Two aircraft in an open, instrumented test campaign since November 2023 — the program is flying earlier than its predecessors did, but the fielding date still rests on testing no one can compress.
The DoD's Milestone C review is the formal gate between a prototype and low-rate production, governed by strict criteria under DoD Instruction 5000.85.
CJADC2 aims to connect every sensor to every shooter; legacy data links like Link 16 and MADL were never designed to talk to each other.
The defense budget runs on a two-year clock that starts inside the building long before Congress votes — and a missed appropriations bill, not a design flaw, is what most often freezes program money.
GAO's latest review of nearly five decades of stopgap funding finds the same pattern every time: schedule delays, cost growth, and administrative drag across programs from the Amphibious Combat Vehicle to the F-35.
A few hundred pages of standardization agreements are what let an Italian tanker refuel an American vehicle and a Danish radar feed an American battle network.
Before a range hosts new training cycles, expanded sonar or supersonic flight, NEPA requires an environmental review — and per NOAA Fisheries practice, marine mammal protections add a second permitting layer.
Special Access Programs protect the nation's most sensitive defense work, and per statute and DoD manual requirements, even unacknowledged SAPs must be reported to Congress and to the President in defined cases.
Title III of the Defense Production Act lets the government buy equipment, guarantee loans and fund factory expansion for defense-critical industry — used for rare earths in 2020, medical supplies in the pandemic and solid rocket motors after 2022.
The statutory conditions, approval thresholds and follow-on production path behind the Pentagon's fastest-growing contracting instrument — and the data gaps GAO says still obscure it.
Roughly a quarter of federal contract dollars flow to small businesses under rules that reserve entire competitions for them — a system with its own thresholds, programs, and failure modes.
Revenue tells you what a contractor shipped last year; bookings and backlog tell you what it will ship for the next five — if you know which lines to trust.
Acquisition gives defense startups scale and gives primes software speed — and per the deal record, what survives the first two years depends on how the buyer integrates.
A Pentagon acquisition program moves from requirement to fielding through a gated process run jointly by the military services and the Office of the Secretary of Defense: a documented requirement, a Milestone B decision that starts engineering and manufacturing development, a Milestone C decision that starts low-rate production, and a full-rate production decision that follows operational testing.
Multiyear authority buys the industrial base a stable demand signal and costs the services their flexibility, with savings estimates that GAO has questioned since 2008.
Every few months, a familiar headline returns to Washington: Congress has passed a stopgap bill to keep the government funded past a deadline.
Boeing is assembling F-47 test aircraft in St. Louis on a schedule pointed at a 2028 first flight, backed by rising budgets in FY2026 and FY2027.
Offset commitments and local production terms attached to FMS deals push costs onto contractors well after the headline contract value is announced.
Other Transaction Agreements let the Defense Department negotiate prototype and research deals outside the Federal Acquisition Regulation, a tool that has grown sharply since the mid-2010s but comes with its own oversight gaps.
The fiscal year ends September 30 with full-year appropriations unbuilt, and the FY2027 request's two-track structure — $1.15 trillion discretionary plus $350 billion in reconciliation — makes this year's deadline harder to manage than most.
The House takes up the fiscal 2027 defense authorization this month, keeping alive a July floor tradition that per CRS has anchored the bill's more-than-60-year enactment streak — with an amendment season that will test the reconciliation build-up.