Most people have seen the standard Navy refueling photo at some point. Two gray ships steaming side by side at matched speed, maybe 150 feet of water between them, with hoses strung across on cables while sailors in helmets haul on lines. That’s how a destroyer gets its diesel from an oiler, and it’s been the routine for about a century.<\/p>\n
The Seahawk can’t do any of that. Nobody’s on board to catch a line, and at 135 feet it’s a lot of boat to put alongside a 505-foot destroyer with no one steering it from a bridge.<\/p>\n
So on September 11, somewhere in the Pacific, the Navy tried it the other way around. The destroyer USS Chafee ran a fuel hose off its flight deck, the Seahawk tucked in behind it, and sailors climbed onto the drone to hook it up, according to Navy photos<\/a> released on September 22 and reported by USNI News.<\/p>\n Why go to all that trouble for a prototype? Because this particular prototype is now sailing with an aircraft carrier, and a carrier group doesn’t turn around so the little guy can go home for gas.<\/p>\n Plenty of Navy drones get stowed and craned. The small boats, the underwater vehicles, anything that fits in a well deck or hangs off a davit. The Seahawk is in a different size category altogether.<\/p>\n The Navy’s own fact file<\/a> lists Sea Hunter and Seahawk at about 135 feet and 142.3 metric tons at full load, and Leidos, which built it, puts the loaded displacement at 145 long tons. That’s roughly 325,000 pounds of composite trimaran.<\/p>\n (A trimaran, if you haven’t been around one, is a long narrow main hull with a slim float on each side to keep it from rolling over. It’s the hull shape that lets a boat this skinny cross an ocean.)<\/p>\n No ship in the strike group has a crane or a deck for that. Maritime Executive called this the first time a deployed carrier group has sailed with an unmanned vessel too large to stow on a ship, and I’d say that’s the more interesting “first” here.<\/p>\n A drone that lives on its own hull has to be treated like an escort: fueled at sea, kept in formation, and babysat by somebody. Which is where the Chafee comes in.<\/p>\n The pictures show the fuel line coming off the Chafee’s amidship refueling station, running aft along the ship to the flight deck, and then dropping over the stern to the Seahawk trailing behind. USNI News noted the line was tied off with ropes and cushioned with pads along the way, which sounds improvised because it basically is. Astern refueling is an old technique for feeding a boat that can’t safely hold position alongside a bigger ship, and it’s about the simplest option when the smaller boat has no crew to handle the normal gear.<\/p>\n Here’s the catch, though. Both times the Navy has done this in 2026, sailors had to board the Seahawk to make the connection. So the “unmanned” vessel takes on fuel the way a manned one does, with people on its deck, at least for a while.<\/p>\n DARPA flagged exactly this problem in a 2024 note: putting people on a drone, even briefly, means designing the boat around their safety, and moving them across in rough seas or high winds is risky. DARPA’s answer is a separate program called NOMARS, which demonstrated a no-sailor fueling rig off California in 2025.<\/p>\n The Seahawk doesn’t have it. The Navy hasn’t said how many sailors went across on September 11, how long the two ships held formation, or how much fuel moved; it released photos, not numbers.<\/p>\n If you’ve been following the Navy’s drone-boat plans, you may be picturing the 30 medium drone ships the service ordered<\/a> in late September from HII, Saronic and Galliano Marine Services. The Seahawk isn’t one of them.<\/p>\n It’s an older animal: the second of two trimarans Leidos built for DARPA and the Office of Naval Research, under a $35.5 million contract awarded in December 2017, and delivered to the Navy in April 2021. Its older sister, Sea Hunter, ran 2,000 nautical miles<\/a> from Pearl Harbor to San Diego on its own after RIMPAC this summer.<\/p>\n As delivered, the Seahawk was unarmed. Its job was surveillance and towing a sonar to listen for submarines, per Maritime Executive.<\/p>\n Leidos says the boat’s mechanical and electrical systems were set up to run for months without maintenance or a crew, and the company’s September 8 release lists what its autonomy software is supposed to do: avoid collisions under the international rules of the road, steer around designated keep-out zones, switch to backup comms if the main link drops, and hold a waypoint course with the GPS switched off. Those are Leidos’s claims about Leidos’s software, so I’d read them as a spec sheet rather than a test report.<\/p>\n Two diesels and 14,000 gallons of fuel. That’s what gives it ocean-crossing range in the first place, and it’s also the reason this story exists: a carrier deployment runs the better part of a year, and no tank runs that long.<\/p>\n The Chafee wasn’t the first ship to try this. Back in April, off Southern California, the oiler USNS Guadalupe did the same astern transfer with the Seahawk during the Roosevelt group’s final workup, and Military Sealift Command called the demonstration “critical to deployed operations of MUSVs in conjunction with a carrier strike group.” Capt. Garrett Miller, who commands Surface Development Group One, was blunter at the Sea-Air-Space show that month.<\/p>\n The boat has to keep up with the strike group, he said. “It can’t be an anchor,”<\/a> per Naval News.<\/p>\n So April proved an oiler could do it, and September proved a destroyer could too. That second one arguably matters more.<\/p>\n An oiler isn’t always around, while destroyers are the ships that’ll be sitting next to the Seahawk every day of the cruise. We covered the deployment itself<\/a> when the Navy confirmed it in mid-October.<\/p>\n Now for the bit the Navy didn’t exactly advertise. The Roosevelt left San Diego on September 27 with no families on the pier and no announcement, and the Seahawk wasn’t with it.<\/p>\nSo why can’t they just hoist it aboard?<\/h2>\n
A hose over the back of a destroyer<\/h2>\n
Seahawk is the prototype, not the production boat<\/h2>\n
The April dress rehearsal<\/h2>\n
It left eleven days after the carrier<\/h2>\n