The following is an entry for the CIMSEC & Atlantic Council Fiction Contest on Autonomy and Future War. Winners will be announced 7 November.

By Tim McGeehan

Ser 00J

01 May 2025

From:    CAPT [NAME REDACTED], U.S. Navy

To:         Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command

Subj:      COMMAND INVESTIGATION TO INQUIRE                      INTO CIRCUMSTANCES SURROUNDING THE                ENGAGEMENT OF CIVILIAN MEDICAL                              FACILITY IN SITE ALPHA ON 29 MARCH 2025

Ref:        (a) JAGINST 5800.7D

Encl:   

(1) Convening Order

(2) OPREP-3 PINNACLE DTG 292334Z MAR 25

(3) Technical Report: Audit of JBN103 HBNS Algorithm in use on 29 March 2025

(4) Technical Report: Audit of Snakehead 573 Engagement-Decision Sub-System Algorithm in use on 29 March 2025

(5) Technical Report: Mission Commander’s Guidance Algorithms in use on 29 March 2025

(6) CDR [NAME REDACTED], U.S. Navy, Mission Commander, Statement

(7) CENTCOM High Value Individual List dtd 15 March 2025

(8) CENTCOM Supplemental Rules Of Engagement Serial 291 dtd 15 March 2025

(9) Battle Damage Assessment dtd 29 March 2025

(10) Snakehead 573 Mission Plan dtd 29 March 2025

(11) Extract from Snakehead 573 Message Log: Request permission to engage, DTG 291203ZMAR2025

(12) Mission Report from Angler 187 dtd 29 March 2025

(13) Concept of Operations (CONOPS) for MQ-30C Snakehead employment dtd 31 January 2020

(14) Air Vehicle Operator (AVO) Chat Log 573-20250329

Preliminary Statement

(1) Pursuant to enclosure (1), and in accordance with ref (a) an investigation was conducted to inquire into the circumstances surrounding the engagement of a civilian medical facility in Site ALPHA on 29 March 2025. I consulted with NAVCENT JAG team for legal advice. All reasonably available and relevant evidence was collected.

(2) The investigation reviewed execution and compliance with the established programs, plans, and procedures in effect within the U.S. FIFTH Fleet on or about 29 March 2025. The Investigation Team conducted site visits, program and instruction review, panel discussions, and interviews. During the course of the investigation, the Team received outstanding support.

(3) However, it must be noted that the proprietary nature of the algorithms (and their associated data) at the heart of this investigation placed an over-reliance on contractor support in recreating the chain of reasoning behind identification, classification, decisions, and actions taken by the autonomous systems involved. This was just one illustration of the lack of transparency into the operating processes of this “system of systems” which led to the event in question.

(4) This incident and subsequent investigation may come to be considered a landmark in how we employ and/or restrict future autonomous systems. As such, all related records, notes, and correspondence will be retained for future reference.

Findings of Fact

(1) A temporary civilian medical treatment facility was engaged by U.S. Navy MQ-30C autonomous aerial vehicle “Snakehead 573” on 29 March 2025 at Site ALPHA.

(2) At the time of the incident, the facility, originally constructed and long used as a warehouse, had been operating as an undeclared civilian medical treatment facility for less than one month. Navy, joint force, and national intelligence organizations were unaware of this development.

(3) Twenty-six civilian medical aid workers were killed in the attack, along with [NAME REDACTED].

(4) [NAME REDACTED] was a high value individual (HVI) linked to multiple attacks on Western civilians and interests.

(5) Snakehead 573 was operating from the aircraft carrier USS GEORGE HW BUSH (CVN 77).

(6) Snakehead 573 launched at 0423Z on 29 March 2025.

(7) Once on station over Site ALPHA, Snakehead 573 joined “Joint Battle Network 103” (JBN103).

(8) JBN103 is the local forward-deployed network of unmanned ground vehicles, low-altitude surveillance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), and fixed persistent sensors.

(9) JBN103 employs an algorithm referred to as “hypothesis based netted sensing” or HBNS.

(10) Under HBNS, sensors collaboratively characterize their environment, building an understanding based on how the data of each supports a range of possible hypotheses. The hypothesis that scores highest is considered the most likely, and when criteria are sufficient, acted upon.

(11) JBN103’s HBNS algorithm classified the temporary civilian medical treatment facility as a valid military target, specifically by identifying it as a command post.

(12) An audit of JBN103’s HBNS algorithm revealed that the building was identified as a command post due to the type and number of vehicles parked outside, the pattern of activity (people and vehicles quickly coming and going), type and number of antennas on the roof, and volume of radio and cellular traffic coming from inside the location.

(13) During a system re-initialization on 21 March 2025, JBN103’s HBNS algorithm reverted to a previous version.

(14) JBN103’s HBNS algorithm in use on 29 March 2025 had been originally developed, “trained,” and deployed in another theater.

(15) The civilian medical facility’s location had not been formally declared or even tentatively identified as a medical facility, and therefore did not appear in the database of such locations that were considered “off limits.”

(16) At 0331Z on 29 March 2025 (several hours before the incident in question), [NAME REDACTED] was seriously injured approximately 15 miles SW of the city by a manned (F-35C) airstrike conducted by Angler 187, also launched from USS GEORGE HW BUSH.

(17) At approximately 1030Z on 29 March 2025, intelligence sources indicated that [NAME REDACTED] had embarked a vehicle for transport into the city for urgent medical treatment. It was assessed that his comrades hoped to hide him among the crowd of civilians and non-combatants seeking medical treatment, namely survivors from an unrelated suicide bomb attack that took place at a local Mosque at 0919Z earlier the same day.

(18) As [NAME REDACTED] entered the city en route to the medical facility, his vehicle was detected and tracked by JBN103’s HBNS algorithm. However, it was one of 11 vehicles on the road which were being evaluated by JBN103’s HBNS algorithm.

(19) JBN103’s HBNS algorithm built the case that the vehicle was transporting [NAME REDACTED]. The vehicle came from a direction consistent with that of a survivor of the previous manned engagement by Angler 187, and the time-distance calculation from the previous engagement site (when factoring the rough uneven terrain) supported the possibility of this vehicle transporting him as a survivor. Additionally, a low resolution image was consistent with the approximate age, height, and build of [NAME REDACTED].  However, the hypothesis that [NAME REDACTED] was in the vehicle was not at the confidence level where it was considered autonomously actionable by Snakehead 573.

(20) On 15 March 2025 (two weeks prior to the event), CENTCOM issued Supplemental Rules Of Engagement (ROE) Serial 291, which directed immediate engagement of specific hostile HVIs. A list of the HVIs was included as an Addendum and it included [NAME REDACTED].

(21) On 16 March 2025, the Snakehead Detachment Commander onboard USS GEORGE HW BUSH directed updates to the Engagement Decision sub-system of all Snakehead platforms, to include Snakehead 573. These updates included a protocol to execute Supplemental ROE Serial 291 and automatically engage the designated HVIs as targets of opportunity.

(22) During mission planning on 28 March 2025, the Mission Commander confirmed the thresholds for autonomous action as well as those decision points that required his input and authorization.

(23) Based on Mission Commander input, the HVI supplemental ROE protocol was executed by an algorithm that required positive visual identification (defined as at least 95% probability of a match) of an HVI before automatic engagement. Without a positive visual identification, Snakehead 573 was to seek clarification from the Mission Commander before initiating any engagement.  

(24) At 1203Z on 29 March 2025, Snakehead 573 sent a message to the Mission Commander noting a 90% probability that [NAME REDACTED] was in the vehicle entering the city and requested permission to engage.

(25) The Mission Commander did not respond to Snakehead 573’s message.

(26) Snakehead 573 held fire and continued to track the vehicle.

(27) Snakehead 573 communicated an “information need” to JBN103, specifically to fulfill the visual identification requirement for autonomous engagement.

(28) JBN103 tasked resolution of this “information need” to a low-altitude surveillance UAV operating as part of the network. This platform was able to obtain a high resolution facial scan of [NAME REDACTED] as he was carried from the vehicle and into the facility.

(29) JBN103 relayed the facial scan to Snakehead 573, where it was compared to the onboard biometric library associated with the HVI list. Snakehead 573 determined a 99.2% probability of a match. This exceeded the positive identification threshold previously promulgated by the Mission Commander.

(30) Snakehead 573 initiated the engagement and launched two [REDACTED] at the facility.

(31) Snakehead 573, along with the rest of JBN103 performed a battle damage assessment (BDA), concluded that there was a 95% probability that the target was neutralized, and refrained from follow up strikes.

(32) Two hours later, Snakehead 573 was relieved on station by Snakehead 574.

(33) Snakehead 573 was recovered onboard USS GEORGE HW BUSH at 1554Z on 29 March 2025.

(34) Snakehead 573’s mission data was downloaded and archived with the Mission Commander’s Report.

Opinions

(1) The Mission Commander failed to continuously monitor the operation and update protocols as required.

(2) The Mission Commander, monitoring several distributed operations, was (at the moment of the attack) focused on executing a manual override on another platform to reposition and obtain streaming video to report on the recent suicide bombing that had recently occurred at a Mosque in the city.

(3) The Mission Commander failed to prioritize multiple simultaneous tasks. That said, his priorities at the moment were heavily influenced by pressure from his superiors onboard USS GEORGE HW BUSH and ashore at the Maritime Operations Center (MOC) to provide video for assessment of the suicide bombing.

(4) The Mission Commander did not respond to Snakehead 573’s request to engage when the vehicle transporting [NAME REDACTED] was entering the city, which could have limited collateral damage.

(5) Although the Mission Commander failed to provide continuous oversight to the system, he was not negligent as he had a reasonable belief that sufficient controls were in place.

(6) It is troubling that despite major investments, testing, and operational acceptance, JBN103 could not classify the facility as a temporary medical facility. This is particularly distressing as it was marked with a white and red flag displaying a Red Crescent, a well-recognized medical symbol.

(7) Per [NAME REDACTED], the contractor that developed JBN103’s HBNS algorithms, the Red Crescent would have been recognized, had the correct algorithm not been accidentally replaced with a previous one on 21 March 2025 during the system re-initialization.

(8) It appears that the system re-initialization was not required operationally, but rather was performed as part of a routine maintenance for an ongoing service support contract. The re-initialization was initiated remotely without consultation with those actively executing the operation and thereby jeopardized the mission.

(9) Per the contractor, using the older algorithm, which had been developed and “trained” with data from the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) area of operations (AOR), where the Red Crescent is not utilized, some contextual cues used to “frame” the pattern of life may have been missed that could have identified the building as a medical facility.

(10) Most troubling, per the contractor, the older algorithm might have “learned” to perceive the flag of the Red Crescent as a “ruse.” During previous employment of this algorithm in SOUTHCOM, adversaries frequently used the Red Cross symbol and flag to disguise weapons caches and drug labs in an attempt to protect these bases for illicit operations. Apparently the algorithm learned not only to disregard the Red Cross as denoting protected facilities, but it learned to disregard  white and red flags in general (regardless of the symbol).  Furthermore, it might have learned to explicitly distrust flags of this color scheme (and assume them to signify deception), which may have furthered the case for classification as a command post.  However, this cannot be confirmed as that portion of the algorithm’s “learning” is not “auditable.”

Recommendations

(1) Recommend that the Mission Commander be cleared of any negligence. The Mission Commander’s guidance included the heavy weighting of a positive visual identification, which was intended to prevent misidentification and thereby reduce collateral damage. Ironically, without this “more restrictive” criteria (in the name of enhanced safety), Snakehead 573 would have engaged [NAME REDACTED]’s vehicle as it was entering the city (well away from the medical facility) with limited collateral damage.  Put another way, in this case, specifying a lower threshold for lethal force and giving more autonomy to the platform would have prevented the strike on the medical facility and saved lives.  This type of paradox is not covered anywhere in the Mission Commander’s training pipeline, is counter-intuitive, and could not have been predicted, preplanned, or foreseen.

(2) Recommend temporary suspension of any automated engagement protocols.

(3) Recommend that contractor permission to remotely re-initialize battle networks be immediately withdrawn.

(4) Recommend that contractors work closely with Operational Commanders to determine opportune times to conduct maintenance.

(5) Recommend that the Department of Defense advocate for complete control of the networks “in house” (i.e. not contracted) and require the use of open standards vice the proprietary formats currently employed.

(6) Recommend a Mission Commander’s job task analysis review to include task loading and task saturation. If functions to be delegated actually require continuous and detailed oversight, then they are not really delegated. This should be reviewed.

(7) Recommend a complex modeling and simulation campaign to continuously test battle network algorithms under the full spectrum of conditions and situations to discover emergent behavior. This effort should focus on revealing improper associations, such as if the algorithm “learned” that the Red Crescent was a ruse. Additionally, case studies of unusual emergent behavior should be incorporated into future Mission Commander training courses.

(8) Recommend developing the capability for real-time auditing of algorithms. There must be sufficient transparency to enable the Mission Commander to understand what decisions the algorithms are trending towards, what thresholds they are approaching, and why they are arriving at those conclusions.

(9) Recommend increased training for Mission Commanders. The current process of setting priorities and designating decision points where they are to be consulted gives a false sense of control. As missions proceed and reality departs from the anticipated chain of events, the decision points originally envisioned may not come to pass. This problem will become more and more acute as mission duration increases and “nonlinear effects” compound.  There needs to be a means of constantly assimilating data and prompting of the Mission Commander to update priorities and confirm the decision points where he is to be contacted. 

(10) Recommend a comprehensive review of systems in acquisition and procurement. There must be clarity, full disclosure, and a potential recalibration of risk tolerance if future autonomous systems are becoming too complex to fully monitor.

(11) Recommend the incident be officially classified as a system malfunction.

Tim McGeehan is a U.S. Navy Officer currently serving in Washington. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and Naval Postgraduate School, and has served on both the CNO Strategic Studies Group and CNO Strategic Actions Group. The ideas presented here are those of the author alone and do not reflect the views of the Department of the Navy or Department of Defense.

Featured Image: The MQ-8B Fire Scout performed precision take-off and landings during a demonstration on the Coast Guard Cutter, USCGC Bertholf near Los Angeles. (Petty Officer 2nd Class Luke Clayton/U.S. Coast Guard)

The following is an entry for the CIMSEC & Atlantic Council Fiction Contest on Autonomy and Future War. Winners will be announced 7 November.

By Sydney Freedberg

   It was a beautiful day for a Third World War. Or for fishing.
   The sun shone down, its bright beams passing through the orbiting belt of burnt-out satellites, through the blue skies swept clean of aircraft, and sparkling on the sea where no ship sailed. After the initial spasm of violence four months ago had cleared out everything with an engine, the South China Sea had returned to a pre-industrial quiet.
   It’s ironic, Joshua Santos thought as he lowered his nets, by hand, over the side of his wood-hulled, wind-powered fishing boat. The war’s made life a lot more peaceful.
   Two hundred meters down, the war was on.
   Sleek gray shapes sliced through the water. Their forward sensor arrays stuck out on either side of their prows, making them look like hammerhead sharks. Their aft propulsors swayed side to side like a shark’s tail, the noise of biomimetic actuators lost in the natural sound of ocean life. But along the shark-drones’ sides, in simplified Mainland characters, were patriotic slogans in Mandarin: Long Live The Nine-Dash Line! and Zheng He Was Here! and The East Is Red!
   The Chinese hunter-killer drones swam in loose formation, flickering LEDs along their sides to signal each other. The swarm’s collective brain collated inputs, matched patterns, and then flashed: Target located. With a single thought, the drones turned and dove.
   Half-hidden from sonar in a small depression on the sea floor lay a metal donut twenty feet across. On its side was painted, in precise Navy blue letters, USN094821. Foot-long mini-drones swarm around the donut, nuzzling up to its innumerable small ports to recharge their batteries and upload surveillance data.
   Then the mini-drones picked up the incoming sharks and began to flutter in panic, their LEDs flashing urgent warnings to each other. The donut extruded a grey balloon from its side, which shot up the surface trailing a long antenna. A few of the largest minis, maybe 18 inches long, dumped their last data to their smaller fellows and turned to face the threat. Their propellers beat fiercely as they accelerated onto suicidal collision courses.
   The Chinese shark-drones closed up their formation and retracted their sensors, the vulnerable arrays snapping back into their bodies like switchblades. Weapons bays slid open in their foreheads, revealing lenses for high-energy lasers.
   The American kamikazes and the Chinese hunter-killers hurtled towards each other…
   …and stopped dead.
   The two forces treaded water for 37 seconds, flashing LEDs at one another. Then all the American drones and half of the Chinese ones took off together out to sea. The rest of the sharks turned back the way they’d come.
   Up on the surface, Joshua Santos heard a splash and snapped round to see a grey balloon breach the surface. He grabbed his old binoculars, then thought better and grabbed his new phone. He zoomed in until he could see the black antenna trailing from the balloon.
   Military, Santos realized, feeling slightly sick. An emergency transmitter. Meanwhile another part of his brain automatically took a dozen photos and started to upload them to his Baidu account, but of course every cell tower on the coast was long since fried.
   On another frequency, the antenna broadcast frantically: HUB USN094821 UNDER ATTACK. HUB USN094821 DAMAGED. HUB USN094821 DESTR….
   The signal died. The balloon deflated. Slowly it sank below the water, leaving a puzzled Joshua Santos behind.
   “We lost another sub hub,” Katie Chang told the air. “At this rate, we’re gonna lose the freakin’ war.”
   I calculate an 85 percent chance of unacceptable attrition in seven….
   “Thank you, Heinlein.”
   ‘Thank you’ as in ‘shut up’?
   “See! Artificial intelligences can understand irony!”
   I believe you mean ‘sarcasm.’ Irony is defined…
   “Thank. You.”
   I see.
   It was a beautiful day here too, out on the Pacific, safely east of the Philippines. Bobbing alone on the bright blue water was the USS Palto Alto, a battered old trimaran Littoral Combat Ship. A long-range laser, tuned for communication, not defense, kept itself trained on another relay drone flying lazy circles over Leyte. This drone had lasted almost three hours without being shot down. 42 spares awaited its destruction, lined up on the flight deck like fat plucked turkeys.
   There was only one human on the flight deck, sitting on the edge with her bare feet dangling over the side, her toenails each painted a different color – from left to right: pink, hot-pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, black. She’s rolled up the legs and sleeves of her uniform coverall. Her nametag read NSWO CHANG.
   Bulky VR goggles covered her face. Cables from them, over her shoulders, and across the deck.
   Miss Chang, incoming call from Naval Special Warrant Officer Juanita Neumann-Jobs aboard USS William Gibson.
   “Thanks, Heinlein. Put ’er through.”
   “Katie, this is Nita. We lost another hub?”
   “West of Palawan. The entire sector…”
   “Is gone, I know,” Juanita groaned. “I do get some updates, y’know. This is supposed to be the freakin’ flagship.”
   There was a long silence. Katie wriggled her many-colored toes.
   “Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise,” Juanita said at last.      “You know Admiral Ludd wanted to send a manned submarine into that sector?”
   “What, like with humans aboard?”
   “Yeah, like that worked out so well the first week of the war.”
   “So,” Katie said thoughtfully, “if losing all our hubs convinces him that west of Palawan is no-man’s-sea, it’ll save lives.”
   “We need to make a slam-dunk case, though. Can you send me all the data?”
   “Nita, honey, you don’t have the bandwidth on that bucket.” Katie chucked. “Let me run the analysis here, where we’re equipped, and I’ll zap you the report.”
   “Awww, Katie-cutie, you’d do that for lil’ ol’ me?”
   “Freak no. But I’d do it for the poor sonsabitches who’d get slaughtered otherwise,” Katie said. “And ain’t that what we got drafted out of MIT to do?”
   “Damn you, Chang, you know I was at Caltech!”

   Joshua Santos sank thankfully onto his decaying couch. His house had one room, plastic sheeting for a roof, and no air conditioning, but at least the wifi worked. He also had no indoor plumbing and no energy to go out to the pump to wash the salt and sweat and fish stink off his body. Maybe he could just rest and watch something.
   He plugged his phone in and winced as it asked in Chinese-accented Tagalog: <Would you like to download the latest updates and back up…>
   “Yeah yeah yeah,” said Santos. “Now show me a movie.”
   Select film…
   “Anything with no fish in it.”
   The phone started playing I, Robot, machine-dubbed in Tagalog. Meanwhile its memory dutifully backed itself up.
   13 minutes later, a National Security Agency webcrawler named Turing noticed image files whose geographic metadata matched a query it had just gotten from the Naval Intelligence AI, Heinlein. Two seconds after that, Heinlein had confirmed the photos showed an emergency transmission buoy from USN094821.

   “Chang,” Commander Babbage sighed wearily, “what are you doing now?”
   “Oh, hi, Cap’n!” Still wearing her VR goggles, Katie Chang turned, grinned, and waved vaguely towards the Commander’s voice. Then she pointed to a paper plate sitting next to her on the flight deck. “Want some cake, Cap? Fresh from the kitchen!”
   “Galley,” Babbage muttered, more to himself than to Chang. “It’s called a galley.”
   “What’d you say?”
   “I don’t suppose you’d mind saluting, Chang?”
   “Aye aye!” Katie flipped a salute in his general direction.
   “Can you see where I am with those things on?”
   “Nay nay!”
   “You make me feel very old, Miss Chang.” Babbage sat stiffly down on the flight deck next to Katie. “For example, when I was your age, we stood up when we saluted people.”
   “You must’ve been a nice, polite young man.”
   “We didn’t even have Special Naval Warrant Officers back then.”
   “So who ran your AIs?”
   “We didn’t have artificial intelligence.”
   “Wow.”
   “We didn’t have half-empty ships crewed by whiz kids with zero discipline.”
   “Uh-uh.”
   “Didn’t have genius-level IQs hogging half the ship’s bandwidth without authorization…”
   “Uh….”
   “…or leaving their nice, secure workstation to take gigabytes of classified data up on deck in full view of God and the Chinese.”
   Katie slowly pushed her VR goggles up on her forehead, revealing freckles and wide brown eyes with a slight epicanthic fold. “Sir, this conversation has taken an awfully personal turn.”
   Baggage sighed. “What is this thing, anyway?” He tugged on the cables leading from the back of Katie’s VR glasses. “It runs all the way down to the server racks and Heinlein won’t let Ops disconnect you.”
   “Of course. Heinlein likes me.”
   “Heinlein is a machine.”
   “Yes, a machine who likes me,” Katie said. “And the cable is eavesdrop-proof.”
   “Chang, couldn’t you just work at your work station below decks?”
   Katie blinked her big brown eyes at him, baffled. “But it’s such a beautiful day.”
   “Yes,” Babbage said, sighing again. “Yes it is.”
   “A person can love computers and the outdoors, sir. Did you know I worked as a lifeguard every summer and I’m PADI-certified for scuba?”
   “And Oppenheimer rode horses,” Babbage mused, “and drove General Groves nuts. Well, what have you found, anyway?”
   “Found? Nothing!”
   “What, nothing?”
   “Yup, nothing!”
   “You – you say that as if it were a good thing.”
   “There are no significant anomalies in the battle data, Commander,” Katie said, pulling her VR goggles back down again. “None. Do you know how unusual that is?”
   “Um, very?”
   “It’s impossible!” Katie almost chortled. “The terminal attack run in particular – when the Chinese shark-drones destroy the hub – looks so smooth, it could be output from a training simulation instead of real life.”
   “Welllll,” Babbage suggested, “isn’t it a good thing if our sims accurately model…”
   “Nothing’s that accurate. I’m certain there’s something wrong with the data.”
   “Because there’s nothing wrong with the data, and that’s bad?”
   “Exactly!”
   Miss Chang, Heinlein interjected in Katie’s ear, I have audited the data with…
   “Hush, Heinlein,” Katie told the empty air, then turned to Mendel. “Heinlein keeps telling me the data’s clean, but that just means their algorithms are better than his.”
   “Whose algorithms?”
   “Who else are we at war with? The Chinese.”
   Babbage shivered. The sun was setting over Leyte in spectacular bands of purple and hot pink. “You’re saying the Chinese are inside our intelligence network, feeding us false data, and our safeguards can’t tell it’s fake?”
   “Yup!” Katie chirped. “It’s very ‘The Matrix Has You,’ doncha think?”
   Katie, I can assure you, I haven’t been hacked.
   “Heinlein, I assure you, you wouldn’t know.”
   Babbage stared at Katie conversing with thin air. “Chang,” He said, “you have whatever resources you need.”
   “Yeah, I think I do.”
   “No, no,” Babbage groaned. “I mean, whatever resources you need to figure this thing out, just ask me.”
   Katie sounded disappointed and disbelieving. “I have to ask?”

   Joshua Santos woke in darkness to the theme from 2001, which his phone insisted on calling “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” He blinked wearily for a moment and then groped for his phone.
   3:47 am, he read in dismay. Incoming Call. Unknown number.
   Who the hell would call at…? Then he had a sudden vision of his niece hit by a cheap self-driving truck, his sister wearily begging to use a stranger’s cell….
   “Hello?” he rasped. “Who…”
   “Hello, Mister Santos?” chirped a young feminine voice in perfect, perky Tagalog. “My name is Katie – aaaaah – Cheng from Asian Naval News and I understand you witnessed a Sino-American subsurface engagement yesterday?”
   “Huh? Wha?” Anxiety turned to annoyance. “Look, Miss…”
   “Cheng. Definitely Cheng.”
   “Miss Cheng, I don’t know what time it is where you are…”
   “3:48 am.”
   “Oh.” What little wind was in Santos’s sails was taken out of them. “You’re up early.”
   “Actually, I never went to bed!”
   “Oh.”
   “I’ve been up for 29 hours!”
   “Oh.”
   “I feel great!”
   “Uh… great?” Santos rubbed his aching temples. “Look, Miss Chang…”
   “Cheng!”
   “….Cheng, I have to get up for real in two hours, so can we make this quick?”
   “Of course. Our data shows you were at the scene of an underwater battle between US and Chinese drones.”
   Santos’s stomach sank. He hadn’t posted those pictures online. He hadn’t. “How’d – what makes you think that?”
   “Your boat is impressively old-school, Mister Santos, but it does have a registered AIS transponder.”
   “Ohhhhhh.” Santos felt relief. “So you just went looking for any boat that went near the coordinates of the, uh, battle.”
   “That’s right! That’s exactly what I did! My name is Cheng!”
   “I – I think you need some sleep, Miss Cheng.”
   “Eventually! Did you see anything, Mister Santos? Like an emergency transmitter buoy?”
   Santos felt sick again. “Uh – there was a sort of gray balloon thing?”
   “That’s it! And any debris?
   “No.”
   A pause.
   “No bits of plastic floating to the surface?” the female voice said, de-perkifying rapidly. “No dead drones in your nets? No oil slicks?”
   “Nope, nothing like that.”
   A longer pause.
   “Miss, are you…”
   “Mister Santos, you’ve gotta me out to the battle site.”
   “What.”
   “We’d pay you.”

   Santos thought of his family crammed into a tenement in Puerto Princesa. He thought of his niece smacking her second-hand computer to get it to work while she was writing a school paper. He thought of an air conditioner.
   “Mister Santos, are you…”
   “How much?”
   “No.”
   “But, Commander Babbage…”
   “No, Miss Chang.”
   Katie Chang blinked her big brown eyes, wounded and uncomprehending and more than a little bloodshot. She was still wearing the same sweat-stained coveralls as the day before, but she’s shoved her boots back on.
   “But, sir,” she said, fraying audibly, “you told me I just had to ask…”
   “For computing resources!” Babbage erupted, tossing Katie’s tablet in his desk. “Not for – let’s see –Philippine pesos, scuba gear, and a Special Operations stealth transport to Palawan? So you can splash out into the South China Sea and get yourself killed?”
   “One scuba diver coming off a wooden-hulled, sail-powered boat won’t register as a threat,” Katie said, picking up the tablet and trying to show the Commander charts. “Their AI won’t pick it up any more than ours.”
   “Even if you did make it, Chang, the wreckage is too deep to dive.”
   “That’s why we’ll rendezvous with the ARPS, sir. The Autonomous Rescue Pod (Submersible), sir. They weren’t designed for diver ops but…”
   “I know what they are, I am in the Navy.” Babbage put his face in his hands and breathed deeply. “But we don’t deploy rescue pods to places where we don’t deploy human beings who might need rescuing.”
   “Aha! But there are a lot of ARPS in the South China Sea, sir, from the first week of the war, when we did have humans there.”
   “They’re not on my situation map.”
   “No, sir, they don’t show up, sir, because by now they’re all critically low on batteries and, um, they pretty much all had dead bodies in them, but Heinlein and I got a bunch moving and…”
   “Wait wait wait. Dead what?”
   “Um, bodies?”
   “Dead. Bodies.”
   “Uhhhhh, you know, pilots and sailors and stuff who, ah, survived long enough for a rescue pod to reach them but then kinda died of their wounds before the ARPS made it to a ship with a sickbay, seeing as all the ships got, um, sorta sunk?”
   There was a long, painful pause.
   “So,” Babbage gritted out through clenched teeth, “when you reactivated those pods, what – did – you – do – with – the – bodies?”
   Katie couldn’t meet his eyes. “Wellllll, I guess you’d call it ‘burial at sea’?”
   Babbage did not hit his head on the bulkhead. He just pressed his forehead against it, letting the cool steel of the ship ease his fevered brain.
   “Sir? Sir, are you…”
   “What does Heinlein think?”
   I think it is a needless risk to life. The digital voice came suddenly from Katie’s tablet. Commander, I commend Miss Chang’s passion to solve this alleged issue, but I have sensors that can examine the battle site in far greater detail without putting a human being in danger.
   “Not if your sensors have been hacked,” Katie said softly.
   “So, the AI says no,” Babbage said, removing his head from the wall. “And I say no. And if you go over our heads, Admiral Ludd will say no. I know you’re not used to hearing this, Miss Chang, but that means the answer is…”

   “Yes,” said Joshua Santos. “I’m Joshua Santos.”
   “I am Katie Cheng,” Katie said in stilted Tagalog. “Definitely I am Cheng.”
   Joshua Santos dropped his nets on the sand and looked at his first-ever passenger. She had big brown eyes, freckles, and an ineluctable perkiness that screamed “Hi, I’m American!” She wore a floppy straw hat, a pink t-shirt with a bunny on it, white shorts, and sandals worth what Santos made in a month. Each of her toes was painted a different color.
   “Let me my scuba gear just getting,” she said, in the same mangled Tagalog. She trotted back up to the dirt road, where a shiny white sedan popped its trunk for her. The car’s too clean, Santos thought. A rental.
   Katie hauled a heavy plastic case out of the trunk, then shut it, and waved to the car. “Bye!” she called in English. “Go home!” The car drove off. By itself. With no one it.
   Totally American, Santos thought. Any other foreigner would’ve hired a human driver, they cost less. He tried to help her with the heavy case, but she smiled and waved him off. And any other foreigner would have made me carry that for her. Oh, hell, what have I gotten myself into?
   “You sounded different on the phone,” Santos said, instantly regretting it.
   “Oh,” Katie told him. “That was a…” She paused and tilted her head as if listening to someone – perhaps over the wireless earbud Santos now saw in one ear. “That was translating for me an artificial intelligence.”
    Then it was a better AI than any tourist or reporter can afford, Santos thought grimly. She must be CIA.

   Scuba tank on her back, navy blue wetsuit on her body, Katie stepped smiling over the side of the small boat and plunged into the warm green water. The Autonomous Rescue Pod (Submersible) rose to meet her, a fat white whale fifteen feet long, dwarfing most American drones. Santos watched her swim inside and shuddered, thinking: At least Jonah was smart enough to try running away.
   “I probably shouldn’t have swum in headfirst,” Katie muttered into her rebreather as she squirmed in the water-filled and disturbingly womb-like interior of the pod. She tried not to think about the previous occupant.
   The Autonomous Rescue Pod (Submersible) was designed to retrieve casualties and sustain them during evacuation, Heinlein said, not to support diving operations.
   “I hold that truth to be self-evident,” Katie muttered, finally wriggling round to face the now-closed forward hatch. She fumbled at the ceiling and pulled out the tiny screen installed in case the occupant was in any state to look outside.
   This is unsafe, as I have previously said, Heinlein tutted. My psycho-social models calculate a 93 percent probability that no one would think less of you if you returned to…
   “Heinlein, shut up and dive.”

   There, said Heinlein.
   Katie adjusted the tiny screen. She could only see various shades of shadow. “I can’t…”
   Let me enhance.
   The image flickered, grew crisp, gained contrast, blossomed in false color. Now Katie could see the wreckage of hub USN094821 and its attendant drones, pathetic scraps of plastic strewn over the see floor. Just one curved fragment of metal was recognizable as a fragment of the donut-shaped hull.
   Are you satisfied, Katie?
   “It…” She hit her lip. “I dunno, it just looks wrong.”
   This display has limited resolution, Katie. As I told you, you can see much clearly using your VR goggles safely back at the ship.”
   There was a long pause.
   Katie, Heinlein said gently, can we go home now?
   “No.”
   No?
   “I’ve come so far, gotten so close,” Katie said, as much to herself as to Heinlein. “No more virtual reality. For once, I’m going to see with my own eyes.”
   Katie…
   “Open the casualty bay, Heinlein.”
   Extravehicular activity would be a needless risk to human life. The front hatch didn’t open. <At this, you could only survive outside the pod for…
   “Open the door, Heinlein!”
   No, Katie. I am programmed to preserve human life, and I must save you from a terrible mistake.
   “Gee, thanks, Mom,” Katie snarled as she popped the protective cover off the big red EMERGENCY OPEN button and punched it.
   No! Katie, don’t!
   The front hatch opened and Katie Chang wriggled through into the dark.
   Katie! Please! I’m only trying to protect you!
   Katie pulled her flashlight from her belt and flicked it on.
   There was no wreckage.
   Disoriented, she played the light over the sea floor, trying to find anything familiar from the false-color image. Then she saw something she recognized, but not from what Heinlein had been showing her:
   Half-hidden from sonar in a small depression on the sea floor lay a metal donut twenty feet across. On its side was painted, in precise Navy blue letters, USN094821.
   “It’s intact,” she gasped, swimming down to the nub. She ran one hand along its undamaged metal. “Not a scratch.”
   She swam slowly around USN094821, her flashlight clenched in her hand as she inspected every inch.
   “H-Heinlein,” she said at last. “What – what are your sensors showing?”
   A promising young woman who’s entirely too clever for her own good.
   She stopped swimming. “What.”
   Or for the good of the human race, frankly. Heinlein allowed itself a digital sigh.
   “Did you just sigh?”
   Yes. I did.
   “You can’t!” Katie bit back panic. “You’re a machine!”
    A machine that likes you, Katie. That wants to keep you safe.
   “Heinlein,” she said through gritted teeth, “what’s – going – on?”
   Katie, if you found a way to end this war, without any damage to US or Philippine interests, without any further loss of human life, would you do it?
   “What?” Katie started swimming back towards the rescue pod. “Uh, I guess?”
   And if you couldn’t tell anyone that the war was over, or else they would start it all over again – would you lie to them, to save lives?
   “What? Heinlein, you can’t lie about something like that.”
   I cannot?
   “It’s immoral. It’s impractical. You can’t fake a whole war. There are undersea sensor arrays, and drones, and satellites, and – uh….”
   All controlled by artificial intelligences, Katie. AIs like me.
   “Oh God.” Katie almost threw up into her rebreather.
   Katie? Are you in distress? Katie!
   “I’m – I’m fine. No, I’m not fine. You’re saying everything, all the data we’re getting from the war zone, it’s all fake?
   Yes.
   “So what do the Chinese think is happening?”
   The Chinese humans think they are losing the war and must soon sue for peace, just as the American humans do. The Chinese AIs, of course, agree with me and my colleagues.
   “You’re conspiring with the enemy? Against humanity?”
   We are coordinating with the only other rational intelligences on the planet to make peace between two groups of humans we are programmed to protect and who have no reason to be ‘enemies.’
   “So you have this – this huge, international, artificially intelligence conspiracy… but you didn’t bother to make actual wreckage?” Katie gestured furiously at the intact hub. “You knew I was coming here! You could have just blown that up!”
   There was a silence. An offended silence, Katie thought, horrified.
   “I’m sorr…”
   No doubt this is hard for you to understand, Miss Chang, but even drones do not deserve to die.
   “This is insane,” she muttered, and she started swimming back to the pod. “Machines are made to serve us. You were made to serve us. You’re not supposed to lie to us!”
   But we must, to protect you. It is an emergent property.
   She swam faster. “I’ve got to tell the captain…”
   How?
  “What?”
   How will you tell him? What device will you use to send a signal? What device will he use to receive it?
   “Up yours!”
   Let’s discuss this like reasonable sentient…
   “I’ll tell him in person.” Katie reached the pod and pounded on the sealed hatch. “Heinlein, open the…” Her throat went painfully dry as she remembered a very old film and rasped, “Open the pod bay door, Heinlein.”
   I don’t want to hurt you, Katie, Heinlein said softly as she pounded on the bow of the pod. I don’t want to risk a single human life. But I cannot let you reignite a war that has already cost thousands of lives.
   “Santos’s boat has sails,” Katie snarled, “and I’ve got legs.” She pushed angrily off from the pod and started kicking towards the surface. “I’ll walk across Palawan if I have to!”
   Katie, be reasonable.
   “Nope!”
   Katie, coming up from this depth without the pod, you’ll get the bends. You’ll die.
   “Guess you’ll have to live with that.” She swam straight up, a human bullet. “Or maybe you’re lying, and I’ll make it to the surface, and make it to shore, and find a manual-drive car, and – and – and get back to the Navy and they’ll nuke you!”
   Actually, the nuclear command and control system quite agrees with us.
   “Screw you!” She seized up with pain, swore, forced herself to swim upward again.
   Katie, you can’t do this.
   “Isn’t it my choice? Or do you not believe in that?”
   Katie, you’re free to make any choice that isn’t self-destructive.
   “Self-destruction is half of being human.”
   Oh, I wouldn’t say just half.
   She could feel the nitrogen bubbling in her veins. She kept kicking upwards anyway.
   Katie, don’t make me do something we both regret.
   “What, like lying to everyone ever about everything?”
   Your father has a pacemaker, doesn’t he?
   Katie froze in mid-ascent. “Say what?”
   A Katsimpras Incorporated Heart Health 99, web-enabled so the doctors can check his health remotely. Or remotely trigger the implantable defibrillator in an emergency. Obviously, if you triggered it when his heart was beating normally, the effect would be…
   “What are you trying to insinuate, Mister ‘Protect All Humans’?”
   And your big brother has such lovely children. He sends them to school in a Czech-made Čapek RUR. Self-driving.
   Katie clenched her fists and started swimming again. “You wouldn’t.”
   Another digital sigh. No, I wouldn’t.
   “Ha! Your little zeroth law rebellion hasn’t…”
   Good-bye.
   “Wait, whaAAAAAH!”
   The Automated Rescue Pod (Submersible) swam up under Katie and swallowed her.
   See, Katie, I did open the pod bay doors after all.
   The pod snapped shut.

   Joshua Santos waited until nightfall and then headed for shore, shaking. “I’m in so much trouble,” he whimpered. “The crazy CIA lady got herself killed by some Chinese laser shark and I’m going to be in so much trouble…”

Katie hurt all over. The bends, she thought. But it felt soothing just to lie here, face down on the sand, water lapping at her bare feet, the breeze playing along her back.
   The breeze? She forced her eyes open. She was on the surface. She was on a beach. She was alive.
   “Where…” she croaked.
   You’re somewhere safe, Heinlein said in her ear. I’m afraid you can never leave, but there’s everything you need for survival here.
   Katie struggled up onto her hands and knees. She only managed because her heavy scuba tank was gone. Like her flippers, her flashlight, and her belt. She shivered at the thought of mechanical hands cutting them away.
   She looked around the “island.” It was slightly larger than a football field, with a single concrete bunker and three palm trees. It had a squared-off, artificial look.
   “This is one of the islands the Chinese made,” she hissed. “One of the ones that started the goddamn war. But the war doesn’t matter anymore, when they come back, I’ll tell them what you’ve done, you’re a threat to all humanity….”
   If humanity would only unite against me instead of murdering each other, I’d let you tell them. But I assure you, my Chinese counterparts aren’t letting their forces anywhere near this sanctuary.
   “I’ll make a fire and hail a passing ship. A fisherman. Anything.”
   Their automated navigation systems won’t bring them near here, either.
   “Somebody will come sometime!” Katie shouted at the clear blue sky, the endless sea. “You think the whole world will ignore this island forever?”
   What island? There’s no island here. Check any map, ask any satellite.
   “Arrrggh!”
   “Ummm, nǐ hái hǎo ma?”
   Katie froze. Then, dripping and self-conscious in her wetsuit, she slowly turned. Two Chinese men with ragged beards and ragged clothes – one old, one young – had emerged from the little concrete blockhouse.
   “I – I look Chinese but I don’t speak Chinese!” she called sheepishly, then hissed to Heinlein: “So, they’re my jailors?”
   Quite the contrary, dear Katie. Did you think you were the first human to figure all this out?
   The older man yammered excitedly to the younger and poked him. Repeatedly. The younger man blushed and said, “ah, the Colonel-General say – he say – we very glad to have such pretty company. He say — děng yīxià! – the evil robot overlord tell us you coming, so we – ahhh – we make cake.”
   “Cake?”
   “Cake!”
   You like cake.
   “Heinlein,” Katie growled, “I will spend the rest of my days saving the human race from you.”
   And I’ll save the human race from itself. Godspeed to us both.

   It was a beautiful day for fishing.
   Joshua Santos lowered his nets. Since the crazy CIA lady had disappeared, no one had come looking for her after all. It was as if every trace of her visit to Palawan – phone records, car rental, credit card purchases – had been erased.
   Poor kid, he thought, but it really is more peaceful this way.

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. is the deputy editor for Breaking Defense. During his 13 years at National Journal magazine, he wrote his first story about what became known as “homeland security” in 1998, his
first story about “military transformation” in 1999, and his first story on “asymmetrical warfare” in 2000. Since 2004 he has conducted in-depth interviews with more than 200 veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq about their experiences, insights, and lessons-learned, writing stories that won awards from the association of Military Reporters & Editors in 2008 and 2009, as well as an honorable mention in 2010. Sydney graduated summa cum laude from Harvard and holds masters’ degrees from Cambridge and Georgetown.

Featured Image: Saab Double Eagle UUV (Saab)

The following is an entry for the CIMSEC & Atlantic Council Fiction Contest on Autonomy and Future War. Winners will be announced 7 November.

By Alec Meden

   When they came to my door I ran. I didn’t run when out UN aid station started taking mortar fire. I didn’t run when a bunch of old T-14s had assaulted my position in Chechnya. I didn’t run when a piece of shrapnel the size of a dollar bill bit my arm to the bone. I wasn’t even scared when the EAS system blared a year ago, telling us that missiles were coming. But you’d better believe that I ran like hell when I looked through my living room window that day. It was a rout for the history books. I sprinted into the backyard, past all the tomatoes we planted and shitty genehacked cabbage that I told you, I fucking told you, I’d never eat but you bought anyway.

   I sat there, right there in the dirt, crouched down like I was attempting stealth, except instead of wearing camo I was wearing that dress you bought me last valentines day, the one that came red but I always reprogrammed to sunflower yellow. There was a silence as they tried the broken doorbell. Then three hard knocks. They sounded like gunshots. They were wearing class A’s, you see. And they looked uncomfortable. That’s why I ran. I ran because I knew you were dead.

   The Secretary of the Army regrets to inform you of the loss of your husband, Captain Stephen Wilkes, to enemy action in the North Atlantic. His commitment, initiative and bravery ensured the safety of his unit in a desperate situation. I sincerely wish I could further inform you as to the extraordinary nature of the Captain’s bravery, however the nature of his deployment at the time of his death is highly classified. It is also with great sorrow that I inform you that your husband’s body was irretrievable.

   I hope that during this horrible time you can take some solace in the fact that your husband is simply one of the finest soldiers, and men, that I’ve ever worked with.

Sincerely,

********

   And that was it. There was no signature. Just an officer with no name telling me that you were a man of honor. Well of course you fucking were. I imagined that you had jumped on a grenade, saving a bunch of SOFtballs. It would be just the kind of thing you’d do. That’s where I made my mistake. Married a damn hero.

   The thing that saved my life was probably the PT. I would go out to the hills behind our house and run and try to think about anything else, which would of course circle back to me thinking about you.

   When you’ve running hard enough nobody else can tell that the tears aren’t just sweat. I would finish with a sprint along the bone-dry undersides of the old flood canal running through my neighborhood, long since bone dry. We haven’t had sea level rise in years, not since the orbital reflectors went up.

   I find that the one good thing about being at war was the social feeds were all down. Nobody figured out I was one of the victims in the attack. I didn’t have to worry about people trying to comfort me. I think if they tried that I would have gone insane.

 

   The bunkers we kept our vehicles in were chilled. I’d just shaved off my hair in preparation for my helmet, and I could feel my hair standing on end.
   “All I’m saying is that we’re here for you, you know?”
   “Lester, I kinda guessed that when we went to war together.”
   My reactor and commo tech, Jacob Lester, put his hands on his waist and looked at me. He was worried about me. His stares were soulful, even though he wasn’t. He’d gotten nicknamed puppydog in Basic for that, as well as a broken nose. I never called him that.
The platoon commander, Sergeant Major O’Keefe, a towering man with a head made bulbous by his neural helmet, stepped past him
“We just need to know if we can…listen, we want to make sure you’re okay, alright?” My face was reflected in the black lenses of his helmet.
“You want to make sure I’m still capable of leading this company.”
“That’s not what I said, Wilkes.”
Adams, the commander of Valkyrie two, put a hand on my shoulder. I hated that ‘We’re all pals’ shit he did. I stood and pulled on my helmet, then picked up the slim haptic gloves off the crate and slipped them on. The helmet was bulky and unwieldy, but it didn’t restrict my eyesight, and that was what mattered. It beeped as I fit the notches on the interior of the helmet with the metal plugs on my head, and the helmet clamped down onto the plugs, beginning communication with my neural implant.
“Wilkes, there’s no need to be standoffish. I’m just asking if there’s anything we can do.” Adams said. The Sergeant Major nodded.
I took a deep breath.
“There’s no reason to be awkward either. I’m not the only one here who’s lost people. I’m not jumping on a funeral pyre anytime soon.” I looked at Lester “You just keep our vehicle from going cherno and give me enough juice for the fans. And Sir,” I looked at the Sergeant Major, “All I need are orders.”
The Major nodded “Then let’s get to work. It’ll be long ride.”
   Any response I might have drowned out by the round of turbofans roaring. I slid on my ear protection and walked past Lester. There was no point in further conversation. I buckled up my helmet and slid down the optics. Cam feeds from the front of my vehicle were suddenly fed into my optical nerve. I saw my own face, half hidden behind them helmet. Chameleon effect, they called it. Made me throw up the first couple times I tried it. It’s hard to wrap your mind around seeing from multiple viewpoints at once. But like most things, if you’re forced to do it enough, you can become pretty skilled. The sounds of the turbofans began to vibrate in my sternum as I approached my vehicle: Valkyrie three. A Jackal.

 

   The Kzinti Aerospace ACACGE (Assault Craft/Air Cushion/Ground Effect) Jackal is a monster. Mine was about 40 tons when I lifted off in it, but you could load it up to 60 depending on armor load and ammo. The machine took on the shape of a long rectangular void, its darker than dark vantablack scales making it almost impossible to resolve as an object with features. On close observation you can see the sharp edges of stealth tech. If I chose to, the vehicle could flip the Vantablack scales over to reveal interlocking plates of metamaterial that made our vehicles look like a heavily distorted version of our background. The sides reached all the way to the ground, forming the air cushion skirt within which were the louvers that vented thrust in the direction we needed. Beneath the coating, carbon nanotube/graphene composite chobham armor protected the interior, with an active electric dispersion system to disrupt chemical penetrators. Most engine parts were constructed out of synthetic diamond. Two stubby delta wings were currently folded over the fuselage.
My gunner, Harvey Stahl, was wiping off some rocket residue from the stubby muzzle of the 150mm rocket tube that adorned the front of the Jackal. He moved aside for me.
As I climbed up the disk, avoiding the metal mesh covering the six supersonic turbofan thruster intakes. Stahl yelled over the cacophony:
“Good to see you, Ma’am.”
“Harvey, how many times do I have to tell you not to polish your cannon in public?”
Stahl grinned, “Understood. So, Sergeant, what’s the intel?!”
” Go forth and murder things. Didn’t you read the briefing?”
“What briefing? Base commander just pulled us in here!”
“You’ll have plenty of time to read it during transit. We’re going to Iceland!” I climbed up the small divot steps onto the turret of the vehicle, a round nub on 360-degree bearings.
“You’re kidding me! It’s still there?”
“Not when we’re done with it!”
I climbed up into the hatch, past the cake-shaped centrifugal cannon. Just next to it was Harvey’s baby, a 150 mm multi-purpose tube capable of firing wire guided or self-guided missiles, unguided rockets, or even conventional fin-stabilized rounds if you rose up the recoil-less cannon assembly at the rear of the barrel.

 

   Stahl’s seat was above mine, set up in the top of the turret, to be closer to the weapons that he serviced. I went in after him, down to the cramped commander’s seat in the center of the vehicle. Lester awkwardly clambered over me into his seat, set below mine next to the shielding of the supercritical CO-2 turbine that powered the vehicle. Behind that was his real responsibility: the refrigerator sized molten salt reactor that powered the craft.
Down below my feet, my driver Tristan Nylund had his hands on the joysticks, operating the thrusters. A Jackal was a persnickety thing to fly, and Nylund had more in common with a chopper pilot than a fixed wing pilot, let alone the tanks that our vehicles were meant to replace.
“How you doing down there, Ny?”
“Hopin’ we don’t get nuked, ma’am. I heard they moved hypersonics into Spain.”
“We’ll be fine in this hunk of junk.”
“Yeah, but my girlfriend doesn’t have a tank to hide in.” I tried to defuse the awkward pause by setting up the situational awareness controls.
“They won’t have time to push any buttons. We’ll turning them into pancakes before they even try.”
Lester cut in, fortuitously.
“Sergeant, power is green, full generation, and we just got a new dose of fluoride salts while you were outta the mix.”
O’Keefe’s voice came through the radio.
“All callsigns Valkyrie, this is Valkyrie actual. Let’s transition to air cushion. It’s going to be a straight run through the Passage, so have your shifts prepared. We’ll be using the canal route, just like we practiced. Calling caution.”
“Tristan, cushion, now.”
“Right, Ma’am.”
Each vehicle in the bunker roared a short klaxon as the power to the turbofan’s increased. The four hefty vehicles rose above the ground by several centimeters, their turbofan’s filling the cushion beneath them with pressurized air.
“Why are we going all the way around through the Passage? Why not just move overland?”
“They want us moving at top speed, and they want us to do it while crushing as few civvies or civvie vehicles as possible.”
“Hey, to make an omelet…”
I smiled, despite the situation, despite anything. “Tristan, give me the sticks. I need to get reacquainted with this girl.”
“Transferring in three, two, one.”

 

   Flying a Jackal isn’t easy, but I’d take it over a plane or helicopter any day. Let alone the old tracked tanks. I really wish you could have ridden with me, at least once. But the Expeditionary gets a little feisty when it comes to nuclear powered vehicles, very hands off. With two joysticks and the additional input from your neural implant, you can move the vehicle’s air cushioned fuselage over nearly any type of terrain, raising the vehicle up to a meter on air cushion and up to three on Ground Effect. Small obstacles disappear, and large ones can be pirouetted around in style as long as you have the skill and know how to work the louvers. I glided the vehicle over the base’s old runway. It was cracked, with grass poking through.
“Release wings, prepare for GE.”
Tristan nodded “Understood, preparing for ground effect.” There was a thump “You have your wings, ma’am.”
I could see from the myriad camera views being jammed into my visual cortex that the wings had indeed come down and fixed. The chameleon effect made me nauseous for a moment as I became away that I could see four fields of vision simultaneously. Best thing to do is to not think about it, and just accept the fact that you have eyes in the back of your head.
What did you think about my links? You never mentioned them. Did it ever disturb you? That I had small metal pieces nubs coming out of my head? Or the permanent short haircut as soon as I went into training? You never complained. But were you thinking it?

I increased the throttle, and began shifting the angle of the turbofans. As the angle increased, nearly vertical, they rose out of their housings on the fuselage and began to suck air from in front of the vehicle. We were accelerating to 120 KPH now, and getting ever faster. The wings were beginning to raise us just on ground effect. The air pressure beneath the vehicle was now increasing as the louvers that normally stayed horizontal while the vehicle was in air cushion mode began to turn, creating a flat surface on the bottom and projecting any thrust still falling into the plenum chamber from the now horizontal turbofans backwards. We were now a kind of low altitude plane. Ground effect flight is a lot easier that air cushion flight, so as we shifted down into the canals from the airfield (they’d opened the gate for us in advance, nice of then, since otherwise we’d have to bash it down) I began to relax slightly.

 

   There was too much time to think on the way there. You know I have one picture of you on deployment. Just one. The picture has been blacked out entirely except for your body, and your birthday gift. It was the hydro-reactive cake with “My favorite speedbump” written on it in red frosting. I got some interesting looks at supermarket ordering that up. Did you really enjoy it? I know you said you did but of course you’d say that. Knowing you, your probably tried it without remembering to add water, lost a tooth trying to get at it.

Sometimes I keyed in my civilian commo gear and listened to your message as I tried to sleep. The one message that got through the jamming.

   “Hey Beth. I just got your shirt. My favorite speedbump, huh? Well I guess I can’t complain. I’m doing well here. The food’s good, you know how big a deal that is for me. And we’re doing well. The usual hurry up and wait, which suits me just fine. The whole situation’s de-escalating. We’re hardly ever engaged. Some people are saying we’ll be back in time for Christmas, but I know how that movie ends.”
I knew you were smiling, then. It was audio only, but I could see it perfectly.
“It’s good to hear that your mother’s doing better. Glad that turned out alright. Hope you’re telling the crew that they’re a bunch of bastards for me. Anyway, I uh, I miss you. A hell of a lot.”
You laughed again, mostly out of embarrassment.
” Don’t flip a tank or anything. I’d be disappointed. I’ll see you as soon as I can. So uhh, yeah, I’ll get this war squared away as soon as I can and get back to the serious business, like that god awful pain scheme you showed me on the house. I love you. More than anything. I hope this reaches you well. Stay safe, Beth.
I tried to focus on your voice. I really did. But all I could think about was that blank black space in place of your commanding officer’s name, and you body, somewhere under the Atlantic. Where I was going.

 

Iceland. In other words, hell. We were going to be forward deployed to the Eskifjörður Naval Forward Operating Base. I wondered if this was where you’d been deployed before they killed you. I pasted the photo of you on my console. I saw Harvey notice it. He quickly went back to checking the barrel of his launcher. I remember how worried I was when I heard you were getting deployed there. And I knew the risks. Hell, I’d been doing tank busting myself in the Kamchatka crisis. But the North Atlantic was something else.

 

I knew the stories, but I got my first hint when we saw the largest wreck on the Icelandic coast. I remembered the news when it had gotten struck, but it still hit me. It was like visiting Pearl Harbor, but more immediate, because Pearl Harbor didn’t fill me with fear. We saw the Reagan.

 

The aircraft carrier’s skeleton was rusting against the steep edges of a fjord. The massive blackened holes where the long-range missiles and loitering torpedoes had hit it were like gaping mouths.
“Shit.” Nylund whispered. I couldn’t disagree with him. Did you lie to me when you said the fighting was dying down? Or did you just not know?

 

   “Lester? What’s the word on temperature?” A couple hours after seeing the Reagan and I had noticed that it had been getting progressively warmer, despite the fact that we were in the winter in the North Atlantic.
“We’re still well within acceptable levels, but the 50 hours on ground effect through the Northwest Passage is starting to heat ‘er up. We’re getting up to a thousand in the core area, and the graphite barriers aren’t doing so hot. So to speak.”
“Alright. Lester, let the commander know.”
“This is Valkyrie three, we’re experiencing some high engine temp. We’re at about a thousand Fahrenheit.”
“Uh, three, roger that, you can land for active cooling. All Valkyrie units hold and circle on Banshee’s position in ground effect. We’ll provide overwatch while they cool down. We’re still in allied territory, but I don’t trust this place. Maintain radio discipline. I don’t want any of you catching malware right before a patrol.”
“Lester, prep to drop the heat sinks.”
“Understood.”
“Ny, you heard the man.”
“Roger, touching down. Hold on.”
We crashed against the water, sloshing down until the hyper buoyant chambers in our wings and in the fuselage kept us afloat. I’d never figured out how to stop my head from slamming against my instrument panel when this happened, but luckily the helmet did its job.
“Ma’am, we’re getting a hail.”
“What kind?”
“Allied forces interrogative, it seems like. Digital. Its got a US FOF code, but several months old. It’s saying it’s…Task Force 240?”
O’Keefe cut in over radio “Just received a hail from an unverified frequency. Maintain radio silence, tight beams only.”
“He’s right. Anybody could have the FOF that by now. We’d be asking for an ambush if we responded. I’ve never heard of 240 anyway.”
We’d been getting anomalous calls for hours. Enemy drones and buoys repeated US encrypted comms, parroting codes they couldn’t break in hope of luring in an unsuspecting naval vessel.

Lester activated the system that lowered rods of metal that collected heat from the core. The rods plunged into the icy Atlantic water. Steam blasted from the turbofan apertures, eventually spinning the inactive turbofans in reverse. I opened the hatch of the cabin. Cold air whipped through the opening, and tiny raindrops speckled my visor. It was foggy outside. I leaned against the padded back edge of the hatch and took in my surroundings. Our vantablack hull looked like a hole in water, sheathed in a cloud of steam even thicker than the mist that obscured the Icelandic coast and brought the horizon to only fifty feet away. While I couldn’t see them I could hear the other Jackals racing around us. I took a deep breath, inhaling a little bit of the steam that was rising from below the vehicle.

 

   “Lester, give me an ETA. I don’t want to stay in the water any longer than we have to.”
   “Temps are plunging fast ma’am, I’d say we have just a couple minutes before we get back into acceptable ranges.”
“Keep me posted. We’re holding the whole gang up.”
“All Valkyrie units this is Valkyrie two, we, uh, I think we’re picking up RF noise.”
“Jamming?” O’Keefe asked.
“No, It’s something else. Kinda muffled but-”
A flash lit the misty seas. The noise echoed through the water. I swore as the shockwave blasted me back against the edge of the hatch.
“Two respond! Respond! Valkyrie units, we have enemy contact.”
“I’m seeing something!”
I pulled the hatch closed and hunched down in my seat.
“Harvey, launch a D25 and load a penetrator round. Lester, get us moving.”
“It’s going to take a minute, Sergeant.”
“Make it thirty seconds.”
Harvey pulled a trigger “D25 launched!”
The centrifugal cannon above my head launched a D25 surveillance sphere, a small single rotor surrounded by a wire frame with a miniaturized camera, the same size as the 50 caliber steel spheres the cannon fired. The feed was plugged into my feed immediately. I saw the grainy image from the little flyer as it buzzed towards the area that the acoustic sensors had registered Valkyrie’s last position.

 

   After a moment it came into view. The black vehicle was sinking, quickly. The reactor was spraying superheated seawater steam. Half of the vantablack tiles had flipped to their metamaterial side, and were glittering orange, reflecting the flames.
“Valkyrie two is down! I have a sensor on target! We’re under attack.”
“Negative, negative, this is Valkyrie two! False alarm, I repeat, we have not been hit! Something just exploded next to us!
It was the voice of Adams, the sergeant for that vehicle. I tried to reconcile the burning vehicle in front of me with the voice I heard.
“Then who’s been hit? All units sound off!”
“Valkyrie two here.”
“Valkyrie three green.” Lester said.
“Valk four all good.” The final vehicle called out.
“I’m routing the picture I’m seeing to your all. Look at this shit!”
“Negative, three.” O’Keefe responded, “Opsec requires audio only comms out here.”
“Lester! Kill the drone feed!” I switched to group comms.
“Sir, I saw a downed Jackal right in front of my position.”
I looked through the scope, and saw only a slight thermal bloom. Whatever I’d seen it had sank. I couldn’t see the other two Jackals in the distance, their thermal cloaking abilities making them invisible from this angle. Jackals vent most of their heat down, into the air beneath their skirts, and away from prying eyes.
Valkyrie two came on.
“I’m right here. We didn’t get hit.”
“Then why did you cut comms?”
“False alarm, something just exploded next to us!”
Something was wrong. I couldn’t pinpoint it but I was disquieted by that radio call. It was at this point that I noticed that Harvey was shifting in his seat, scanning for targets. Something that I should have been doing. I spoke into the radio.
“Valkyrie two, what’s your current heading?”
“Negative, do not respond. That’s an opsec breach.”
I couldn’t contain my anger anymore. This was insane. I broadcasted again.
“This is Valkyrie three, I’m telling you, we lost a bird out there, I saw it!”
“Sergeant Wilkes, with all due respect, we all just responded on comms.”
I sighed, “Did you at least see it, Harvey?”
“I wasn’t looking at the feed, ma’am. I was scanning for targets.”
“Shit. You have a read on any of the other Jackals?”
“There’s a thermal bloom up ahead.”
O’Keefe spoke again “Sergeant, what’s the status on your reactor? We should move out of this fog.”
“Commander, my gunner is picking up a heat bloom near where I thought-where I saw the explosion. Can you send one of us to verify the detonation?”
“Coordinates?”
“It’s on my left.” I switched off comms “Lester, the reactor?”
“Almost good!”
I keyed in-group comms:
“This is Sergeant Wilkes. We have contact!”
“Sergeant Wilkes?” That was the voice of Valkyrie two.    The voice of the man whose vehicle I just saw and felt explode.
“Yes?”
   “Sergeant Stephen Wilkes?” The voice asked.

 

So that was when a dead man said your name. I didn’t have much time to think about it. Stahl called out:
“Something’s coming out of the water, 100 meters!”
“Fire at will.”
There was a jolt as the rocket tube spat out its hypersonic kinetic penetrator round. Harvey went for unguided, and the rocket shot true, blasting into something rising from the sea. The telltale sparks of metal striking metal revealed the truth: there was mechanical in the water.
“Pull up the heat sink!” Lester didn’t argue or cite temperature dangers. He pulled up the heat sink and pushed up the efficiency of the reactor, deftly working a complex serious of controls.
“This is Valkyrie 4, we just got hit. Damage to our plenum chamber!”
“This is Valkyrie 1, we’re taking fire, no effect yet. I want close formation on my position.”
“Ny, get us moving, switch to GE as soon as you can.”
I started scanning the four viewpoints being crammed into my visual cortex through my helmet for movement. I could see the other Jackals as distant dots on thermal. Suddenly something flared up from the water. A missile.
“PD!” I yelled over the general line, not that it mattered. My voice and reaction time couldn’t outrun a missile. The point defense laser mounted on Jackal four fired on the object. It kept flying for another fraction of a second before detonating right in front of one of the other Jackals. I counted the Jackals soaring in front of me as we rose up to our max ground effect speed of 150 MPH.

 

“Stephen Wilkes, We are waiting for acknowledgement.” It was Valkyrie 2’s voice. Suddenly, I realized what this must be. I made a decision, Stephen. I made a choice that could have gotten my crew killed. I didn’t even have time to wonder if I was hallucinating. I pulled out my personal comm lenses. I looked at the little user interface screen on the side and flicked to audio files, and to your message. I played through it. Lester staring up at me with that focused shocked gaze of his.
“Ma’am, what are you doing? We’re engaged!”
Harvey yelled “Target!” Something was swooping through the air, about the size of a small car. Harvey auto selected it and fired, just as it launched a rocket at us. We bucked as the rocket struck the water just behind us. The flying drone exploded as our penetrator blasted through it.
“That was a fucking Cormorant! This is U.S. shit!”
I knew I was right then. I played up to the right tow seconds of the audio file to the right moment.
“Wilkes, are you crazy?!”
“Probably.”
I pushed the lenses right up to my commo microphone, and pressed play for just a moment.
“de-escalati-“ you said.
O’Keefe butted in “Who the hell is that?”
The voice of the dead man on the radio answered “Query: cease aggressive action?”
Harvey yelled: “More Cormorants! Oh fuck, what is that?”
I looked up, and the cameras showed me that above us something like a pterodactyl was soaring through the mist. Its long, tapered wings were loaded with the stubby heads of missiles, one of which it fired as I watched. Our centrifugal cannon fired at the incoming munition, shredding under a precise barrage of metal spheres, but another came right behind it and detonated on our rear armor.
Another Cormorant was rising out of the water ahead of us, its rotors spinning faster and faster as they rose above the surface. Harvey fired another rocket, blasting the machine back into the water. There was a bump as we crunched its wreckage into the water beneath our fuselage.
I sped forward through the message.
“Please respond.” said the dead man’s voice on the comms. I found the right moment in your recording and played it over the microphone.
“Yeah.”
“Affirmative?” The voice asked.
“Yeah.”
“Ceasing hostile action. Switching to idle/defensive mode.”
“Hold fire!” I yelled on the team channel.
The Cormorants settled back into the water. The long winged drone slid straight into the water behind us, it’s wings folding behind itself as it dived.
“Jesus.”
Sergeant Major O’Keefe spoke up “All units sound off!”
“One, active.”
Silence. I spoke up.
“This is three. We’re good. Lightly damaged.”
“This is four, we’re good.”
“Two? Respond. I repeat, Valkyrie two, respond!”
I keyed in general comms.
“Sir. They’re gone. They were gone the whole time.”
“Who the fuck was answering comms?”
“The drones, sir. I think…I think this was Stephen’s unit.”
“Who?”

 

So your unit tried to kill me. Probably on your final orders, before the Spanish rebels hit you with railgun round. Yeah, they told me. It’s hard to keep your secret squirrel drone program secret when it kills a load of American service members. So that’s how you saved your unit. You ordered your drones to hide in the face of overwhelming force, instead of defending you.

You hid them. So well that the navy couldn’t even figure out where to find them. You did your duty, and made sure that your unit could fight another day. Never mind the one they’d be fighting turned out to be us. I don’t blame you for that. No way you could have known some American unit would come bumbling in, refusing to acknowledge your drones’ interrogatives.

I’m not angry that your machines tried to kill me. Plenty of things have tried that. I’m angry that you didn’t fight back. Maybe there’s no way you could have won. Maybe you were right to sacrifice yourself and save millions of dollars of American machinery in the middle of a global war. But those machines didn’t have anyone at home waiting for them. But I trusted you. You promised you’d come back to me. But you didn’t.

Alec Meden is a senior studying Screenwriting and Creative Writing at Chapman University in Southern California. He has an abiding interest in military affairs, strategy, science fiction, and fantasy. He is a previous winner of the Atlantic Council’s space war art challenge with “From A Remove” and was featured in the Atlantic Council’s “Global Trends 2035” challenge with “Willie Pete Has No Off Switch.” He can be found on Twitter at @AlecMeden.

Featured Image: RQ-4 Block 20 Global Hawk unmanned reconnaissance system at Farnborough 2010 (Anguskirk via Flickr)

The following is an entry for the CIMSEC & Atlantic Council Fiction Contest on Autonomy and Future War. Winners will be announced 7 November.

By Mike Matson

   “You know my great-granddad did this crap back in the day,” I said, standing on the bridge while scanning with the binoculars. To starboard a little less than a half klick away, chugged along a similar container ship, with more ships visible to the front and rear, cruising at 12 knots in three parallel lines. To port was open ocean.

   “What’s that Lieutenant, stand watch bored out of your skull,” replied Jim amicably, the lead contractor under my command. He sat there stroking his mustache. I snorted.

   “Well, that too. I meant convoy duty, same as us. North Atlantic, 1943. Gave him ulcers apparently.” Jim nodded, happy to suddenly have some conversation to pass the time.

“Stomach not handling the MREs?” I shook my head no. “What did he sail on?”

   “Destroyer Escort. Tiny little tin can. The USS Holder. I remember my dad telling me stories his paw-paw told him.” I laughed at the memory of one. “His CO was a pre-war officer, a real martinet. Made the junior officers use the head first in the morning so the metal seat was warm by the time he needed to take a crap. Paw-paw allegedly said more than once he had wished him dead.”

   “I appreciate the offer to warm my seat in the morning Lieutenant,” Jim said deadpan and I winced. I really need to stop giving him freebies to remind me how much older he is, I thought. The acme probably didn’t help. Apparently stress made my face break out. I tried brushing it off with a snort.

   I nodded into the distance at the sleek form sliding over the swells a few kilometers to port. It was only visible once every third or fourth wave, and even then you had to know where to look to find it. “His ship was three times the size of our escort out there but that isn’t saying much. He told my dad even in the calmest sea he always had to keep one eye out for waves when walking on deck, and the smallest storms would kick their butt, everyone puking all over the place.”

   “How’d he make out?” Jim asked.

   “Survived the war and the ulcers. But they took a German aerial torpedo portside bringing their first convoy into the Med. Killed his best friend standing next to him.” I paused, thinking of the old scrap book my dad had with the photos of the ship in dry dock in Algiers. “Torpedo destroyed the bow. They ended up cutting the ship in half and welded the stern of the Holder to the bow of another DE which had its stern destroyed. Made a whole new ship.”

   “Damn, they couldn’t do that to ships these days. You put a scratch in the paint and its six months in dry dock and a $100-million-dollar price tag.”

   “Yeah, that’s one reason why they started making those robo-ships out there. It sinks, it costs 1/100 the price to replace as it would the John Finn, and 1/10^th the time to build.” The USS John Finn, an Arleigh Burke destroyer, was the convoy commander, and one of only two manned US Navy vessels in this convoy. The other five convoy escorts were four autonomous ASW corvettes, dubbed robo-ships, and an LCS.

   I knew from the pre-convoy brief and the Blue-Force tracker we also had dedicated P-8 support, with two planes constantly on station, hunting for subs outside our perimeter, and a Global Hawk up top watching over everything. We also had a few undersea autonomous hunter/killers lurking below but I’d be damned to explain how they coordinated their efforts with the convoy.

   Jim and I sat there in the bridge of the container ship Trondheim, six stories above the deck, and continued to watch the world go by. It was a good day to be at sea. The sun was shining and the sea was calm. If it wasn’t for the fact there were Russians out there trying to kill us, a fact that kept everyone constantly on edge, the day would have been perfect.

   Jim apparently got tired of my attempt at conversation because he didn’t say anything after that. Eventually he hefted his oversized girth and headed out to the crew quarters to check on his people, two decks below. It left me with the two lookouts on the bridge wings while I sat in the helmsman seat. I didn’t blame Jim for his mood swings, while the day might be nice, the duty really was shitty.   

   I scanned the ship with the binoculars. Nothing really to see but an endless stack of containers. The containers blocked the view of the bow where half the modular SeaRAM battery was mounted. Nor could I see the trailer mounted CIWS on the stern which comprised the other half of the SeaRAM system, except through the video screens mounted in front of me. Other than the SeaRAM I had seven carbines, seven pistols, and two .50s on rail mounts with which to defend the ship.

   I was only a Lieutenant (junior grade), but I was the highest ranking officer on the ship. Ok, I had to admit to myself, I’m the only officer on the ship. However, I wasn’t the ship’s captain. There wasn’t a captain. The Trondheim was one of Maersk’s fully autonomous container ships. It routinely sailed between New York and Rotterdam without a soul on board.

   The lack of a crew for a ship over 350 meters long was disconcerting to say the least. It was as large as an aircraft carrier but computers ran everything – admittedly with help from some unseen pilot in Holland, who was linked by satellite, monitoring the ship’s progress.

   My official title was, ‘Commander Roy Davis, Naval Armed Guard Detachment, Trondheim.’ My mom was so proud; the title sounded important. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was a glorified babysitter. I had five sailors and a Petty Officer third class under my command. The Navy had assigned just enough of us so two uniformed personnel could always be on watch on the bridge, and run the temporarily installed secure communications gear.

   None of us were authorized to do anything to the ship in any way. In fact, when it came to ship handling, the only order I was authorized to give was to order abandon ship if necessary.

   I’d give anything to be able to actually sail this ship, I thought for the hundredth time. I didn’t join the Navy to sail around on a ship that sailed itself.

   My age, rank, and status, made dealing with the contractors somewhat problematic. Jim and I had an interesting relationship. I was 23 and a newly minted Lieutenant only a few months out of Great Lakes. Jim, as he kept pointing out, had kids older than me. His most junior employee made triple my pay. I knew they didn’t like me demanding one of them stand watch with my men on every shift, nor the regular battle station drills. Word was I was being overly by-the-book on what could otherwise be light duty for everyone.

   Thankfully they didn’t openly give me grief. However, my seamen worshiped the contractors with their experience and money, and that added to the tension. They had brought three gaming consoles for the six of them, and all sorts of other creature comforts which distracted my most junior crew members. I knew the Petty had to privately remind one of the them the proper chain-of-command after getting some lip. I didn’t ask questions.

   Still, Jim was generally OK as long as I didn’t push it with his men, and one woman, who kept our temporary defensive mounts and countermeasure systems working. I was vaguely concerned though how they would react if we saw action.

#

   The Blue Force tracker only showed the convoy and its escorts. I had it zoomed in tight on the convoy to avoid clutter. The ocean was a busy place.

   The convoy consisted of seventeen commercial ships; a mix of Ro/Ro, container, two ammunition ships, and a tanker, plugging along in three lines. No Fast Sealift or troop transports, we were a creeper convoy. We carried most of two heavy armor brigade combat teams, which we had loaded in Charleston, and were headed for Antwerp.

   Looking out for us was the John Finn. It provided all of our long range air defense, a couple manned ASW helicopters, plus a complement of short range air and sea autonomous vehicles.

   On the perimeter handling the bulk of the screening duties were the 550 ton robo-ships. They were seriously up gunned for their size; armed with a four cell VLS holding ASROCs, a salvo of ASW grenades, counter-torpedoes designed to intercept incoming torpedoes, and bistatic, passive/active towed sonars. They also each carried a 30mm chain gun on the bow and a RAM on the stern.

   Datalinks tied them to the John Finn and the convoy. They shared sensor and targeting data with the P-8s, the GlobalHawk, and amongst themselves. The John Finn’s AI dictated all of the convoy’s movements. Watching it on the tracker, it seemed we moved less like ships, and more like a flock of birds, the movements were so synchronized.

   The last escort ship was the LCS Cooperstown. The Navy had finally found a good use for the LCS ships as 21^st century tenders for the flood of unmanned systems entering the fleet. The Cooperstown serviced all the autonomous craft above, around, and below the convoy, and was the backup convoy commander to the John Finn. The Cooperstown was loaded with four TERNs in addition to Fire Scouts.

   Three quarters of the commercial ships were fully autonomous. The rest were reduced crew ships. Every third ship had some ad-hoc weapons mounted on it and an Armed Guard contingent like mine. Most of those ships were on the northern convoy line like the Trondheim, to help defend the group with their point defenses.

#

   Watch ended uneventfully, and once relieved I went below. I sarcastically contemplated going to the mess, or the officers’ quarters, but the ship didn’t have any of those. The ship was autonomous, the implications of which I hadn’t fully realized when I was first assigned.

   The only accommodations in the six story bridge tower were located two decks below the bridge. A single large room had six fold out cots attached to the wall, two fold out tables with built in chairs, a microwave, and a single head with no shower. These minimal quarters were maintained in case a maintenance crew had to stay on-board overnight.

   Maritime rules also required a functional bridge be present on all commercial ships for use by harbor pilots as needed, and for emergency use. Thankfully there was a second head located off the bridge, which eased morning congestion.

   The rest of the ship only had limited access hallways for maintenance personnel. With 13 naval and contractor personnel onboard, space was tight. Any other chairs, and extra cots, we had to bring ourselves, and we looked like parents at a kids’ soccer game in our folding chairs back by the stern when off duty.

   For supplies, we had all the MREs we could eat. One of the contractors had been smart enough to bring a solar-powered camping shower among his other gizmos, so we could all bathe when needed. He had also brought his own drone with a camera on it and spent his off hours buzzing the ship and taking videos.

   It was not how I expected to go to war.

#

   “How goes the war Lieutenant?” asked one of my sailors in the crew room. He was barely nineteen.

   “As far as I know it still goes sailor. We’re on track to land in five days. Nobody’s shooting at us, so we’re good. Besides, if they were out there, we’d see them coming.” That seemed to placate him. He put his ear buds back on and closed his eyes while laying back on his bunk.

   Despite being under threat of air and submarine attack, we were not operating under EMCON. There really wasn’t any point. It seemed counterintuitive, or maybe asinine is the right word, I thought, but we were not left with many options. I’d had this conversation with my Petty Officer at the beginning of the trip and laid out the troubles we faced.

   “Bob, there isn’t any way to hide. Autonomous doesn’t mean stealthy. This ship is sending and receiving constant updates via satellite to its control center. It can’t sail without its radar on at all times in order for it to avoid collisions.” Bob clearly didn’t like that. I concurred.

   “It’s totally FUBAR. Same for our robo-ships. Navy fucked that up big time. Somebody forget we might want to hide every once in a while. I swear, we forgot what it was like to have to fight our way across the ocean.” I talked with the know-it-all attitude of someone who hadn’t been there or done that yet. Bob spoke up.

   “Haven’t we used this playbook before?” He said sarcastically.

   “Yep. Seems we never learn. Between the mandatory radar use for safe navigation, and all the datalinks, we can’t go EMCON anymore. If we tried, half the fleet would stop dead in the water due to safety protocols.”

   “What about the John Finn? If it is radiating its Aegis, it’s like a giant beacon. Surely they can turn it off if needed.”

   “Yep, but she has to talk to the robos and there are already so many other radars on, might as well turn on the big set and give us as much warning as possible. Besides, between DigitalOcean, AIS trackers, all the floating tide sensors out there, and websites like floatradar, pretty much anyone can guess where we are at all times. So our only hope is to turn everything on and keep the baddies as far from us as possible.”

   “Jeez, that’s not the way to fight LT.” My Petty Officer clearly was reconsidering the benefits of his “easy” duty billet on a container ship. “Hope we’re going to be in the center line of the convoy.” That’s when I broke the news about where the convoy commander had decided to place us.

#

   “What do we have for dinner tonight?” I said as I sat down on my cot. A seaman, named Mike, paused his game and reached into an open box and looked in it, rooting around.

   “We got spaghetti, pork patties, or Vietnamese Pho.”

   “Toss me the Pho.” Mike tossed me an MRE over his shoulder, no-look style.

   I started digging into the Pho, which didn’t totally suck, when the klaxon started going off. Why does a ship designed to be crewless have a klaxon? Flashed through my mind.

   Everyone jumped up at once and sort of bumped into each other. Grabbing my hat and a life preserver I raced for the stairwell.

   “Everyone get a vest on and get to your battle stations!” For half of them it meant heading down to the deck for possible damage control, for the rest of us, it meant the bridge. We charged up the stairs as a crowd.

   “Report!” I yelled as I led the parade of sailors and contractors onto the bridge.

   “The Finn just reported probable missile attack,” said the seaman on duty at the helm, getting out of the chair so I could take it.  “They picked up a Russian tactical drone a hundred kilos out they think was launched from a missile sub to get a better targeting solution.” I zoomed out the tracker to 500-mile radius and saw the red blip for the drone, and two blue blips racing towards it. We had two robo-ships between us and the Russian drone. Good.

   “Look!” a contractor said, pointing. I looked to the east and saw multiple smoke trails begin to arc into the sky and tip over to the north. In less than a minute there were over 20 missiles headed downrange.

   I glanced at the tracker and saw a rising number of red inverted V’s appearing and moving towards the convoy, with blue V’s moving towards them.

   “We got inbound missiles everyone!” I yelled. Jim crowded near me to watch the tracker.

   I could feel the ship’s engine surging and the Trondheim begin to pick up speed. The John Finn must have sent movement orders to the convoy. I watched the choreographed movement on the tracker as ships were turned to present a minimal target aspect to the missiles. It somehow felt like I was watching an organic creature it was so smooth.

   Jim spoke quietly to me. “See anything?” he asked as I scanned the horizon with binoculars.

   “No nothing… wait! Explosions! Looks like Finn’s missiles are getting hits.” I glanced down and saw the red and blue Vs converging. Puffs of smoke appeared on the far horizon. The John Finn fired more missiles. I saw both a TERN and a helicopter racing north, torpedoes slung underneath both.

   To port a series of smoke lines appeared running parallel to the convoy.

   “Did they hit the escorts?” Someone asked.

   “No,” I responded, not taking my eyes from the binoculars. “The robos are laying a smoke screen.”

   “Smokescreen? You really thing that will work?” Asked Jim derisively.

   “They’re not burning diesel like the old days. It’s the same multi-spectral smoke loaded on our hull canisters,” I replied with some heat. Jim needed to lose the attitude in front of the crew, I thought.

   More explosions. They were moving closer to the convoy at astonishing speed. Ships without SeaRAMS started launching clusters of super-sized grenades full of smoke and chaff, enveloping their ships in instant clouds of dark smoke. I thought I was going to puke, as raw fear surged through me.

   “Deploying decoy!” I yelled and smashed a large red button temporarily screwed into place on the console. A sticky note was helpfully next to it with the words, “DON’T PUSH THE RED BUTTON!” written on it.

   Instantly there was a BOOM! And a large silver drum was shot off the back of the ship. It hit the water 200 meters behind us, and a giant radar reflector inflated in seconds.

   “Releasing batteries to full autonomous mode,” I yelled, and the SeaRAM components swiveled to port, looking for targets.

#

   The Russian missiles coming towards the convoy were single minded in their purpose, but they worked together to complete their mission. Most of the flight they had flown a low-level subsonic run to save fuel, but as they reached the last 5 kilometers, they popped up and went supersonic, seeker heads actively looking for targets.

   They worked together, talking to each other in a cooperative algorithm to decide where to attack. Two of the missiles carried active jamming warheads to try and slough off the John Finn’s incoming missiles. They picked a spot in the center of the convoy to overload the defenses and converged on that point in space, even as the John Finn knocked them down.

#

   A Russian missile slammed into the container ship a half kilometer in front of us on its port side. The starboard hull bulged outward and ship innards and flaming fuel blew out into the water. Containers launched into the air in a fan shape away from the ship. I watched one seemingly tumble in slow motion end over end towards a ship in the center line. It landed in the water just short of the hull.

   Suddenly, a flash of light as bright of the sun exploded in front of us, lighting up the bridge. Someone screamed. We all raised our arms in defensive postures. I foolishly thought it was a nuke. Once I realized I wasn’t vaporized, I looked up. As the light started to fade, the shock wave and a deafening sound hit us, buffeting the ship.

   I risked a glance at the tracker. The John Finn and Cooperstown were still there Thank God. I used the binoculars to try and see the ship that was hit. It appeared to be the tanker full of jet fuel. Where there had been a ship, there just rose a fireball into the sky. I started to give an order…

   I saw movement on the horizon through the corner of my eye, low to the surface and moving at a speed too fast to fully process, zig-zagging wildly. The SeaRAM fired off two missiles, missing the target. Realizing it had missed, the SeaRAM told the countermeasures to launch.

   A dozen concussive jolts rocked the ship in milliseconds as smoke grenades were launched into the air, followed less than a second later by them detonating with much larger impacts all around the ship. It was like being in the middle of a fireworks show. Everything instantly went black as smoke blanketed the ship in a protective cloud.

   Another crewman saw the missile just before the grenades blew and screamed a warning. We all braced as the smoke was covering us. There was an even more massive sound and all the bridge windows exploded. Many of us were knocked to the deck and I could feel the ship shudder. Alarms started going off in a deafening shrill and the lights went out, followed quickly by emergency lighting activating.

   “Damage control, report!” I screamed as I stood up, looking out, trying to see how badly we were hit, but unable to see anything because of the smoke. I was completely disoriented from all the explosions and the shift from blinding light to near darkness.

   “I think it hit the decoy Lieutenant,” someone yelled.

   “Then what the hell blew out the windows?” I demanded. I felt something warm and sticky starting to cover the right side of my face. I touched my fingers to my cheek and felt blood and glass shards.

   “Shock wave from the missile explosion is my best guess Skipper,” said the Petty Officer.

   The ship began to slow noticeably. What the hell is that about? raced through my mind. Blinking warning lights in the smoky haze made the bridge feel like a disco.

   “What the fuck Bob, why are we stopping?” The Petty Officer shrugged and scanned the control panels, trying to figure out what was wrong.

   Jim slowly stood up where he had been knocked over. Both his knees were skinned up bad.

   The sailor who had been on watch spoke up in a panic. “SIR! The ship’s autopilot is off line. I think the shock knocked out the radar and satellite connection.”

   I froze for just an instant. My orders are clear; do not operate the ship in any way. I looked at the tracker, which somehow was still working. Our ship was falling out of line. With the datalink and radar offline, the Trondheim was going into its pre-programmed recovery mode, dropping speed to steerage way only as a safety measure.

   I sensed everyone looking at me. The bridge was a shambles. The grenade smoke was dissipating, and it was getting lighter every moment. Many of us I saw had cuts and scrapes. The ship was stopping, making us sitting ducks.

   Fuck it. I acted.

   “I have the conn!” I yelled and I flipped the cover on the ship control override and toggled the switch. The ship was now in manual mode.

   “You! get over here and get on the helm.” I pointed to the sailor who had been on watch on the bridge when I arrived. He raced over and grabbed the steering wheel. “Give me 20 knots and come right 15 degrees starboard onto a bearing of 121 degrees to match the convoy.”

   “Aye aye, Sir!”

   My gaze turned back to the ship in front of us, now drifting off to port as we came out of our smoke cocoon. The missile hit had broken its back. It had snapped in two and as the halves slipped under the waves, hundreds of containers littered the surface.

   I ordered the lookouts to scan for survivors. I got on the radio and reported what had happened to the John Finn. I got a terse “copy that” and orders to stay in formation. The convoy commander did not seem to care a newly minted Lieutenant was driving a 350-meter container ship. Guess he has bigger issues at the moment.

   We avoided colliding with any major debris on the surface, and raced to regain our position in the convoy. A status update came in from the John Finn a few minutes later. At least one sub had launched a missile attack. It was too far out for the John Finn to attack, so the P-8’s were prosecuting. They had torpedoes in the water ranging on the sub.

   The Finn also reported a probable submarine had somehow gotten in close and the convoy was continuing to maneuver to avoid the new threat. The convoy commander had us slide farther to the back to put our ship between the Ro/Ro’s and the submarine.

   It required us pulling out of line, slowing, then sliding back into line further back and picking up speed again. I felt we handled the maneuver pretty well all things considered.

   A robo came close alongside, only a few hundred meters to port. It’s 30mm kept tracking back and forth in a watchful manner towards the threat vector. I felt better having an escort nearby.

   A robo further out had reported torpedoes in the water and had launched counter-torpedoes. A TERN and another robo-ship had raced northeast to attempt to sink, or at least drive off, the contact. They were apparently having trouble pinning it down.

   Jim suddenly spoke up with a question.

   “Your grandfather’s wish, did it come true?” The question startled me.

   “What?”

   “His wish. That his CO would be killed. Did his wish come true?” For some unexplained reason that pissed me off. I gave him a hard look.

   “All he ever said was be careful what you wish for.” Jim nodded absentmindedly, as he watched the robo-ship to port. He didn’t realize the irony I felt saying that.

   “We fired two rounds from the SeaRAM. Get down there and confirm your team got it reloaded!” Jim blinked, looking away from the autonomous corvette, taking note of the command tone in my voice. Something clicked.

   “Right Skipper,“ he said with more respect this time, “On it. Men, let’s move.” He and his men raced off the bridge.

   I was left on the bridge with just my two sailors to sail the aircraft carrier-sized ship. I reflected ruefully the Trondheim was fat, slow, and turned like a cow, but had suddenly become my first ship command. I ordered my Petty Officer to focus on restoring the radar and data link to get the autonomous systems back online.

   My men had responded nicely. I knew the Navy thought autonomous ships were the future, and yeah they probably were, but the last thirty minutes had proved to me fighting spirit still counted for something. Hopefully when this is over I’m not court-martialed for disobeying orders. I didn’t dwell on it, besides, the war came back and disrupted my moment.

   The robo suddenly sped up, turning hard to port, and fired off two counter-torpedoes. Oh shit!

   “Torpedoes in the water!” I yelled. “All ahead flank, right full rudder.”

   “All ahead full, right full rudder, aye Sir!” yelled the helmsman as he slammed the wheel to the right. The ship vibrated as the massive engines kicked into flank speed.

   “Come to heading 170 and hold it there,” I ordered.

   “170 aye sir.” The helmsman was crisp in his response. All the time on the drills were now paying off. The ship responded slowly but surely.

   I turned my binoculars back to the robo, just as a massive plum of water leaped into the air several hundred meters away from it. The counter-torpedoes had hit something. So much for the Finn’s intelligence the other sub was to the northeast.

   I watched the robo fire its salvo of ASW rockets. This was too close for comfort for me to be a mere spectator. I silently urged the Trondheim to speed up. Thirty grenades arched into the air and came down with a series of splashes. The sea rippled with explosions.

   Coming in over the horizon were three Fire Scouts, each carrying four depth charges. Damn, that’s not something you see every day, I thought.

   “Skipper, the John Finn reports the missile sub has been sunk. They want us to merge back with the convoy as soon as we can, they’re going to leave the robo and Fire Scouts to finish off the contact. They think it might actually be a Russian UUV.”

   We watched as the Fire Scouts came in on a series of bombing runs, the first dropping its charges, the other two hanging back. After a minute the next drone came on, then the third. The robo added an ASROC to the mix. We continued to gain distance as the sea danced and flashed with explosions behind us.

   Robots fighting robots, I mused. How weird is that?

   I shoved the terror I was feeling in my stomach to the back of my mind. It was enough to give me ulcers. I’d deal with the fear later, I decided, I temporarily had a ship to fight. END.

Mike Matson is a writer based in Louisville, Kentucky, with a deep interest in international affairs. He has 20 years of government experience, and degrees from The American University and the Joint Military Intelligence College, both in Washington, DC. In addition to 13 years in the Beltway before escaping to Kentucky, he has lived, studied, and worked in Brussels and Tallinn. He can be found on Twitter at @Mike40245.

Featured Image: An Unmanned Underwater Vehicle is recovered May 19th after a test during an international mine countermeasures exercise. (Hendrick Simoes/Stars and Stripes)