“Regardless of how many you buy” of any weapons program, “the development costs are going to be about the same,” said Mark Gunzinger, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “So you could spread it out over many, or you could spread it out over a few.”

"There is a growing realization on Capitol Hill and the Department of Defense that it’s time to transition these technologies," said Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and former deputy assistant secretary of defense under President George W. Bush. "There are some technological challenges, but it's apparent to us that it's a case of inadequate funding. We do believe there are directed energy technologies that are ready to transform now."

“Like the European powers at the start of World War I, we could find ourselves tremendously unprepared,” said Tom Mahnken, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “We’re likely to find ourselves surprised, and unpleasantly surprised.”

“There is no arguing with the point that it’s had its growing pains and some of the growing pains were severe,” said Mark Gunzinger, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense research institute. “But at this point, frankly, it’s not experiencing the kinds of problems it was experiencing even three to four years ago.”

“If you look across these technology efforts, it looks like within the next four to five years, there will actually be prototypes,” said Mark Gunzinger, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense research institute.

Last month, I participated with my colleagues Jerry Hendrix and Elbridge Colby in a strategic choices exercise hosted by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments where we built an alternative 10-year budget for the Department of Defense. We assumed up front that a new Administration was able to achieve a budget deal with Congress that resulted in stable funding, a prerequisite for getting the Department of Defense back on its feet, but assumed only modest budget growth.