The capacity to appraise, select, fund and deliver public investment, the machinery that turns fiscal space into assets that work.
The Capability Development Index tracks the events that move a capability — operational use, technical breakthroughs, procurement decisions and the industrial base behind them — and places each on the record with the date it happened.
Recent developments cover the current period. Historical developments are the inflection points that produced Public Investment Management as it stands today.
An unpiloted biplane designed to fly a set distance and dive on a target; the armistice came before it was used.
Some nine thousand were launched against Britain, establishing the guided one-way attack aircraft.
Thousands of jet-powered reconnaissance sorties established uncrewed aircraft as an operational capability rather than a target drone.
Uncrewed aircraft used for decoy and reconnaissance over the Bekaa Valley helped destroy an integrated air defence network.
Satellite navigation gave uncrewed aircraft the position fix that made autonomous routing practical.
The first missile strikes from a remotely piloted aircraft opened two decades of persistent surveillance and strike operations.
Mass-market airframes put aerial imaging in general use and gave militaries a supply chain they did not have to build.
Loitering munitions and armed drones destroyed armoured formations, prompting a broad reassessment of ground force vulnerability.
Autonomy shifted from a research topic to a procurement category, with allied forces specifying formations rather than individual aircraft.
Small FPV aircraft costing a few hundred dollars became the dominant cause of vehicle losses on both sides, inverting the economics of armour.
A solicitation closing 6 July sought to place autonomous surface vessels into global military supply chains, extending autonomy from strike into logistics.
Exercises covered uncrewed vessels, autonomous logistics and collaborative sensing, moving allied navies toward integrated uncrewed operations.
The Army Warfighting Experiment 2026 focused on large groups of drones operating as one formation across three national forces.
Game of Drones at Edwards Air Force Base required swarms of at least four aircraft and sought end-to-end autonomous completion of reconnaissance and targeting missions.
Three Corsair one-way attack surface vessels were used against a facility at Bandar Abbas, the first operational employment of the class.
Spooled fibre links, immune to jamming, moved from improvisation to standard fit, and a universal ground control station for them entered service.
Interceptor production scaled to roughly a thousand aircraft daily; in February they accounted for around 70% of Shahed intercepts in the Kyiv region.
Approvals ran well ahead of previous years against a stated national target of more than seven million drones produced during 2026.