With service enthusiasm seemingly flagging and lawmakers and defense leaders throughout Washington scrounging for dollars, a panel of military and budgetary experts hosted a congressional briefing July 11 to urge Congress and defense leaders to maintain the U.S Navy's Unmanned Combat Air System (N-UCAS) demonstration effort.

The system's potential range, stealth and persistence capabilities will be critical in future naval force structures, especially aboard aircraft carriers, according to the experts. The group was assembled by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) just feet away from the Senate chamber where lawmakers are debating the fiscal 2008 defense authorization bill.

CSBA analysts Robert Work and Thomas Ehrhard said the Pentagon should double its technology maturation budget for N-UCAS over the coming years to $600 million so that officials can better determine exactly what roles and missions it can conduct. Specifically, funds should go to investigating aerial refueling.

At the least, they said, Congress must not further cut into the budget request or else the program's demonstration will slip further, and top Navy leaders should explicitly endorse the unmanned aircraft.

"We need to aggressively pursue this capability," agreed James Thomas, Applied Minds vice president for national security consulting.

Thomas and David Ochmanek, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corp., said N-UCAS will be "essential" for making sure future carrier strike groups can project power and do more than just be concerned with self-protection. Both men, who have been involved in recent high-level Pentagon strategic discussions, said a demonstration is needed to help DOD leaders see that the "paper aircraft" is real.

The Defense Department plans $1.8 billion over the latest multiyear defense budget plan for N-UCAS. Demonstrations under the UCAS-D carrier demonstration effort now are slated for FY '13, two years later than before, after congressional cuts to budget requests in recent years, according to CSBA. Congress funded just $300 million of the $350 million FY '06 request and only $100 million of the $239 million FY '07 request.

Boeing and Northrop Grumman have been dusting off their earlier X-45 and X-47 designs for the Navy's recent request for proposals (RFP) on the UCAS-D (demonstrator) program. The RFP involves a specific set of requirements for carrier operations, including catapult launch, arrested landing and deck handling. The Navy plans to feed lessons from the demonstration program into the larger, more-capable N-UCAS.