Inside the U.S. Space and Missile Defense spending surge

A version of this story appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each weekday.

Threat Status has partnered with Arlington-based Shield Capital portfolio company Obviant to take a deep dive into the critical line items in the 2027 NDAA during OPERATION Huntsville and the 2026 Space and Missile Defense Symposium.

Interceptor Quantity

The quantity total for the FY27 request includes quantities requested through a reconciliation bill outside the annual appropriations process. Of the 7,031 interceptors in the FY27 request, 6,059 (86%) are in reconciliation, including 2,936 (92%) for PAC-3.
It remains unclear if Congress will pass another reconciliation bill that includes defense spending.
PAC-3 and AMRAAM quantities sum the requested amounts from the Army and Navy for their totals.
Quantities in the request are best understood as “orders the Pentagon plans to place” in the corresponding Fiscal Year, not missiles delivered or paid for.

Kill Chain

Each row in this chart represents programs, organized roughly into their relevance to each stage in a simplified missile defense killchain.
% increases represent changes from each program’s FY26 enacted value.
These values also include the reconciliation request for each program.

Huntsville DoW-wide

This chart represents the summed transactions under DoW contracts with place-of-performance in Madison County, Alabama, for FY2015-FY2025.
Place-of-performance can occasionally be a noisy or under-reported metric, meaning not all defense work performed in Huntsville is represented in the totals. It also does not include subcontracting activity.
Obligations to subsidiaries are rolled up to their parents (with the exception of Dynetics, which is shown instead of its parent Leidos).

Huntsville, PEO Missiles & Space

This chart is a subset of the chart above, restricted only to work where PEO Missiles & Space (now PAE Fires) is the funding agency on the contract.
The same caveats regarding place-of-performance apply to this chart.
This does not represent all missiles and space work performed in Huntsville, just the work funded through this specific PEO.

Space Force Sankey

Each line here represents a Space Force budget line item, program element, or O&M activity in the FY27 request.
The values include the reconciliation request.