{"id":17579,"date":"2026-08-19T09:00:05","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T13:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/?p=17579"},"modified":"2026-08-19T06:23:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:23:13","slug":"drone-ship-crewboat-yard-louisiana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/drone-ship-crewboat-yard-louisiana\/","title":{"rendered":"America’s biggest shipbuilder is welding a 151-foot aluminum drone ship in a Louisiana crew-boat yard, a no-crew mothership that drops underwater drones over the side \u2014 the Navy picked it as one of seven MUSV designs, and four more hulls are already being built before the first one floats"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most of the drone boats the Pentagon has been buying lately are small enough to tow behind a pickup. Saronic’s Corsair, the one the Navy already buys in numbers, is 24 feet. The boats the Defense Innovation Unit asked industry to deliver on 29 days’ notice<\/a> earlier this summer only had to manage 10 knots. Useful machines, none of them big.<\/p>\n

The one taking shape in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, is playing a different sport. HII, the biggest military shipbuilder in America, is welding together a 151-foot aluminum drone ship called ROMULUS 151 at Breaux Brothers Enterprises, a family-owned yard that has spent decades building crew boats for the Gulf oil patch. In late May, the Navy picked the design as one of seven to advance into the at-sea testing phase of its Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel program.<\/p>\n

The hull has never touched water.<\/p>\n

HII is not waiting to see how the test goes, either. Four more 151s went into production back in April, a second Louisiana yard signed on over the summer, and an aluminum fabricator in Slidell stood up a dedicated line to feed the program parts. For a ship with no crew, it is generating a serious amount of payroll.<\/p>\n

The yard that got the job builds crew boats, and that is the point<\/h2>\n

ROMULUS did not start life as a warship concept. Duane Fotheringham, who runs the Unmanned Systems group inside HII’s Mission Technologies division, told Breaking Defense<\/a> at the program’s unveiling that the design is based on an offshore crew support boat, modified to run itself. That is the entire pitch. Crew boats are cheap, fast, and yards along the Gulf Coast can bang them out on repeat.<\/p>\n

So the partners are commercial people. Incat Crowther handled the design. Beier Integrated Systems, a Louisiana marine engineering firm, does the systems work. And the hull itself is going together at Breaux Brothers in Loreauville, a village outside New Iberia, deep in Cajun country, where the family has been welding aluminum workboats since long before anyone put the words “autonomous” and “vessel” in the same sentence.<\/p>\n

When HII executives visited the yard on December 11, the prototype stood at 30% complete<\/a>, with sea trials targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026. Reporters from USNI News and the CavasShips podcast walked the same yard earlier this month as part of a Gulf Coast shipbuilding tour, and the write-ups describe a busy shop, not a finished boat. Which matters, because of what happened in between.<\/p>\n

The Navy signed it up while it was still dry<\/h2>\n

On May 29, the Navy named seven companies whose designs would advance to prototype at-sea testing under the MUSV program, and HII’s ROMULUS was on the list, USNI News reported<\/a>. The other six were Leidos, Saronic, Sea Machines, Galliano Marine Services, PacMar Technologies and Birdon. HII put out its own statement<\/a> on June 1, with division president Andy Green crediting the company’s autonomy track record and its Odyssey control software.<\/p>\n

The stakes are concrete. According to Maritime Executive, the designs that pass the Navy’s underway test receive $15 million<\/a> and approval for follow-on production. Reporting at the time of the selection put the demonstration window between June and October.<\/p>\n

Now line that up against the hull in Loreauville. HII’s own December schedule points at fourth-quarter sea trials for the 151. Those two calendars do not leave much slack between a first splash and a graded Navy exam, and nobody involved has published how the gap closes.<\/p>\n

What HII does have is Odyssey running on other hulls already, with more than 6,000 operational hours logged across over 35 platforms for the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. The brain has sea time. The body is the part still in the shed.<\/p>\n

Four more hulls before the first one floats<\/h2>\n

Here is where the program stops behaving like a science project. On April 21, at the Sea-Air-Space show outside Washington, HII announced four more ROMULUS 151s<\/a> heading into production at Breaux Brothers, on top of the one being built. Green called it a shift from prototype to operational deployment. Which means HII ordered the production run before the prototype had ever tasted salt water.<\/p>\n

The company had already shown its hand in March, when it laid out plans for an expanded ROMULUS assembly facility at Breaux Brothers plus a robotics push called HYPR, aimed at serial production of vessels from roughly 20 feet up to 190 feet.<\/p>\n

Then the supply chain started sprouting. In July, per Maritime Executive, Halimar Shipyard in Morgan City joined to expand 151 production. The same month, HII said Bayou Metal Supply in Slidell had opened a dedicated line cutting, bending and welding structural assemblies that ship to Breaux Brothers for final integration.<\/p>\n

Look at the map and it is an all-Louisiana operation: Loreauville builds, Morgan City adds capacity, Slidell feeds them both. The Navy has spent years saying it wants drone ships built like commercial products instead of like destroyers. This is what that looks like when someone actually does it: crewboat yards, aluminum, and a parts line over by the Mississippi state line.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
Hull length<\/div>\n
151 ft<\/div>\n
Aluminum drone ship under construction at Breaux Brothers in Loreauville, Louisiana.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Navy test round<\/div>\n
7 designs<\/div>\n
Selected in late May for MUSV at-sea testing. Passing pays $15 million and opens follow-on production.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Hulls committed<\/div>\n
5<\/div>\n
One prototype plus four production ROMULUS 151s ordered in April 2026.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
TARGET<\/div>\n
First sea trials<\/div>\n
Q4 2026<\/div>\n
The schedule HII set in December, when the hull stood at 30% complete.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The spec sheet still promises four shipping containers<\/h2>\n

When HII first pulled the sheet off ROMULUS at a London defense show in September 2025, the flagship was pitched bigger: a 190-foot vessel doing 25-plus knots with a minimum range of 2,500 nautical miles<\/a>, hauling four 40-foot ISO shipping containers on its payload deck. That 190-foot design is still the headline act on HII’s product page. The hull actually being welded in Louisiana is the 151, and since spring, every HII release has described the boat under construction that way.<\/p>\n

The container math is the interesting part of the family pitch. A 40-foot box is the same unit that crosses the Pacific full of washing machines, so a deck sized for four of them means the mission gear gets packed at a base, trucked to a pier and craned aboard.<\/p>\n

A German yard took the same idea somewhere stranger with an 82-foot crewless boat stacked out of shipping containers<\/a>, built around the box rather than sized to carry it. ROMULUS keeps the boat a boat and treats the boxes as luggage.<\/p>\n

The deck does double duty, too. HII lists launch and recovery of its REMUS underwater drones as a core ROMULUS job, and that family has more than 700 vehicles delivered to over 30 nations. One of them, the 10-foot Lionfish, is the underwater drone the Navy keeps ordering by the batch<\/a>. Pair the two and you get a 151-foot mothership that drives itself to the fight and drops robots over the side once it gets there.<\/p>\n

The 25-foot little brother already passed its exam<\/h2>\n

While the big hull waits for water, the small end of the family just banked a result. On August 11, HII announced that the Defense Innovation Unit had signed off on its PRIME prototype project, built around the Watcher small drone boat<\/a>, a ROMULUS-25 built with aluminum specialist MetalCraft Marine. Two of them were delivered and sea-tested for the Marine Corps back in December, and DIU’s memo says the design proved it could handle the mission of an interceptor, right down to “sprinting to interdict a noncooperative, maneuvering vessel.”<\/p>\n

The 25-footer carries up to 1,000 pounds and covers up to 1,000 nautical miles, and PRIME started as an open competition that drew 116 industry pitches. The DIU sign-off positions Watcher for a move into production. So the smallest ROMULUS has now cleared a government test gate, running the same Odyssey software that will steer the 151. That is not nothing when your bigger product’s exam is coming up.<\/p>\n

The bet HII has placed is easy to read. Five 151 hulls, two yards, one dedicated aluminum line, all committed before the lead boat floats. If the design passes the Navy’s underway test, HII walks in with a production system already warm while competitors are still hiring welders. If it fails, the company owns a small fleet of very fast, very empty crew boats. Breaux Brothers has been building those for decades, so at least somebody in Loreauville would know what to do with them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most of the drone boats the Pentagon has been buying lately are small enough to tow behind a pickup. Saronic’s … <\/p>\n

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