“Track four-eight-two-one bears two-seven-five, fifteen miles,” came from CIC. “Probable merchant, southbound.”
“Roger, correlating with AIS,” confirmed Petty Officer Martinez.
Competence under pressure — the foundation of naval power since men had first gone to sea in warships. Those were the words Trammell’s first skipper had told him many years ago — something he’d instilled in his officers. Technology was changing things, and you either kept up or you got left behind. In the business of warfighting, being left behind wasn’t an option.
Through the rain-lashed windows, Captain Asa Trammell caught glimpses of the future riding alongside them. A Stormwatcher-class unmanned combat surface vessel, one of the specially designed air-defense variants, crested a wave two hundred yards off the port bow, its angular hull shedding water like a breaching whale. It carved effortlessly through the slate-gray chop with quiet efficiency, half-swallowed by mist and foam, like a ghost refusing to be seen for too long. It was one of the many semi-autonomous combat vessels his task group would put through their final paces today.
The weather was hell. That was the point.
He remembered his conversation with Vice Admiral Reeves shortly after accepting command of the USS
“Congress will scream,” Reeves had said, eyes fixed on the glossy, sensor-rich interface of the new CIC consoles. “But they screamed about the carrier too, once upon a time.”
Trammell had nodded then. He understood the politics, but more than that, he understood the stakes. For years, the Navy’s procurement pipeline had been choked by legacy thinking. Gold-plated hulls. Manpower-intensive platforms. Endless spiral upgrades.
In contrast, companies like Saronic, Shield AI, and Anduril moved like predators in blue water. They weren’t just building hulls — they were designing fleets of thinking weapons, nodes in a kill web that could fight, fail, learn, and adapt faster than any crewed ship ever could. Their approach was ruthless, elegant. Hardware as disposable. Software as sovereign.
Reeves had leaned closer that day. “Asa, we both know the next fight isn’t going to give us six months to spool up. It’s going to be fast, brutal, and decided by whoever commands the battle space — digitally and physically. Whoever dominates autonomy… wins.”
Now, with the
This wasn’t a test of weapons. It was a test of trust.
“Captain.” His executive officer appeared at his elbow. Robert Walsh had the solid build of a former linebacker and the steady demeanor of a man who’d seen enough sea duty to respect the ocean without fearing it. “METOC shows this mess clearing by 0900. We’ll have decent conditions for the demonstration.”
Trammell nodded, eyes still on the Sentinel Stormwatcher as it disappeared into another valley of water. Despite its 279-foot length, the stealthy unmanned vessel cut through the waves like a giant surface board. Hidden within its angular features were a series of removable weapon pods that gave the vessel a capability Trammell still marveled at.
In its present form, it carried twenty-four of the versatile multirole SM-6 missiles. Two quad-pack SeaRAM launchers flanked the superstructure, providing close-in defense against missiles and drones, while a pair of quad-pack ESSM interceptors for short-range aerial threats. Mounted fore and aft were twin 150kW Cobalt beam lasers, capable of silently scorching incoming targets mid-flight. Amidships, beneath a retractable panel, sat the dish-like emitter of the Epirus high-powered microwave system — designed to fry the guidance systems of entire drone swarms in a single burst. All of it was slaved to GIDEON’s combat AI, allowing the Stormwatcher to engage threats across multiple domains without a human aboard.
“How are our metal friends handling it?” Trammel asked.
“The Seeker AUVs are in their element. The acoustic interference is actually helping them practice noise discrimination. The surface units…” Walsh paused. “Stormwatcher-3 is reporting some visual degradation from salt accumulation on its camera lens.”
“Damn, it’s still operational, right?” Trammell asked.
“Affirmative. All green, sir. The GIDEON-AI is keeping them tighter than a drum section,” Walsh confirmed.
