The Robot Ships of Route 90

NEW IBERIA, Louisiana – Surrounded by rows of sugar cane fields on Bayou Teche, generations of shipbuilders are wrenching on the U.S. Navy’s latest push toward a future drone fleet.

Work boat builders and repair facilities dot U.S. Route 90 in southern Louisiana, where the boom and bust of the oil and gas industry looms over yards small and large. It’s along this road where several shipyards are vying for a chance to build unmanned ships for the world’s most powerful navy.

At Breaux Brothers Enterprises outside of Lafayette, La., four aluminum Romulus vessels are currently under construction for a collaboration agreement between the yard and HII, the United States’ largest shipbuilder.

Breaux Brothers has built high-speed vessels for the petroleum industry since the 1940s, when Brannon Breaux’s grandfather started building aluminum crew boats in Iberia Parish.

“Undoubtedly, my family’s name – Breaux – has built more crew boats from the 40-something to 200-foot [range] than anybody else in the world,” Breaux, the president of Breaux Brothers and a third-generation boat builder, told USNI News over boudin and cracklins on a muggy morning visit in August.

Breaux Brothers and yards like it in central Louisiana construct offshore support vessels, the pickup truck of the oil and gas industry. Yards built them by the hundreds during the height of the Gulf Coast oil and gas surge in the early 2010s and the glut of used boats served as the nucleus of the Pentagon’s early autonomous ship experiments.

The Defense Department converted former Gulf Coast crew boats into autonomous test beds and the U.S. Pacific Fleet tested two of the ships in 2023 in the unforgiving waters of the Western Pacific. The Navy used the test results to shape a line of fast, durable ships capable of traveling 2,500 nautical miles, hauling modular payloads camouflaged in two 40-foot shipping containers.

Breaux Brothers has eight father-son duos working in its yard, housed on the property that Brannon Breaux’s family used for summer getaways when he was a child. The company’s current office was once the family vacation home, where young boys played with chickens, donkeys and go-karts outside and jumped from the open second-floor balcony to the first floor couch inside.

“Me and my two brothers would terrorize this place,” Breaux recalled.

Now, he is carrying on the family legacy, running and working at Breaux Brothers with his son.

The yard is one of seven participating in the Navy’s Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel (MUSV) competition, which is currently in the midst of prototype testing expected to wrap by the end of this month.

After years of fits and starts, the Navy is moving out on unmanned ships with the MUSV, which is generating interest from new defense technology startups and legacy shipbuilders alike.

“This MUSV program fits right into our wheelhouse,” said Breaux. “It’s basically a glorified crew boat, or [fast supply vessel]. I mean, it’s a fancier looking one. You’ll see it. It’s sleeker. Now what separates it is the autonomy.”

These Louisiana yards are putting up their own money to pursue unmanned vessels, answering the U.S. government’s call for a so-called marketplace that puts the onus and risk on industry. They also have expansion plans if the U.S. Navy ramps up production and more work comes to the Gulf Coast and Louisiana boat builders.

It’s an area with untapped capacity outside the major defense contractors that have historically constructed the U.S. fleet’s manned warships since World War II.

“We have shipyards in the United States, and those shipyards … when there [were] 3,800 offshore oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, which there [were] in the 2010s, they were producing the most advanced OSVs and support vessels and work vessels,” Matt Paxton, the president of the Shipbuilders Council of America, recently told USNI News. “We were exporting those vessels all over the world.”

The Navy has struggled for years to create a strategy to purchase, build and operate an unmanned fleet. But with the evolution of drone warfare and successive administrations focusing on unmanned assets, a hybrid naval fleet is becoming more and more likely. Congress passed a reconciliation bill last year that allotted $5 billion for the Navy to buy unmanned vessels. The service intends to order 36 MUSVs before the end of the current fiscal year, then taper off before increasing purchases again in the outyears.

The smaller shipyards are taking notice.

“We’re building our workforce with the intent of the Navy coming and saying, ‘Don’t stop building,’” Breaux said. “That’s what our intent is. And as soon as they tell us that, we will acquire that piece of land and build whatever it takes to maximize this yard.”

Bots on the Bayou

Forty minutes down Route 90, a four-year-old Austin, Texas-based defense technology startup is erecting new facilities on the same bayou for a 300,000-square-foot expansion.

After purchasing family-owned Gulf Craft in Franklin, La., last year, Saronic is spending $300 million to increase its footprint in anticipation of a hot USV production line for the Navy. Months ago, much of the property that backs up to Bayou Teche was sugar cane fields. Now, two vast buildings that will be fully air-conditioned are taking shape next to the highway.

“We think that there is quite a large MUSV market,” Doug Lambert, Saronic’s chief operating officer, told USNI News during a stop in Franklin.

With the expansion in full swing, excavation equipment was strewn throughout the dirt paths and gravel floors on the humid August day.

Fueled by venture capital, Saronic started in a Texas warehouse building autonomous vessels about 24 feet long – approximately a medium-sized fishing boat. The company has since sold nearly $400 million worth of autonomous vessels to the Navy in 2025 and extended its autonomy suite to a USV more than triple the size.

“We’re primarily building Marauders [at] this site. Incredibly bullish on what that looks like for the future, and then more importantly, we’re seeing use cases that crop up everywhere across the [Department of Defense], to oil and gas, to hydrographic survey,” Lambert said. “The utility of these vessels is quite large. We think that that market’s going to continue to grow, and we continue to invest in it.”

Three MUSVs known as the Marauder, a 180-foot-long aluminum vessel, are currently under construction in Franklin. The first vessel from the Navy’s MUSV marketplace already sailed away for testing.

Of the $5 billion allotted for Navy unmanned systems in last year’s reconciliation bill, $2.1 billion is slated for the MUSV program. The service’s latest shipbuilding outlook projects MUSV purchases increasing over the coming five years, with a goal of buying three in the next fiscal year and 12 by Fiscal Year 2030. Companies like Saronic are preparing to build at that scale, incorporating the Navy’s plans into the new facilities and manufacturing lines.

“You’ll see the traditional Gulf Coast manufacturing process, which is very build-in-place. That’s something that we want to turn the corner around,” Lambert said.

To make that shift, manufacturing lead John Morgan is designing a space so Saronic can meet a serial need should the Navy’s unmanned blueprint come to fruition. Morgan, who formerly worked in manufacturing at Space X, is a proponent of a linear flow. He is crafting the Franklin facility to move material in straight lines so employees can easily identify logjams on the floor.

“Of course we’re going to have all the analytics coming from our manufacturing execution system about throughput, quality, labor hours, all of that will be inherited,” Morgan said. “But also seeing a gap on your floor while you’re getting coffee immediately tells you that you have a problem in a station. You don’t need a computer to tell you that. Within five minutes, everybody should understand what … their top priority for today is – solving that bottleneck that is creating that gap in the system.”

The company has hired around 300 people for the Franklin location since talking over Gulf Craft, which had 29 employees when Saronic bought the yard. The goal is to have 1,500 employees in Franklin when the yard is at full operating capacity. Company executives expect one facility to be finished in October and the other one early next year.

‘They Know How to Speak Navy’

Twenty-seven miles down Route 90, another shipyard that’s been building since the 1940s is teaming up with a young defense startup. On the edge of Cajun Country, Conrad Shipyard boasts four facilities. One is its yard on the Atchafalaya River in Morgan City, where a series of bayous, lakes and rivers drop into the Intracoastal Waterway. Another yard lies 10 minutes away in Amelia. Conrad also has a new construction facility nearby next to a separate deepwater repair yard.

Conrad is partnered with Blue Water Autonomy, a Boston-based company established in 2024 that hired a handful of employees who worked on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) No Manning Required Ship (NOMARS) program.

“This is a profitable commercial yard … that’s not currently doing a lot of military work,” Ryan Maatta, Blue Water’s head of marine engineering, told USNI News at the Morgan City yard on Front Street.

“But they also pass with flying colors [Supervisors of Shipbuilding] inspection. They know how to speak Navy. It was one of the reasons Blue Water identified them as the best commercial partner for this, and [they] very organically can deliver tens of hulls annually without disrupting or giving up their commercial market.”

The Front Street yard sits behind the city’s steel and concrete storm wall, locally known as the “Great Wall,” built in the 1980s to safeguard against flooding.

Conrad’s commercial portfolio ranges from offshore supply vessels to ferries, but the yard recently entered the naval market with a contract to build the Yard, Repair, Berthing, and Messing barges for the U.S. Navy.

Blue Water and Conrad announced their partnership to build autonomous vessels one year ago. While the Navy chose Blue Water’s USV as one of the contenders for the second phase of the former Modular Attack Surface Craft (MASC) program, the service cancelled MASC in March when it switched to the marketplace acquisition approach. Blue Water competed for the MUSV, the latest iteration of the program, but did not win an award.

Blue Water and Saildrone, which also did not make it to MUSV’s prototyping stage, are currently suing the Navy over the decision. The two companies claim the Navy did not follow its own selection criteria when choosing the awardees.

HII and Saronic made the Navy’s first cut, along with designs from Edison Chouset, Birdon, Leidos, PacMar Technologies and Sea Machines.

But Blue Water and Conrad are still building their steel Liberty USV, a 190-foot vessel based on a Damen-hull parent design.

“We took a proven hull design that we’re confident was heavy weather-capable,” Maatta said. “That hull is known for reduced slamming, high sea-state performance and low resistance without having to do something like aluminum or trimaran or planing, because we don’t think that putting a small vessel at 25 knots in the Pacific is going to work.”

The Navy’s MUSV requirements called for a vessel that could travel at 25 knots for 2,500 nautical miles in sea state 4 while transporting payloads up to 25 metric tons across at least two 40-foot shipping containers.

While commercial maritime companies stepping into the naval market is not new, Navy officials under both the Biden and Trump administrations have voiced a desire to upend shipbuilding acquisition. Both administrations have also excoriated the major defense contractors for their program performance and the practice of stock buybacks.

“There’s a bevy, an ecosystem of small- to mid-sized yards … that have been traditionally underutilized, and that’s fully on the Navy traditionally,” said a senior Department of Navy official. “We’re changing the way we do business 100 percent and that is now a primary focus for the secretary, frankly, at all levels of the administration’s leadership, all the way up to the White House.”

In a maritime action plan released in February, the White House called on the Navy to speed up the operational employment of autonomous vessels. The document specifically identified the Gulf Coast as an area where commercial yards could play a role.

“In short, their production can also be distributed, increasing both competition and shipbuilding capacity while lowering costs,” the plan reads.

But the small yards on the bayous of Acadiana want a sign from the government that it’s committed to serial production before they expand.

Breaux Brothers, which currently employs about 65 people, would like to churn out a boat every two months. The company would increase its workforce by 15-20 employees for that cadence and is eyeing a piece of land next door to grow should the Navy place the orders.

For Brannon Breaux, moving into naval shipbuilding is also personal. When he was younger, he had dreams of becoming a U.S. Marine.

“I watched my father build his business with his brother, and I fell in love with it and I just couldn’t get away from it,” Breaux said. “What you’re seeing here today and what we’re talking about, I can fulfill that dream by giving back to this country and saying, ‘No, I didn’t go in the service. I’m not in harm’s way. But boy, I got something that I can give back to this country and be proud of it.’”