What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project 645352 of PE 0604858F. 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.
- SAINT will continue to develop and expand on work from FY 2026, moving to more advanced tuning and testing of the prototype using new operational data feeds anticipated to become available in FY 2027. - SAINT will continue to assess and improve prototype performance in maintaining custody of adversary high value moving targets in support of dynamic targeting. This includes maturing the autonomous fusion of these new data sources with legacy data and determining advanced methods to optimize the collection strategies for these data sources in a way that extracts key target features that contribute to improved kinematic accuracy and target identification (ID) associated with priority adversarial targets. This will expand SAINT's capability to fuse Multi-INT data sources and explore integration into key edge environments to support a distributed operational network and associated concept of operations (CONOPS). - SAINT will continue to participate in operational exercises and tests, moving forward on the path to successful transition to DAF PAE C3BM.
FY 2027 decreased by $10.441 million compared to FY 2026 in accordance with planned shift in focus on supporting final capability development, test, maturation and transition activities to DAF PAE C3BM.
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.
- SAINT conducts tests with live operational data from existing sensors and new advanced sensor systems in a fully integrated system test. - The SAINT program continues development with acceleration of the build and testing an operational prototype for the Air Force Custody Engine to make up for the reductions in FY 2025, minimizing operational impacts. - SAINT continues to improve the ability to maintain continual custody of high value moving targets through cooperative and autonomous orchestration using cross-service, cross-agency, and commercial sensing capabilities to inform battlespace management nodes and ISR collection nodes among the JADC2 enterprise, completing key achievements towards successful transition. The SAINT program continues to assess the Custody Engine prototype and its ability to extend to additional critical software infrastructure supporting data object management services, battle management services, and sensor and platform orchestration. - New data sources and higher fidelity sensing, weapon and target models are being integrated with the SAINT prototype in FY 2026 for the purpose of further tuning and assessing the Custody Engine performance in operationally relevant conditions. - The SAINT program continues to participate in joint exercises to gain operator utility feedback. Incremental deliveries to C3BM's Battle Network Architecture continue to occur to enable prototype transition and integration activities.
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 | 0.0 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 41.7 |
| FY2027 | Request | 31.3 |
This activity is 51% of project 645352's FY2027 request and 19% of PE 0604858F'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.
3 activities in project 645352
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.