What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project AX3 of PE 0604115A. 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.
Will focus on integrating and testing critical common Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) electronics and components, including propulsion, communication, navigation, and system processing, across multiple Army/Blue UAS platforms, while advancing the integration of inexpensive commercial components, sub-system arrays, and payloads for both aerial systems. In FY27 live operational evaluations will validate performance, interoperability, and adaptability in real-world scenarios, including testing in operationally relevant environments at CONUS or OCONUS locations. Feedback from testing will refine designs to improve field assembly, reconfigurability, and usability, delivering scalable, mission-ready solutions with order-of-magnitude increases in system capabilities. Transition prototypes to multiple Army PORs.
The funding increase reflects full-scale prototype testing, operational evaluations, and refinement, requiring additional resources to support expanded testing environments, advanced system capabilities, and preparation for transition.
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.
Finalize the evaluation of component performance and interoperability. Begin system integration to enable FY27 UAS evaluations. Leverage the evaluation to prototype advanced systems for U.S. Army tactical platforms.
Assess commercial technologies for optimizing systems enabling critical common electronics, components, and algorithms for Army UAS platforms. Fabricate initial component prototypes to assess performance and interoperability of the 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) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | Actual | 8.5 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 10.0 |
| FY2027 | Request | 12.0 |
This activity is 3.8% of project AX3's FY2027 request and 3.8% of PE 0604115A'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.
28 activities in project AX3
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.