The following is the April 17, 2025, Congressional Research Service In Focus report, MQ-25 Stingray: Background and Issues for Congress.
From the report
The U.S. Navy is developing an aircraft carrier-based unmanned aircraft system (UAS) to perform aerial refueling and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. The MQ-25 Stingray, as currently conceived, would be the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DOD’s) first unmanned tanker and the Navy’s first carrier-based unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Congress has expressed an interest in the Navy’s efforts to develop a carrier-based drone and in the future of the carrier air wing.
According to the Navy’s FY2025 budget submission to Congress, by providing the carrier air wing with a dedicated aerial tanker, the MQ-25 would extend the effective operating range of crewed fighter aircraft in the air wing and reduce the strain on the fighter aircraft that are currently modified to provide mid-air refueling capabilities for other aircraft in the air wing. In congressional testimony, Navy officials have further described the Stingray as a “pathfinder” to the future carrier air wing—one in which the Navy expects that UAVs could potentially engage in a variety of missions.
In its FY2025 budget submission, the Navy requested $898 million in procurement and research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) funding for the MQ-25, according to an annual summary of the budget published by the DOD Comptroller. If approved by Congress, the Navy’s FY2025 request would fund the procurement of three MQ-25 aircraft and represent the first year of low-rate initial production (LRIP). As of the Navy’s FY2025 budget submission, the MQ-25 program of record consisted of a total of 76 aircraft, including 67 operational aircraft and nine test and developmental aircraft.
Background
In 1999, the Navy and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began to develop a multi-mission, carrier-based unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV), a goal Congress supported in the Floyd D. Spence National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2001 (P.L. 106-398, §220). Over the following decade, the Navy, DOD, and Congress considered various possible configurations of a carrier-based combat UAV and the types of missions in which it might be able to engage. These initiatives resulted in the Unmanned Carrier Launched Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) program, the requirements for which DOD initially approved in 2011 and revised in 2013.
In 2016, the Navy redirected its efforts to develop a carrier-based UAV away from a focus on combat missions and announced that a new program, the Carrier Based Aerial Refueling System (CBARS), would replace UCLASS. In a 2016 summary of the program, the Navy said that the MQ-25 would relieve the Navy F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet fighters of having to conduct air-to-air refueling missions for carrier air wings, allowing the Super Hornet fighters to focus on combat missions and extending the operational range of strike aircraft.
The Navy selected Boeing to produce the Stingray aircraft in 2018 and awarded the company a fixed-price contract for the initial engineering development model (EDM) aircraft. Boeing delivered a static test aircraft for testing in 2024 and, according to congressional testimony in 2024, Navy officials planned for deliveries of the EDM aircraft to commence in 2025. Separately, a Boeing-owned Stingray demonstrator, the “T1” (see Figure 1), conducted its first flight in 2019 and its first mid-air refueling of another aircraft in 2021. The T1 lacked some features of the developmental and production aircraft.
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