What project 986 buys
This project funds the development, acquisition, and integration of major operational test instrumentation for the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command's Operational Test Command and supporting test activities at test and training ranges. Requirements for instrumentation are identified through a long-range survey of project managers, Research Development and Engineering Centers (RDECs), and Battle Laboratories developing future weapon systems and the test programs that support these systems. Project focus is to address Director Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) identified Army test realism shortfalls. Base funding will establish enterprise level business processes and services for test instrumentation to develop, operate, and secure capabilities in accordance with OSW and Army Digital Engineering and Software Modernization Strategies. Efforts will promote synergies between the training and testing enablers to improve product development, integration, and cyber activities, and to promote re-use of common assets and services to meet Army modernization priorities. Projects are designated as a major test program based on their visibility, assessed relative technical risk (medium-high), schedule risk, cost (greater than $1.500 million per year or $7.500 million for the total project) and applicability to other mission areas or services. These projects are technically demanding, state-of-the-art, unique instrumentation assets or suites to meet technology shortfalls, and generally result from development programs managed by a professional project management team. The DOT&E annual report to Congress identified shortfalls in the Army's abilities to create realistic operational environments. The Expeditionary Live Virtual Constructive Command Center (XLCC) project addresses multiple shortfalls identified by DOT&E. XLCC is a portfolio of related development efforts that will deliver a system of systems to provide Test Monitoring & Control (TMC) for the Common Operating Picture (COP) for Exercise Control (EXCON) for the Multi-Domain Operations Environment (MDOE). XLCC will provide Real Time Casualty Assessment (RTCA) and instrumentation suite that delivers a high fidelity, realistic, real-time capability to measure the System Under Test (SUT). XLCC also allows the U.S.
Project 986 funding, FY2025–FY2031
Prior years are actuals, the budget year is the request, and the outyears are the FYDP plan. Estimate types are colored and never summed into one figure. Projects carry the full five-year plan; the activities inside them stop at the budget year.
| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | Actual | 27.6 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 28.0 |
| FY2027 | Request | 14.0 |
| FY2028 | Outyear | 12.6 |
| FY2029 | Outyear | 13.5 |
| FY2030 | Outyear | 13.5 |
| FY2031 | Outyear | 13.7 |
1 accomplishment / planned program
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. Each 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.
Continue to expand and enhance the baseline for an operationally realistic test environment and integrate with other systems and tools; refine Real Time Causality Assessment (RTCA) to include non-kinetic effects and centralized battle damage assessments (BDAs); establish technology refresh plan to maintain current hardware; integration…
Read the FY2027 plan →