For Coast Guard, remotely piloted aircraft remain a distant goal.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines Corps fly unmanned aerial vehicles. Customs and Border Protection has been using them to patrol the Southwest for almost five years. Even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has drones it uses to monitor hurricanes.

But the Coast Guard, the service responsible for protecting the homeland from sea-based terrorist attacks as well as conducting search-and-rescue missions, as of yet does not have a dedicated UAV that it can fly off its ships.

Analysts point to the chronic underfunding of the Coast Guard as a root cause of why it is the "have-not" of the UAV world. Officials say they are moving methodically toward the day when drones can be launched off the fleet of new National Security Cutters, but to save funding they are leveraging a Navy UAV program to complete research and development. That means the Coast Gaurd is dependent on the Navy's schedule.

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"The reason why it is not in the program right now ... is that there is no budget space for it," said retired Vice Adm. David P. Pekoske, who served as the service's vice commandant, and was in charge of executing its strategies.

Pekoske has joined a chorus of recently retired Coast Guard officers who have railed against what they call decades of budgets that do not allow the service to recapitalize its fleets of aging ships and aircraft in a timely manner. Members of Congress say they support the Coast Guard mission, but at the end of the day, they don't come through with sufficient funding, Pekoske said at the National Defense Industrial Association homeland security symposium.

"The reason we have not gone forward with [a UAV] is that it is not high enough priority [and] that it would displace something else," said Pekoske, who is now executive vice president of A-T Solutions Inc.

Pekoske and Coast Guard officials said there is still plenty of enthusiasm for UAVs. As other services have found, drones can greatly increase the amount of territory that can be monitored compared to a conventional aircraft.

Capt. Matthew Sisson, commanding officer of the Coast Guard Research and Development Center in New London, Conn., said a helicopter flying off a cutter can stay aloft for about two hours. UAVs such as the ones the Coast Guard are considering can fly about eight hours. Concepts of operation that were recently validated in a report would have a drone flying patterns over the ocean in drug interdiction or search-and-rescue...