Spent the week at SOF Week in Tampa and a few things stood out immediately.
Not from the panels. From the floor itself, the demos, the side conversations, and the people in the room.
AI Is No Longer The Conversation
Nobody was debating whether AI belongs in defense anymore.
That conversation feels over.
The focus now is operational: coordination, navigation, ISR, communications, autonomous systems operating in contested environments, and how humans interact with them under pressure.
What stood out most wasn’t fully autonomous warfare.
It was how much attention went into human-system coordination.
The Soldier Is Becoming A System Operator
A recurring theme across demos was the relationship between individual operators and autonomous assets around them.
Systems identifying soldiers through sensors, drones coordinating overhead, operators directing autonomous platforms in real time.
That shift was visible across almost every demo on the floor: the modern warfighter is increasingly managing ecosystems of machines around him, not just operating alone.
Swarms Are Getting Smaller
One of the craziest things I saw all week was at SOFWERX: a remotely operated robotic cockroach with a mounted camera system built for reconnaissance in spaces larger systems simply can’t reach.
Not a concept video. An actual working platform moving on the floor.
And honestly, it captured a much bigger trend happening across the industry: smaller, attritable, harder-to-detect systems deployed in numbers.
The future battlefield looks less like isolated platforms and more like coordinated autonomous ecosystems.
Counter-Drone And Maritime Were Everywhere
Counter-drone technology had a massive presence throughout the week: detection, jamming, interception, EW resilience.
At the same time, one of the quieter themes was maritime autonomy: unmanned surface vessels, subsea ISR, underwater sensing, autonomous boats.
In one simulation environment, the only autonomous platform actively operating was an unmanned boat.
That detail stayed with me.
The Real Conversations Happened Outside The Booths
Some of the best conversations happened after the expo floor closed.
You’d see generals in uniform standing next to operators in Hawaiian shirts, founders, engineers, investors, and people who’ve seen real combat all inside the same highly technical conversations.
And the questions were never theoretical:
Very little hype.
A lot of operational realism.
Tampa, Florida · May 2026
— UAX
