GAO's 2022 OT consortia audit found medical defense, armaments, and aviation/missiles — large conventional categories, not fringe physics — as the top dollar areas, FY2019–2021

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GAO's 2022 audit of consortia-based Other Transactions (GAO-22-105357) found that of the roughly $24 billion DoD obligated to OT consortia for prototyping between FY2019 and FY2021, the top technology-area categories were medical defense, armaments, and aviation and missiles, receiving $8.0 billion, $5.0 billion, and $2.6 billion respectively. A direct read of GAO-22-105357's own PDF confirms this in GAO's own words, in both the Highlights section and the body letter: "GAO analyzed other sources of OTA data, including from industry, and found that from fiscal years 2019 through 2021, the top three consortia—medical defense, armaments, and aviation and missiles—received obligations of $8.0 billion, $5.0 billion, and $2.6 billion, respectively, from DOD." This is the one partial, cross-cutting technology-area breakdown of OT consortia spending GAO was able to assemble itself — not a DoD-native report, see claim-crs-gao-found-dod-lacks-systematic-ot-funding-data-by-subject-area — and none of the three leading categories is a fringe or exotic-physics domain; they are among the largest, most conventional areas of defense acquisition that exist. GAO's own Figure 5 extends this top-three figure to the full technology-area table, see claim-gao-22-105357-figure-5-extends-ot-consortia-breakdown-to-13-technology-areas.

Verification history.

• 2026-10-19 — confirmed at the primary. The figures above had rested on Tier 3 trade-press reporting (InsideDefense directly confirmed the $5.0B/$2.6B figures; the $8.0B figure was corroborated across multiple outlets but not independently fetched). gao.gov's own PDF, product page, and highlights page all 403'd every tooling route tried on 2026-10-18; a Wayback Machine raw-bytes capture of the PDF succeeded on 2026-10-19 (tls:verified, 75 pages), and the primary states the same three figures verbatim. See question-verify-gao-22-105357-ot-consortia-breakdown-primary (now answered).