The Pentagon’s fiscal year 2026 budget request includes $13.4 billion for autonomous and remotely operated systems, but the funding is scattered across 348 individual budget lines — illustrating both the breadth of investment and the challenge of managing a sprawling portfolio.
An analysis using Real Time Defense — a new platform that enables detailed exploration of Defense Department budgets and programs — shows the terms “autonomy,” “autonomous,” and “remotely operated” appear in 62 procurement budget justification documents while 286 support various stages of research, development, test and evaluation.
The largest share of activity is spread across the military services. The Navy leads with 108 budget lines referencing autonomous or remote capabilities, followed by the Army with 102 and the Air Force with 56. The Office of the Secretary of Defense accounts for 45 lines, while DARPA and U.S. Special Operations Command fund 16 and nine lines respectively.
In a June 26 briefing, a senior defense official highlighted the department’s effort to make autonomy more visible in the budget. “This budget is the first year that we are calling out specifically our autonomy line in its own section,” said the senior official. “So, it will be $13.4 billion for autonomy and autonomous systems.”
The official broke down that figure as $9.4 billion for unmanned and remotely operated aerial vehicles, $1.7 billion for maritime systems operating on the water, $210 million for autonomous ground vehicles, $7.34 million for undersea systems and $1.2 billion for software and enabling capabilities that allow these platforms to operate in concert.
The broad dispersion of spending reflects how deeply autonomy is being woven into the Pentagon’s modernization plans — but also makes clear there is no single program or executive office managing it. Instead, efforts are embedded across hundreds of programs, many of them managed independently by different branches and offices.
The decision to identify a standalone autonomy section in the FY-26 budget marks a step toward transparency, but the distribution of funding suggests the Pentagon is still navigating how to coordinate emerging technologies that touch nearly every mission set — from surveillance and logistics to weapons delivery and command-and-control.
Originally published Inside Defense
