USS Theodore Roosevelt Becomes the First MQ-25-Ready Carrier, Three Years Ahead of the Drone

USS Theodore Roosevelt is the first US Navy supercarrier fitted with a fully operational Unmanned Air Warfare Center, the compartment from which air vehicle pilots will fly the MQ-25 Stingray tanker drone, The War Zone reported on August 8. The center aboard CVN-71 reached deployable status in March 2026, three years before the aircraft it exists to control is due to enter service.

The Unmanned Air Warfare Center is the shipboard half of the Unmanned Carrier Aviation Mission Control System, built around an MD-5E ground control station — operator consoles, displays and computing hardware — and an autonomy layer, the Multi Domain Combat System, developed by Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works. The first such center was installed aboard USS George H.W. Bush in August 2024 as a test article; USS Ronald Reagan is scheduled to receive one this month. The Navy intends to fit every Nimitz- and Gerald R. Ford-class carrier, a total of eleven ships in service today.

The drone is running well behind the ships. Boeing won the MQ-25 development contract in 2018, worth $805 million, and the T1 demonstrator has been flying since 2019, but the first production-representative aircraft did not take off until April 2026. The program cleared Milestone C for low-rate initial production in May. Initial operational capability, once targeted for 2024 and later for July 2027, has now slipped to February 2029. The Navy plans to buy 76 aircraft.

What the Stingray is meant to fix is a workload problem inside the carrier air wing. Aerial refueling is currently flown by F/A-18E/F Super Hornets configured as tankers, which consumes a substantial share of the fighter fleet's flight hours and airframe life to do a job no fighter was bought for. The MQ-25's threshold requirement is to pass 15,000 pounds of fuel to receivers 500 nautical miles from the carrier, extending the reach of the Super Hornet, the EA-18G Growler and the F-35C without asking the ship to close the coast.

Fitting the control centers ahead of the aircraft is not wasted effort. Carrier modification work has to be scheduled around maintenance availabilities and deployment cycles, so a ship that misses its window waits years for the next one. Installing the compartments now means the hardware is aboard, certified and manned by the time the drone is cleared — and the deadline is real: the US Navy operates ten Nimitz-class carriers and one Ford-class ship, with USS John F. Kennedy due to commission in 2027, and each needs the fit before it can generate unmanned tanking sorties.

The remaining integration steps are being worked through in parallel. The first connection between an MQ-25A and the control system was made in October 2025 during ground testing, and a shipboard command-and-control network evaluation was run aboard USS Abraham Lincoln earlier this year. Deck handling, launch and recovery trials with a live aircraft are the next major hurdle for a design that has never landed on a carrier.