Budget Analysis: Cloud Computing in the Army’s FY 2026 Budget Request

Each year, Deltek’s Federal Market Analysis (FMA) team takes a thorough look at the Department of Defense’s Procurement and Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation (RDT&E) budget requests for the fiscal year to come. Using keywords to find technologies of importance to the contractor community, including cloud computing, big data analytics, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and others, FMA identifies programs leveraging those types of solutions.

This year’s analysis reveals that the Army intends to spend $1.3B on programs that use or prepare for the use of cloud technology in one way or another. This total does not include the Operations and Maintenance (O&M) budget, only the Other Procurement and RDT&E budgets, accounts that are considered “new” funding. FMA’s analysis shows that the Army’s $1.3B FY 2026 request is down about $100M from the $1.4B in budget that Army programs leveraging cloud technology received in FY 2025.

Identifying the specific cloud spend in each program is impossible due to the vague way that the Army and DOD report budget request data. Readers should, therefore, keep in mind that the numbers presented here are the requested budgets for programs that plan to use cloud technology for a specific purpose (e.g., storage, testing, or delivering a capability, etc.). The numbers should not be considered the Army’s entire cloud budget for FY 2026. They are best thought of as a signpost indicating how and where Army program offices intend to use cloud and the potential amounts they could spend on it.

Turning to requested cloud-related Other Procurement funding specifically, this totals $352M, down about $173M vs. the funding received in FY 2025. The requested RDT&E funding totals $953.5B, which is up $71.5M vs. FY 2025.

Largest Programs in FY 2026

The tables below list the Army programs with a cloud component arranged from largest to smallest in dollar terms. Because the totals shown are from the RDT&E and Other Procurement budget requests, it means that the work involved could be new and available to contractors if a contract for it is competed.

Here are a few interesting comments from the budget about some of the efforts:

Synthetic Training Environment (STE): The STE program has multiple Other Transaction Authority contracts awarded and will implement an incremental fielding approach leveraging the Software Acquisition Pathway and the Middle Tier of Acquisition pathway.

High Performance Computing: Will continue to mature and demonstrate seamless access to resources and transparent interfaces with cloud computing services for DOD entities that demand a hybrid compute capability.

Integrated Personnel and Pay System: FY 2026 funding increases $2.3M to support an expansion in development capacity as part of an acceleration of cloud migration.

Interesting comments from some of these efforts.

Base Communications: FY 2026 base procurement dollars in the amount of $22M enable the expansion of SDN capabilities in Europe; $32.8M enables expansion in the Pacific.

Intelligence Communications: FY 2026 base procurement dollars fund the acquisition of Intelligence application software, maintenance, and licenses.

Electrical Equipment-Automation: FY 2026 base procurement dollars in the amount of $24.3M support the Army's Edge Computing Capability.

Summing up, after years of lagging behind the other military departments, especially the Air Force, the Army is finally expanding its use of cloud solutions into a variety of areas, hopefully providing industry with more support and service opportunities.