Can’t start, won’t start: Over 150 new military programs face delay under a CR
WASHINGTON — The federal government rang in a new fiscal year on Thursday, and, as has been the norm for years, the government will now be operating under a continuing resolution (CR).
And if there’s one thing military leaders like to remind everyone about, at every opportunity, it’s that a CR means the Pentagon cannot begin funding new programs, also known as “new starts,” at a time when the department is pursuing novel technologies.
Breaking Defense reached out to the Pentagon and the services to ask for details on new starts that will be impacted by the CR, but a list was not provided by press time. However, new starts are listed as such in the fiscal 2027 budget request, and a search under that phrase of both procurement and research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) budget documents turned up over 150 results.
While imperfect, given that Pentagon budget documents have been known to include errors, the method provides a sense of the quantity and quality of items affected by the CR — including billions of dollars for new drones, the Golden Fleet program and hypersonic weapons.
“It’s gonna slow us down, and the threat is not slowing down, so we have to continue to get after that,” Space Force Gen. Douglass Schiess, the newly minted Chief of Space Operations, said in a briefing with reporters Sept. 15. “So I just urge our congressional colleagues and folks to get after getting us the budget.”
The CR is in place through Dec. 11, but there’s no guarantee programs can commence once it ends. Lawmakers could pass another CR, or, if the impasse persists, the government could face another shutdown.
“We are going to be in a mad dash to try and avoid a full-year CR,” Connecticut Sen. Chris Coons, the lead Democrat on the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee, told reporters Wednesday.
“The Pentagon — the senior leadership, OSD [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] — keeps insisting they’re going to get $350 billion dollars in reconciliation. They will not, and they keep insisting they’re going to get more than $100 billion in a supplemental. I think that is very unlikely as long as the war continues,” Coons added. “And so there is likely to be somewhere between a $500 [billion] and $700 billion gap between what the Pentagon is planning on and continuing to insist on, and what they will actually get in appropriations.”
Until a fiscal 2027 budget is passed, here’s a roundup of the programs that will be in limbo.
Pentagon-wide
Perhaps the poster child for being stalled out under a CR is the Golden Dome missile defense shield, one of President Donald Trump’s signature defense priorities. Golden Dome was initially funded through the 2025 reconciliation pot, and the administration then laid out plans to spend $17.5 billion on the national air defense shield in FY27.
However, less than $400 million of that total is found in the base budget, with the rest up in the air along with the reconciliation effort.
“I will tell you that if they don’t figure it out, there’s no Golden Dome, because there is no funding,” Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, who is charged with leading the sprawling program, told an audience at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in August.
“Without continued funding, Golden Dome will stop with everything we’ve already built and delivered,” he later told reporters.
A spokesperson for his office did not respond to questions about the program now that the CR is in effect.
The Pentagon’s plans to roll out the new Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG) drone initiative could also be sidelined.
The DAWG is designed to essentially absorb the Biden-era Replicator initiative established to acquire thousands of low-cost “attritable” drones, particularly for use in the Indo-Pacific. Pentagon leaders were loodfeking to supercharge development investments in FY27 through a $54.6 billion ask for research-and-development dollars — $1 billion in the base budget and $53.6 billion coming from the more flexible reconciliation pot. (That represents a staggering 24,070 percent increase over FY26 spending on DAWG.)
Without a new budget and no reconciliation bill, the Pentagon’s ambitions for DAWG will likely need to be scaled back considerably.
Army
The Army collectively has 29 new start programs listed in budget documents — 17 under procurement and 12 from RDT&E funds.
Two of those new starts are for the service’s High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (HADES) — a spy plane based on Bombardier’s Global 6500 aircraft tricked out with advanced, deep-sensing capabilities for multi-domain operations developed by the Sierra Nevada Corporation. The Army requested $131.7 million for platform and system integration, as well as $15.3 million for micro-high altitude balloons and payloads for the platform.
Another big procurement freeze: $21 million to buy 34 heavy variants of the service’s Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV). In July, the Army awarded Other Transaction Authority agreements to three vendors to provide three prototype variants each by March 30, 2027.
The rest of the Army’s procurement new starts are for unmanned and autonomous ground systems, general engineering support, ammunition and other small arms fire. The largest ticket item is $145 million for work at the Holston Army Ammunition Plant in Tennessee.
Under RDT&E, the Army’s biggest new start is$921.9 million for Terminal High Altitude Aerial Defense (THAAD), along with $132.1 million for the AN/TPY-2 sensor, which serves as the “brain and eyes” for the THAAD system. The next-largest request is$108.1 million for the Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (M-SHORAD) Increment 4 program, which is specifically tasked with protecting dismounted maneuver forces.
The remaining new starts under RDT&E are for directed energy enhancements, tactical bridging, the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, Arctic mobility sustainment and other programs.
Underlining the bureaucratic nature of these definitions is the Army’s Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA). The program was originally listed as a $127.2 million new start under procurement, but the Army ultimately requested that those funds be reallocated into RDT&E.. Since the service has allocated RDT&E funding toward the aircraft for multiple years, FLRAA is not considered a new start — and therefore not impacted by the CR.
Navy and Marine Corps
There are 17 new starts listed for the Department of the Navy in the FY27 budget documents. Among them: some of the Navy and Trump administration’s biggest initiatives to advance the Golden Fleet, including the Trump-class battleship.
Specifically, the Navy wants approximately $1 billion in advance procurement and roughly $837 million in research-and-development funds for the Trump-class battleship in FY27. The service plans to ask for approximately $17 billion in procurement funding for the first ship in FY28.
“Adding capability at the highest end of the Golden Fleet high-low mix, the Battleship’s primary role is to deliver high-volume, long-range offensive fires and serve as a robust, survivable forward command and control platform,” budget documents stated.
The Navy also is seeking funds for a submarine tender under a new start program that will “be designed to conduct steady state and wartime sustained, forward-based / expeditionary tending, resupply, depot and intermediate level repair operations on submarines while anchored or pier side,” according to the FY27 request. In total, the service is seeking$4.4 billion for two submarine tenders to support both Virginia and Columbia-class submarines, as well as future submarine classes.
Additionally, the Navy wants $450 million in FY27 for its bulk fuel vessel, with plans to purchase one vessel in FY27 and another in FY28. Budget documents show that the service is considering foreign shipbuilding designs for the vessels it wants to request those years, and wants the vessels to operate under Military Sealift Command to haul fuel from shore to forward operating areas and conduct at-sea fuel transfers. The program will leverage an existing commercial tanker design in an effort to streamline the acquisition timeline, budget documents said.
“The tankers will be capable of supporting consolidated replenishment (CONSOL) operations, enabling commercial or logistics tankers to transfer fuel to fleet oilers at sea. This capability allows fleet oilers to remain on station for longer periods and continue conducting underway replenishment operations to support combatant ships, rather than returning to port to reload fuel,” budget documents stated.
Likewise, the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) hypersonic missile program is seeking $750 million in FY27 to purchase the first 12 weapons. The service is updating its Zumwalt-class destroyers with a vertical launch system for the CPS missiles and plans to include CPS onto some Virginia-class submarines.
Air Force
Across RDT&E and procurement accounts, roughly 100 Air Force new start programs are affected by the CR.
Many of these programs are relatively small efforts, like incorporating new communications equipment or post-production modifications to weapon systems. But some of the service’s top priorities are also at risk, including its two major hypersonic efforts.
A hypersonic glide weapon known as the ARRW was slated to begin a new round of research for a second “increment” in FY27, alongside another effort to develop an air-launched ballistic missile, according to budget documents. Those projects will be stalled, as will plans to begin buying a separate hypersonic cruise missile dubbed HACM.
Other munition programs like the Family of Affordable Mass Missiles are in a similar boat. The Air Force plans to buy tens of thousands of FAMM weapons in the coming years and wants to kickstart development of what budget documents call the Air Force Long Range Missile under the FAMM program in FY27.
The Air Force is also poised to take over the Navy’s mission of maintaining airborne command posts that can launch ground-based nuclear missiles. The service wants to commence that program, known as Looking Glass – Next, in FY27.
Personnel isolated behind enemy lines use a handheld radio called the Combat Survivor Evader Locator (CSEL), which the Air Force is replacing with the Next Generation Survival Radio for the entire joint force. Budget documents note the Air Force plans to kick off rapid fielding for the system in FY27 — a need potentially underscored by the rescue of an F-15 aircrew downed in Iran earlier this year — but that will have to wait, since the documents say its fielding is a new start.
Protection for mobility fleets has emerged as a top priority for the Air Force, and the service is now exploring how to incorporate active defenses under the Large Aircraft Survivability System (LASS). The Air Force is poised to launch development work for LASS in FY27.
The Air Force is additionally recapitalizing its executive airlift fleet. The Air Force plans to buy a single C-37 in FY27, according to budget documents. That procurement requires passing the spending bill to move forward.
And finally, some programs will be impacted although they are not formally new starts. After selecting General Atomics and Anduril earlier this year to build the Air Force’s first Collaborative Combat Aircraft drone wingmen, the program’s production phase will be limited without an FY27 budget, according to a top service official.
“You can’t go do production without production funding,” Brig. Gen. Timothy Helfrich, the Air Force’s portfolio acquisition executive for its Fighters and Advanced Aircraft Directorate, said Monday during a virtual event hosted by the Mitchell Institute. “So that does provide limitations on what we can execute.”
Space Force
While the Space Force is seeking a massive $71 billion in FY27, much of that funding is targeted at programs that have recently launched. However, there are a total of nine new starts cited in the budget justification documents, some stand-alone programs and others projects falling underneath a larger program.
The biggest Space Force FY27 new start is development of a sweeping software-centric program called Autonomous Tactical Fabric, budgeted at $1.5 billion in FY27 and a whopping $6.8 billion through 2031.
“The Fabric creates a common, defined, consistent operating system to maximize data sharing by unifying and integrating any sensor to any effector via any transport,” according to budget documents.
If that language sounds familiar, it should — it essentially describes the Pentagon’s former Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) effort that over the past couple of years seems to have simply disappeared from DoD and industry lexicons.
Another large RDT&E effort slated to begin next year is the Resilient Ground Architecture program, which is budgeted to receive a total of $196 million under two budgetary program elements: Next-Gen OPIR Ground and Joint Tactical Ground Systems.
The Commercial Geostationary EO/IR project, budgeted at $37.9 million, is designed to acquire commercial electro-optical and infrared satellite capabilities as a less-expensive follow-on to the Space Force’s bespoke EWS-G weather satellite, expected to reach its end of life in 2030. The project is specifically aimed at allowing timely forecasting for Indo-Pacific and Central Commands.
The Space Force also hopes to use $10.6 million to kickstart a Space Force TENCAP (Tactical Exploitation of National Capabilities) program separate from that of the Air Force. TENCAP programs across the services are designed to rapidly exploit intelligence agency information — specifically from sensor systems carried by spy satellites — for battlefield use. The effort is designed to integrate this data “into Space Domain Awareness, Offensive Space Operations, and Defensive Space Operations” and develop “operational prototypes delivered directly to the warfighter, intelligence community, and a program of record inside of two years.”
On the procurement side of the budget, the Space Force’s biggest new start is a program to build and equip four “relocatable” facilities to temporarily house personnel assigned to operations centers under construction in New Mexico, Nebraska, Alabama and Colorado. Those projects have a total budget of $350 million.
The service also is planning a “deployable” SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility), with a FY27 budget of $2 million.
The service also wants to spend almost $140 million in advanced procurement of long lead items for the Evolved Strategic SATCOM (ESS) system’s third and fourth satellites. ESS is designed to replace the aging Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellites for encrypted, nuclear-survivable national security communications.
Finally, the Space Force hopes to procure one new Bounty Hunter “BH-Secondary” unit for $8.9 million. Bounty Hunter is designed to geolocate and report sources of electromagnetic interference with US military and commercial satellites. A first Bounty Hunter was deployed by the Air Force to PACOM in 2018; a second to CENTCOM in 2019.
According to the service’s budget documents, BH-Secondary is a smaller, more autonomous version of the system that “allows for remote operators to conduct mission activities and / operations.”