request and 17% of PE 0603680F'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.
4 activities in project 635280
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.