WASHINGTON, D.C. — The aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt is scheduled to deploy with a Seahawk medium unmanned surface vessel (MUSV) as part of its strike group. The U.S. Navy announced the deployment in April at the Sea Air Space exposition.
The Seahawk is an upgraded design of the Sea Hunter autonomous vessel and is manufactured by Leidos. This unmanned vessel supports anti-submarine warfare and maritime domain awareness operations. The Seahawk originated from a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency initiative. In 2023, the U.S. Navy deployed four unmanned ships, including a Seahawk and a Sea Hunter, to the Western Pacific.
Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and senior fellow at Hudson Institute, said, "This is a regularly scheduled deployment by a full carrier strike group that shows MUSVs have progressed from science project to become part of the operational fleet." Stacie Pettyjohn, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said, "This is a really important, initial early step in terms of developing those CONOPS. The Navy isn’t waiting around to develop a bunch of prototypes and just sort of leave them stateside. They’re putting them out and integrating them with the crewed vessels immediately and allowing them to experiment and consider different ways of how they can work together." Pettyjohn added, "One of the challenges that they’re trying to use the uncrewed systems for is really to help with just sort of the shrinking force structure more broadly, and the fact that the fleet has been shrinking, continues to shrink, and can’t meet the current demand, and is being operated at such a high tempo that they’re going to face challenges meeting all of their requirements going forward."
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle unveiled a "Fighting Instructions" framework in February. This framework outlines a hedge force strategy using unmanned systems and operational options outside traditional carrier strike groups. The instructions direct the Navy to detail how fleet commanders and the joint force will integrate robotic autonomous systems into strategic laydown, dispersal, and global force management decisions. No established model currently exists for integrating robotic autonomous system capabilities into the U.S. Navy fleet structure, which currently organizes these systems by domain, including undersea, aviation, and cyber. Caudle stated in February that he was not ready to release an unmanned strategy while determining the fleetwide command structure for robotic autonomous systems. Caudle said, "We need to move these capabilities from individual units into composite mission sets, including contested logistics. Using USVs to move food and parts — replenishing underways without risking humans — is a major use case." In April, Caudle stated the Navy is considering establishing a Warfighting Development Center for robotic autonomous systems.