By Andrea Shalal

NAVAL AIR STATION PATUXENT RIVER, Md., Sept 23 (Reuters) - T he Pentagon's review of intelligence and surveillance programs should be completed by mid-October, which will help clarify the future of the Navy's proposed carrier-based unmanned spy plane, a senior Navy official said on Tuesday.

Rear Admiral Mat Winter, the Navy's top official in charge of unmanned aviation and strike weapons, said recommendations made by the Defense Department focus group studying the issue would determine if the Navy could issue a delayed request for proposals for the new program, or needed to provide more data.

Winter said the Navy had been answering questions from the Pentagon focus group but had little insight about its decisions at this point.

"We look forward to outbriefs ... in the middle of October timeframe so we know where we're going," Winter told reporters at an event marking the arrival of another unmanned plane at the base, an MQ-4C Triton surveillance plane built by Northrop Grumman Corp.

The Navy earlier this month said it had delayed the kickoff of a competition for the new Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance Strike (UCLASS) program, citing affordability concerns and a Pentagon-wide review.

Northrop, maker of the X-47B unmanned, unarmed plane that has already been tested on U.S. carriers, Boeing Co, Lockheed Martin Corp, and privately held General Atomics, which builds the popular Predator unmanned planes, are keeping a close eye on the Navy's UCLASS program.

Winter said the Navy's design requirements for the new aircraft were solid and not changing.

He told Reuters after the event that the Navy had tried to structure the design requirements for the new plane so it would have the potential to incorporate new payloads, new defensive measures, and other features in the future.

He said that effort had been misinterpreted by many over the past 18 months to two years as the program took shape, largely because the Navy had never tried to institutionalize such an effort on earlier aircraft programs.

"Some of the interpretation of those potential growth attributes has been misinterpreted," Winter said. "The message is we want to make sure it can grow to that, and it's capable of delivering that, but not on day one."

Making adjustments after an aircraft had been in use for two decades was possible, but often costly, he said. To avoid higher cost adjustments, it was important to "bake in" the possibility of changes from the start, he said.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)