Printed from https://fiscalreceipts.com/program/0605863N/ — data as of July 28, 2026. Every figure is citation-backed; see the page online for per-number provenance.
RDT&E Ship and Aircraft Support
Budget Figures
FY2026 award data is a partial year — USASpending awards are reported on a rolling basis and the fiscal year does not close until September 30. why partial FY2026 data? →
- FY24
- $198.6M
- FY25
- $152.2M
- FY26
- $151.5M
● actuals (line) · ○ enacted · ◇ request — gaps are editions the program is absent from, never interpolated.
| Series | FY15 | FY16 | FY17 | FY18 | FY19 | FY20 | FY21 | FY22 | FY23 | FY24 | FY25 | FY26 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actuals | $127.6M | $128.7M | $105.7M | $105.0M | $101.0M | $92.6M | $102.7M | $135.1M | $169.3M | $198.6M | ||
| Enacted | $132.1M | $106.1M | $105.7M | $97.5M | $93.9M | $103.6M | $135.1M | $173.4M | $203.4M | $152.2M | ||
| Request | $106.1M | $105.7M | $97.5M | $93.9M | $104.8M | $135.1M | $173.4M | $203.4M | $152.2M | $151.5M |
blank = series not published for this year; – = absent from that edition.
Asked vs spent: the PB2024 book requested $203.4M for FY2024; the PB2026 book reports $198.6M actually spent — $4.82M below the request.
Program Lineage
No predecessor/successor lineage was recorded for this program element — no FY-to-FY transfer into or out of this line was stated in the ingested J-books, and none was inferred from the program structure.
Description
Mission — SDTS
This project provides for the preventive and corrective maintenance of mission critical Hull Mechanical and Electrical (HM&E) and remote control system maintenance aboard the Self Defense Test Ship (SDTS) in support of the Navy RDT&E of ship self-defense systems. Testing aboard this ship provides the capability to safely test self-defense weapon systems within their minimum range and reduces the number of fleet units required to support RDT&E efforts. Funds are used to purchase consumable supplies and repair parts, conduct routine preventive and emergent corrective maintenance and engineering support services.
Mission — RDT&E Acft Supt
Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDT&E) Aircraft Support: This continuing project funds costs associated with the preventive and corrective maintenance of fixed and rotary wing aircraft which directly support test and evaluation of aircraft and associated weapon systems and sensors. Testing aboard dedicated RDT&E aircraft reduces the number of fleet units required to support test and evaluation of aviation programs. This project unit funds airframe Standard Depot Level Maintenance (SDLM), the Integrated Maintenance Concept and Planned Depot Maintenance, major in-service repairs, emergent repairs and aircraft engine periodic maintenance and overhauls and aircraft material condition and field inspections. Also included in this project unit, are the costs of Aviation Depot Level Repairables (AVDLR), which are spare and replacement parts for components that fail during the conduct of readiness flight operations, aircrew training and proficiency flight hours, and must be replaced to support follow-on flight operations. This project unit also funds Aircraft Structure Periodic Assessments (ASPA), Individual Material Readiness List (IMRL) tools and support equipment, Aviation Climate Assessment Survey System (ACASS) and other projects and peripheral equipment associated with the maintenance of flight readiness for RDT&E aircraft. JUSTIFICATION FOR BUDGET ACTIVITY: This program is funded under RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT, TEST and EVALUATION MANAGEMENT SUPPORT because it supports efforts directed toward sustaining or modernizing equipment required for general research, development, test and evaluation.
Mission — RDT&E Ship & Aircraft Support
This continuing program provides support for the Self Defense Test Ship and developmental test squadron aircraft required to support Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDT&E) of new systems. The RDT&E ship and aircraft inventory is required to adequately test modifications and improvements to fielded weapon systems and sensors and new weapon systems and sensors and evaluate modifications to address new threat capabilities to increase the warfighting capability of the fleet. The program provides integrated logistics support for aircraft at selected field activities, provides depot-level maintenance of aircraft, engines and components for the Navy's inventory of RDT&E aircraft; and provides support for DON aircraft in the custody of contractors in support of RDT&E. The Self Defense Test Ship is a remotely operated platform that supports the test and evaluation of surface ship sensors, combat systems and weapons within the close-in self defense zone. Cost covered under this element include test execution for the Air Warfare Ship Self-Defense Enterprise, aircrew training and proficiency, fuel, supplies, equipment, repair and Aviation Depot Level Repairables, as well as organizational, intermediate and depot maintenance of aircraft in the Navy RDTE inventory and the Self Defense Test Ship. Threat engineering provides test and evaluation (T&E) modeling and simulation (M&S) products and informs targets, simulators, and stimulator designs and development. This project satisfies Surface Navy advanced missile system threat characterization and verification, validation, & accreditation (VV&A) requirements for testing JUSTIFICATION FOR BUDGET ACTIVITY: This program is funded under RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT, TEST and EVALUATION MANAGEMENT SUPPORT because it supports efforts directed toward sustaining or modernizing installations or operations required for general research, development, test and evaluation.
Mission — RDT&E Acft Flt Hours
Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDT&E) Aircraft Flight Hours: This non-acquisition project supports direct flight hour costs, which include aviation fuel and a portion of the costs of Aviation Depot Level Repairables (AVDLR) associated with NAVAIR test pilot proficiency flights, including organizational and intermediate maintenance, associated consumables, including petroleum, oil, lubricants, and spare and replacement parts for components that fail. Annual test pilot flight hours, as delineated in OPNAVINST 3710.7, are satisfied through a combination of program funded test flights, which vary year to year based on program schedules; flights funded through this project unit ensure a baseline level of pilot readiness. These flight hours ensure test pilots remain proficient in assigned type / model / series aircraft in which they are qualified (approximately 3 hours per month) during lulls in program test schedules to ensure proficient test pilots are available to safely support aviation program testing. Readiness hours are designed to provide aircrew with a minimum of 11 flight hours per month, for a total of 133 hours annually. Flight hours support ferry flights to Fleet Readiness Centers for planned depot maintenance, post maintenance, acceptance test flights, aircrew training and test pilot proficiency when test program demand is low, in direct support of Research and Development Programs at Naval Air Systems Command, and Office of Naval Research flight activities. JUSTIFICATION FOR BUDGET ACTIVITY: This program is funded under RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT, TEST and EVALUATION MANAGEMENT SUPPORT because it supports efforts directed toward maintaining test pilot readiness in direct support of general research, development, test and evaluation.
Mission — T&E Enterprise
The Testing & Evaluation Enterprise merges common ship, element, and system requirements into the fewest number of test events while leveraging planned Combat System Ship Qualification Trials (CSSQT) to accomplish Developmental Testing (DT) and Operational Testing (OT) requirements. All tests on the SDTS require the sharing of infrastructure, missile range allocations, execution time, and underway time to eliminate duplicative testing. T&E Enterprise provides end-to-end mission Operational Testing in a realistic operational environment, capitalizing on Probability of Raid Annihilation Modeling and Simulation (M&S) data validated with results of Operational and Live Fire Testing, and ensuring a consistent approach across ship classes. Applicability of all test events is beneficial across multiple ship classes with the same variation under test. Currently finishing Air Warfare Ship Self Defense (AW SSD) testing on legacy SSDS Baseline 10 class ship, CVN 78 (TEMP 1714), and starting testing on follow on SSDS Baseline 12 ship classes, CVN 79, LHA 8, and LPD Flt II (TEMP 1910). This approach merges common ship, element, and system requirements into common infrastructure for combined Developmental and Operational Testing (DT/OT) of the Surface Navy antiship cruise missile (ASCM) defense requirement, expressed as a Probability of Raid Annihilation (PRA). Enterprise Testing characterizes system performance with live fire events and through Modeling & Simulation (M&S) assessments informed by live-fire demonstrations. Enterprise Cost elements: a) Enterprise Testing and Planning. SDTS and Lead Ship tracking and firing exercises are conducted against single- and dual-, subsonic and supersonic ASCM threat surrogates. Includes the contractor and government costs to administer the Enterprise, collect and distribute data from live events, maintain Cybersecurity certifications, and financial management. b) Self-Defense Test Ship (SDTS) Combat Systems. Includes procurement, installation, check-out, stage testing, routine preventive maintenance, and repairs of major combat system elements. c) Enterprise Testbed (ETB). Includes all M&S costs required to create OT-quality digital representations of shipboard combat system performance including infrastructure, distributed secure network, and common environmental services for DT/OT. SDTS testing requirements outlined in AW SSD Enterprise TEMP 1714 and lead/operational ship testing requirements for Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM) TEMP 1471, Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM) Blk 2 TEMP 286-2, DDG 1000 TEMP 1560, CVN 78 TEMP 1610, Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) TEMP 1415, SSDS TEMP 1400, LHA 6 TEMP 1697, AN/SPQ-9B TEMP 1463, Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program (SEWIP) TEMP 1658 (Block 1A), and LCS TEMP 1695. d) SDTS testing. Requirements outlined in Enterprise Test & Evaluation Master Plan (TEMP) in support of Ship Self Defense System (SSDS) Baseline 12 and SPY-6(V)2 and (V)3 Platforms. The Testing & Evaluation Enterprise merges common ship, element, and system requirements into the fewest number of test events while leveraging planned Combat System Ship Qualification Trials (CSSQT) to accomplish Developmental Testing (DT) and Operational Testing (OT) requirements. All tests on the SDTS require the sharing of infrastructure, missile range allocations, execution time, and underway time to eliminate duplicative testing. T&E Enterprise provides end-to-end mission Operational Testing in a realistic operational environment, capitalizing on Probability of Raid Annihilation Modeling and Simulation (M&S) data validated with results of Operational and Live Fire Testing, and ensuring a consistent approach across ship classes. Applicability of all test events is beneficial across multiple ship classes with the same variation under test.
Mission — Threat Engineering
The Threat Engineering program assesses the current and future threat environment and works in coordination with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) to develop, produce, and evolve digital threat engineering models in support of test and evaluation (T&E) requirements. NAVSEA requires comprehensive, validated threat modeling and simulation (M&S) products to dynamically and responsively interact with surface ship air defense systems and subsystems to allow for a performance evaluation in an operationally realistic environment. These threat M&S products, called Acquisition Threat Engineering Products (ATEP), must contain the details, features, and components necessary to react with the Blue air defense systems as the actual threats will with, deployed air defense systems to provide a comprehensive, high-confidence evaluation of Blue system capabilities. The successful and rigorous end-to-end evaluation of surface ship combat systems, to include the component systems, are required before capability and ship baselines can be delivered to the warfighter. ATEPs are valid T&E assets that satisfy Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) and Operational Test & Evaluation Force (OPTEVFOR) requirements in both Modeling and Simulation (M&S) testbed and at-sea configurations. ATEPs satisfy OPTEVFOR's threat model requirement for fidelity commensurate with the Blue-force system representations and contain intel-derived lethality/vulnerability data, physics-based six degrees-of-freedom models, reactive seekers and guidance, and other engineering data. ATEPs are necessary to evaluate mandatory ship Key Performance Parameters (KPP), including operational effectiveness and suitability. ATEPs are also used to evaluate a system's lethality and survivability, and its ability to achieve its performance requirements within operation and sustainment costs. In many cases, ATEP models are the only way in which the Navy can accurately emulate threat ASCM performance. ATEPs reduce Navy operational testing (OT) costs by enabling portions of OT to be conducted via M&S, increasing requirements coverage and avoiding the costs of targets and weapons that would ordinarily be required to conduct OT solely via live fire events. Threat Engineering products inform investment strategies, validate the effectiveness of capabilities provided to the Fleet, and augment live-fire T&E to obtain affordable, statistical confidence in measured performance. Threat Engineering work is prioritized to avoid technical surprise, avoid point solutions, and ensure Fleet capability against specific threats (most stressing, unique, or widely deployed and exported). Each threat system poses unique challenges to the various combat system elements and each threat system affects Blue system effectiveness in different ways, therefore each combat system configuration must undergo rigorous testing against multiple threats. T&E using M&S is essential to fill gaps and to offer realistic operational scenarios that cannot be tested via live-fire events (due to safety, numbers of targets, limitations on the characteristics of the targets, cost to develop a realistic threat, etc.). OPTEVFOR has listed a number of threat representations in ATEPs as their number one and number two priorities for the past five years because they are appropriately built to represent the salient features of the threat as an Intelligence Community-Validated and sufficient product qualified to be used in Operational T&E (OT&E). As each threat system is unique, the ATEP representation of each must include the features of specific threats, such as electronic countermeasures (ECM), active countermeasures, communications links, electronic counter-countermeasures (ECCM). Furthermore, the ATEP products must capture any engineering or manufacturing uncertainties as well as intelligence uncertainties so that our Blue Systems, once deployed to the Fleet, operate in the face of these threats as they were/are designed. Finally, these ATEP products must integrate with the PEO IWS testbeds to be used in Developmental and Operational T&E. In short, each validated threat product must contain the features, components, and details necessary to evaluate the specific combat system or ship baseline. The Threat Engineering group develops specific requirements from threat foundational information (i.e., intelligence data), and systems under test. The requirements are used to guide design, development, and integration of each ATEP product. Blue Systems face severe limitations to test, and risk delayed deployment to the warfighter without required ATEP products. ATEP products need to be developed and integrated IAW Blue System needs and schedules in order to clearly evaluate performance and enable all capabilities to be delivered to the Fleet expeditiously. Additionally, until analysis is performed using the ATEP products, it is often unclear or unknown what the impacts are due to various features and techniques found to be on threat systems. The focus is to meet combat/weapon system Systems Engineering and T&E requirements for in-service and new construction surface platforms to include: -DDG 51 FLT III -CVN 78 -CVN 79 -LHD 8 -LPD FLT II -FFG 62 and others ATEPs cost approximately $5-30M per product, require a minimum of 18 months to build, and include all features and capabilities, unlimited number of runs, and may be used for live, virtual, constructive (LVC) testing. Notably, the advanced seeker discrimination, target selection, and salvo operations and decisions are difficult to characterize until the second or third versions of the ATEP products. It is important to note that the development and integration of each ATEP is a function of the threat system and its complexities, the available foundational intelligence data, and the Blue Systems requirements to include the schedules for T&E; therefore, the cost to develop and integrate each ATEP is not consistent. Moreover, the threat products must be sustained; there are many reasons that ATEP products require additional development and enhancements to evolve to the next version. -Our adversaries are continually developing new threats and upgrading and improving existing threat systems additionally our understanding of the threat foundation data may change and evolve. -Our Blue Systems and their operational characteristics change (e.g., a new Radar may operate in a new RF Band, with different channels/bandwidth, and/or other signature requirements). -Our operating T&E or operational environments may change.
Justification
No accomplishments or planned-program narratives in this line's J-book detail — some exhibits carry figures without per-project prose.
Budget Line Items(workbook-cited)
Exhibit R-1
| Account | Org | Type | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Navy | N | FY24 Actuals | $198.6M |
| Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Navy | N | FY25 Enacted | $152.2M |
| Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Navy | N | FY25 Total | $152.2M |
| Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Navy | N | FY26 Disc. Request | $151.5M |
| Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Navy | N | FY26 Total | $151.5M |
Budget Details(R-2/P-40 facts)
| Project | All Prior Years | FY24 Actuals | FY25 Total | FY26 Base | FY26 Request |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3238: Threat Engineering | $0 | $14.9M | $20.7M | $19.9M | $19.9M |
| Program Element | $0 | $198.6M | $152.2M | $151.5M | $151.5M |
| 0568: RDT&E Acft Flt Hours | $0 | $42.6M | $43.0M | $43.4M | $43.4M |
| 0569: RDT&E Acft Supt | $0 | $50.7M | $52.1M | $53.2M | $53.2M |
| 2924: SDTS | $0 | $49.3M | $15.4M | $14.3M | $14.3M |
| 3206: T&E Enterprise | $0 | $41.3M | $20.9M | $20.6M | $20.6M |
No follow-the-dollar view — this program's awards haven't been crosswalked at high confidence (flows cover 17 of 1741 programs). why coverage is partial? →
Awards
No awards are linked to this program element at high confidence — the budget→award crosswalk only asserts links it can defend, and this line has none yet.
Lobbying Mentions
No Senate LDA lobbying filing in the tracked data mentions this program element by code or alias.
No research dossier for this program — dossiers cover 50 of 1741 programs, the largest fully J-book-detailed lines by FY2026 requested dollars. why no dossier here? →