The Army’s request for $10.5 billion to spend on research and development in 2011 is too little, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., told the Army’s senior leaders Thursday.

The request continues a downward trend in R&D spending that makes it harder to develop the best possible weapons, McKeon said as the House Armed Services Committee launched its annual review of the Army’s budget.

But McKeon, the committee’s senior Republican, conceded there is little likelihood that R&D funding can be increased in a budget year characterized by huge deficits, frozen domestic accounts and a growing urgency to fight and win current wars rather than focus on future conflicts.

Still, McKeon said, “I am concerned about the continued decline in research-and-development funding. From 1980 through today, our investment in basic defense research as a percentage of gross domestic product has declined by 50 percent. For the Army alone, advanced technology and component funding is 50 percent less in this budget than what was enacted in 2008.”

There is little chance that Congress will shift money from other parts of the 2011 defense budget to increase spending on R&D, McKeon said in an interview. One way to raise R&D funding would be to increase total defense spending, but that, too, is unlikely, he said.

The Pentagon has asked for $708.2 billion for 2011. The Army’s share of that is $245.6 billion. Nearly half of the Army’s budget — $102 billion – is for fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

McKeon said that “choosing to win in Iraq and Afghanistan should not mean our country must also choose to assume additional risk” by failing to invest in the development of new weapons.

For almost two years, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has insisted that the services focus more on winning the wars they are fighting today than on the weapons they want for wars they might fight in the future.

But McKeon said downplaying R&D “is shortsighted and puts the department on the wrong path for the next 20 years.”

“We need to develop the next generation of engineers and scientists,” he said. “Who is thinking about the war in 2015? Or the war in 2030?”

Army Secretary John McHugh and Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey remained focused mainly on 2011 and Iraq and Afghanistan. They said that their budget request provides the Army with $10.8 billion for “resetting” — repairing or replacing equipment that has been damaged in the two wars.

It allocates $3.2 billion for modernizing Army brigade combat teams, including equipping them with sensors, unmanned vehicles and other successful technology developed for the largely unsuccessful Future Combat Systems program that was canceled last year.

The budget proposes “significant adjustment to our modernization strategy,” Casey told the committee.

The Army is “in a period of fundamental and continuous change,” he said.

After failing to develop new lightweight tanks and armored vehicles for the Future Combat Systems program, the Army is going to work on a new hybrid combat vehicle that will try to merge the protection of an MRAP with the off-road capability of a Bradley fighting vehicle and the mobility of a Stryker troop carrier.

The budget includes $934 million for that effort.

Casey said the Army plans to take advantage of rapidly developing communications technology to incrementally modernize its battlefield on-the-move wireless networks with WIN-T (Warfighter Information Network-Tactical) to get new communications capabilities to fighting troops as quickly as possible.

Modernization includes spending $887 million to buy 16 AH-64 Apache attack helicopters and upgrading 13 others.

Overall, the budget seeks $6 billion for Army aviation, including money to add two aviation brigades.

And the budget requests $505 million to upgrade Shadow reconnaissance UAVs for brigade combat teams and calls for spending $459 million on extended range, multipurpose UAVs called Sky Warriors. These UAVs are for long-lasting wide-area reconnaissance, targeting and attack missions. Such unmanned systems are “the wave of the future,” Casey said.

In 2011, the Army budget wants to spend $30.3 billion on procurement, a $200 million increase over this year.