Defiant

What if we built a warship designed to fight the next war, not the last one?

The crew of the battleship USS Defiant is alone. Surrounded. 800 miles from safety. It’s exactly the kind of fight she was designed for.

China has finally moved on Taiwan, and the US sends all available forces - land, sea and air – to meet the threat from China that has been brewing for decades.

Caught out of position in the Indian Ocean, the newly launched nuclear guided missile battleship, USS Defiant, and its escort of uncrewed combat vessels, is ordered from Diego Garcia to assist with combat in the South China Sea.

The arrival of the most powerful warship ever built could change the balance of power in the conflict, and China is determined to prevent it. To reach the Taiwan theater, Defiant has to transit the Straits of Malacca, a narrow neutral waterway connecting the Pacific and Indian Oceans, policed by the navies of unaligned nations. But to get there, she must first cross 800 miles of hostile ocean. America’s available aircraft carriers and combat aircraft are all either already deployed to the Taiwan theater, or én route there.

A confident China has kept an ace up its sleeve in the Indian Ocean; the Shandong Carrier Strike Group, comprising not just its carrier, but a flotilla of cruisers, destroyers and frigates. And as Defiant deploys from Diego Garcia, the Shandong strike group sails out to meet it.

In the Ship Mission Center of the Defiant, Executive Officer Melissa Mayeaux has the deck as satellite intelligence shows the Shandong closing. As Mayeaux moves the Defiant from ‘peacetime cruising’ condition to ‘wartime cruising’ and calls her Captain to the SMC, six Chinese stealth aircraft suddenly appear on radar just 80km from Defiant, headed directly for them.

Facing a full carrier strike group, Mayeaux realizes if the situation turns ‘kinetic’ Defiant will be entirely alone in the Indian Ocean, facing a numerically superior Chinese force.

“Bring it,” Mayeaux thinks to herself.