The U.S. Navy practiced at-sea refueling of an unmanned surface vessel (USV) during a recent demonstration ahead of the service’s planned deployment of the sea drones with the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group later this year.
Occurring off Southern California, the oiler USNS Guadalupe (T-AO 200) recently conducted an astern replenishment-at-sea of the Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel Seahawk during a capability demonstration that Military Sealift Command’s claimed was “critical” for deployed USV operations in support of American carriers.
“It’s refuel at-sea capable. We’re moving in the right direction. We had to move it from an experimentation piece to operational, so it has to keep up with a [carrier] strike group. It can’t be an anchor,” Capt. Garrett Miller, the commander of Surface Development Group One, said during a panel last week at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space (SAS) Symposium on the test.
According to Miller, the deployment of the will provide an extended maritime domain awareness capability to the CSG. The sensor suite aboard the MUSV was described as “incredible.” A U.S. Navy factsheet on the Leidos-built drones highlighted their role as a distributed maritime sensor platform in support of the fleet’s manned vessels. Ian Ellis tracked a recent exercise involving the Seahawk MUSV during the Theodore Roosevelt CSG’s workup off the U.S. West Coast.
U.S. Fleet Plans Mass Unmanned Deployment by the 2030s
The recent MSC refueling test and upcoming MUSV deployment with the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) are among the first steps of the service’s planned mass drone deployment by the coming decades. According to Miller, the fleet anticipates a deployment of up to 30 MUSVs and thousands of smaller USVs throughout U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s area of responsibility by 2030. During SAS, the fleet’s surface warfare and unmanned development chiefs also stressed the challenges of their planned mass integration of drone boats into the fleet – including the logistics efforts.
The service views the drones as a key enabler in both sensing threats and providing additional firepower for surface combatants. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle recently stated the importance of container payloads for the fleet’s operations going forward. These systems were previously deployed on USVs and are planned for further integration aboard the service’s under-armed Littoral Combat Ships. While the drones alone lack the endurance, firepower and sensing capabilities of American destroyers, their deployment has been eyed amid an increasingly large and capable People’s Liberation Army Navy.
To meet these ambitions, the service ditched a previous program called the Modular Attack Surface Craft for a “marketplace” model that procurement leaders claim will help the rapid integration of USVs into the fleet.
