Picture an aircraft carrier pulling out of port with an escort that has nobody aboard to wave goodbye. For the first time, a US carrier has done exactly that. The Navy drone ship now deployed with the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group carries no crew at all.
Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao confirmed it on Wednesday, Oct. 14, at the Association of the U.S. Army annual conference in Washington. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attended the panel, which focused on the Pentagon’s use of autonomous systems, according to Naval Today. “This is the first carrier strike group to ever deploy with a large-size unmanned surface vessel,” Cao said.
Meet the Seahawk, the Navy drone ship nobody has to steer
The vessel is a Seahawk, built by defense contractor Leidos. A person familiar with the ship told Bloomberg it is about 137 feet long and weighs 145 tons. Leidos designed it to run for months over long distances, Anadolu Agency reported.
Leidos says Seahawk navigates on its own with limited human intervention. In practice, it follows the international rules for avoiding collisions, steers clear of programmed keep-out zones, and has backup communications paths. The company also says it has shown it can navigate without GPS.
The ship is sailing from the West Coast with the carrier and its escorts. Those include the cruiser USS Chosin and the destroyers USS Paul Hamilton, USS Decatur and USS Carl M. Levin, with Carrier Air Wing 11 aboard, Army Recognition reported. Roosevelt sailors even operated Seahawk during this year’s RIMPAC exercise near Hawaii, per Leidos.
“Imagine having more guns out there”: what the robot warship may do
Cao pitched the vessel as extra muscle. “This is a force multiplier. Imagine having more guns out there,” he said. However, the Navy has not said whether Seahawk is armed or what its exact mission is, so “more guns” may be more rhetoric than hardware for now.
What Cao did describe is a menu of jobs for autonomous ships: logistics, refueling and hunting submarines. He also pointed to recent combat use of smaller robots. In the Strait of Hormuz, he said, forces used Saronic’s Corsair II autonomous vessel to recover two Apache helicopter pilots, and unmanned underwater vehicles helped clear mines, Business Insider reported. That waterway is already a pressure point, as our look at what a US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz could mean shows.
Here’s the thing: this unmanned Navy ship has been a long time coming
This is not a surprise party. The Navy has been telegraphing the move all year. In January, Capt. Garrett Miller of Surface Development Group One said the Navy would deploy a medium unmanned ship with a carrier group in 2026. He also said the service expects at least 11 medium drone ships in 2027 and more than 30 in the Indo-Pacific by 2030, Inside Defense reported.
In April, the oiler USNS Guadalupe refueled Seahawk at sea off Southern California as a practice run. Miller said the Navy drone ship has to keep up with a strike group. Keeping pace and staying fueled are the unglamorous problems that decide whether a robot ship is an asset or an escort’s problem.
The timing matters, too. Carriers are stretched thin, and the USS Gerald R. Ford just wrapped a 326-day deployment this spring. As a result, a cheaper, crewless ship that can do some of the grunt work is an easy sell to a Navy short on hulls.
What the Navy hasn’t nailed down about its uncrewed surface vessel
A few details are still fuzzy. Cao described the vessel as both “large-size” and “medium-sized” in the same remarks, and the Navy’s own category is medium. Cao also gave an Oct. 8 deployment date, while other outlets say the carrier left San Diego in late September. (Even the robots can’t fix a messy timeline.)
And the Navy has not announced the carrier’s departure itself, so the “first” label comes from Cao’s word rather than a Pentagon release.
Business Insider says the strike group is expected to head into the Middle East, where tanker attacks have pushed deeper into the Persian Gulf. Yonhap-sourced reports put the arrival near the end of October, though the Navy has not confirmed that.
So the real test starts now. A robot ship that sails fine in San Diego is one thing. A robot ship that keeps up for months, far from home, in waters where the Navy is already busy, is the story to watch.
Can it keep up when nobody’s aboard to fix it?
