What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project 668 of PE 0604122D8Z. 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.
Funding will expand enterprise access to Joint C2 capabilities to Services across echelon and provide deliberate, sustained development and enterprise-wide integration. Funding will streamline acquisition, establish rigorous testing and evaluation standards, and create clear lines of accountability for performance and management. Finally, funding will advance globally interconnected environment for operations, planning, and intelligence workflows supported by shared access to real time data on the battlespace..
FY 2027 increase reflects transition of Joint C2 from rapidly deployed product to program of record for the Department’s enterprise joint warfighting capability. Funding will enable maturation of capability from fragmented deployments to Joint enterprise tooling fully supported across all domains. The FY 2027 increase of $1,589 million expands access to Maven Smart System (MSS) across the Joint Force and Services in support of the Department's Joint Force AI-Enabled Headquarters initiative. MSS is a cloud-based mission command application that aggregates thousands of discrete data streams into AI-enabled workflows, securing decision advantage across all domains. This funding will provide common access to the platform, alongside foundational software development and programmatic operations, to consolidate the Department's software-centric C2 onto a single pane of glass. The FY 2027 increase also reflects $60 million for VJOC. The Virtual Joint Operations Center (VJOC) initiative will establish resilient, globally accessible command and control through a virtual command and control capability. Combining on-prem hardware and commercial software, VJOC provides low-bandwidth access to mission command applications, significantly increasing operational tempo and survivability. CDAO will leverage VJOC to provide a browser-based virtual command center for real-time situational awareness for low-connectivity users at the tactical edge. This augments cloud-based mission command applications, including Maven Smart System, with low-connectivity, tactical-edge functionality.
FY2026: the year under way
Prior-year accomplishments and current-year plans from the same exhibit. Context for the FY2027 plan, not a series — an activity partitions its project exactly in the request year, but can under-cover it in earlier years.
CDAO will continue to procure Joint C2 licenses and engineering support for the Joint Force--including Combatant Commands, National Guard Bureau, and the Joint Staff. This includes the ability to share new applications and data integrations across user organizations, and the ability to leverage AI in Joint C2. Funding also supports government-owned DevSecOps pipeline to integrate 3rd party applications into Joint C2 under open architecture to expand the vendor base able to develop applications on data Joint C2 data stack. Finally, funding supports cloud computing costs associated with these capabilities.
Three years, and no five-year plan
An R-2A activity publishes the prior year, the current year and the budget year. The FYDP outyears exist at project and program-element level and are deliberately absent here rather than inferred. Estimate types are colored and never summed into one figure.
| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | Actual | 103.2 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 240.5 |
| FY2027 | Request | 2,031.0 |
This activity is 100% of project 668's FY2027 request and 96% of PE 0604122D8Z'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.
1 activity in project 668
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.