HOW IT ALL
STARTED
It started in 2020, not aboard a carrier, inside a Pentagon briefing room, or as part of some classified weapons program, but with a group of friends sitting behind computers and flying combat aircraft in Digital Combat Simulator. They called themselves the Wet Boys, and there was no grand plan behind it. They were military veterans, aviators, operators, and friends who came together because they loved military aviation, competition, and the particular brand of chaos that happens when talented people stop taking themselves too seriously. What began as nights flying missions together quickly developed its own culture. Callsigns appeared. Squadrons formed. Patches were designed. Aircraft received custom liveries. Missions became increasingly elaborate. Inside jokes became traditions, traditions became history, and somewhere along the way the Wet Boys stopped feeling like a group of people playing a flight simulator and started feeling like an air wing that simply happened not to exist.
As the group grew, so did the world around it. There needed to be a reason an F-16 was flying beside an F/A-18, an A-10 was operating from the same force as an F-14, and a collection of pilots from completely different military backgrounds had somehow ended up fighting together. Every ridiculous question demanded an increasingly serious answer. That exercise in explaining the impossible eventually produced Carrier Air Wing Zero, CVW-0, the fictional first carrier air wing placed under operational control of Joint Special Operations Command. The Wet Boys became its founding pilots. Their real personalities, friendships, callsigns, arguments, humor, and experiences became the raw material for characters and stories. The aircraft they loved became squadrons. The patches they designed became unit heraldry. The missions they flew for fun became inspiration for operations inside a much larger fictional universe. Then came the USS Leviathan, CVN-00, because an air wing this absurd needed an equally impossible place to call home.
What nobody expected was for that universe to escape the simulator. The jokes became artwork. The artwork became lore. The lore became stories, music, patches, videos, missions, websites, and eventually the novel Deep Scythe. A group of friends flying DCS in 2020 had accidentally created the foundation for a fictional military universe where almost everything has a connection back to something real, whether that is a person, a callsign, a friendship, a deployment story, or one particularly stupid night flying airplanes together online. That is still the heart of the Wet Boys today. CVW-0 may be fictional. The USS Leviathan may not exist. But the Wet Boys absolutely do. Everything else grew from there.
CARRIER AIR WING ZERO
"DEEP SCYTHE"
Carrier Air Wing Zero, CVW-0, is the first carrier air wing ever approved for operational control under the Joint Special Operations Command. It began with seven pilots, a nearly impossible mandate, and access to rows of forgotten aircraft sitting in the American boneyard. Their task was simple on paper and absurd in practice: build an air wing from aircraft the military had already retired, modify them for carrier operations, integrate them into a single combat network, and make the entire force capable of surviving and winning a fifth-generation fight. What emerged was not another Navy air wing. It was an experimental combat organization built without the traditional boundaries of service, platform, or doctrine.
At the center of CVW-0 is the USS Leviathan, CVN-00, a one-of-a-kind supercarrier designed to support an equally unconventional collection of aircraft. F/A-18s fly beside carrier-modified F-16CJs, upgraded F-14Bs, A-10Cs, electronic attack aircraft, airborne command and control platforms, helicopters, and C-130Js. Every aircraft was selected because it brought a specific capability to the fight, then rebuilt, modified, and networked to operate as part of a single weapons system. The result is an air wing that can conduct air superiority, suppression of enemy air defenses, close air support, electronic warfare, intelligence collection, special operations infiltration, and deep strike without waiting for another force to complete the mission.
But CVW-0 was never really about the airplanes. It was about what happens when seven pilots are given the authority to ignore decades of conventional thinking and build the force they actually want to take to war. The culture they created became known as the Wet Boys, a collection of aviators, operators, maintainers, engineers, and professional troublemakers who believe capability matters more than convention. CVW-0 exists for missions that are politically sensitive, tactically unreasonable, or considered impossible by everyone else. When conventional forces cannot go, when attribution matters, and when the mission requires something that officially should not exist, Joint Special Operations Command has Carrier Air Wing Zero.
EVERY STORY HAS ITS CORE
For the Wet Boys, it was eight.
Founder. The architect. Equal parts instinct and intent. The one who saw something bigger before anyone else did.
Systems mind. Sensor warfare. The guy who sees the fight before it happens.
Engineer. Builder. Breaker of limitations. If it shouldn't work, he makes it work anyway.
Aggression in controlled form. Flies like he's already decided the outcome.
Low and fast. Terrain becomes a weapon when he's in the cockpit.
Precision. Timing. The pilot who makes impossible spacing look effortless.
Energy and pressure. Keeps the tempo high and the formation tighter.
The quiet one. Systems, control, and translation of chaos into something usable.
THE NERVOUS SYSTEM
At the center of it all is the Hive View network, a sensor fusion and deception system operated by VAE-00's Witchglass that serves as the battlefield's nervous system. Hive View sees everything, masks everything, and when the mission calls for it, makes the enemy see things that aren't there.
It is the thread that connects every package in the air, and the reason CVW-0 punches well above its acknowledged weight.
VAE-00 Witchglass is CVW-0’s airborne command, control, and battlespace-awareness element, built around the heavily modified E-2J Witchglass. From the outside, the aircraft is recognizable as a descendant of the Hawkeye, but almost everything beneath its skin has been reworked for the Deep Scythe mission. Reduced-observable shaping, upgraded electronic-support systems, passive detection arrays, secure datalinks, and an enormous onboard processing suite allow Witchglass to collect information without relying solely on its own radar. Instead, it listens to the entire battlespace. Radar returns, electronic emissions, infrared tracks, friendly aircraft sensors, surface contacts, intelligence feeds, and information collected by other CVW-0 platforms are brought aboard and correlated into a single operating picture. Witchglass can still actively search when required, but its greatest advantage is knowing when not to transmit. In contested airspace, the aircraft can remain electronically quiet while building a picture from dozens of other sensors, allowing CVW-0 to see an enemy that may never realize it is being watched.
At the heart of Witchglass is Hive View, CVW-0’s distributed sensor-fusion and battlespace-awareness network. Hive View does not treat an aircraft, ship, radar, or targeting pod as an isolated sensor. Every connected platform becomes another set of eyes feeding the same constantly evolving picture. An F-16 detecting an emitter, an F/A-18 tracking an aircraft, a submarine identifying a surface contact, or a SNIPER pod observing a target can all contribute information to the network. Witchglass compares those fragments, determines which observations likely represent the same object, and distributes the resulting track throughout CVW-0. A pilot therefore does not necessarily need to detect a target with his own aircraft to know where it is. If something inside the Hive can see it, the rest of the Hive can potentially see it as well. Tracks can be passed from sensor to sensor, weapons can be cued by information originating from another platform, and targets can remain under observation even as individual aircraft enter terrain masking, shut down emitters, or leave the area. The result is less a traditional radar picture than a living digital representation of the battlefield, continuously assembled from everything CVW-0 can hear, detect, observe, or infer.
That capability changes the way Deep Scythe fights. Witchglass does not simply tell pilots where the enemy is; Hive View allows CVW-0 to operate as though the entire air wing were a single distributed combat system. Wet Venom can hunt an emitter identified by another aircraft without illuminating it first. Wet Iron can position for an intercept using tracks generated hundreds of miles away. VFA-199 can receive targeting information while remaining low and hidden, while the Swipers manipulate what the enemy believes it sees through electronic attack and deception. Even disconnected or unconventional sensors can become part of the network when their information can be securely introduced into the Hive. The system's greatest strength is therefore not any individual radar or aircraft, but the accumulation of hundreds of imperfect observations into one extraordinarily complete picture. Witchglass sits above the fight collecting the pieces, Hive View puts them together, and CVW-0 acts on the answer.
One aircraft may see a target. Hive View makes sure the entire air wing sees it.
THE 15TH AERIAL
DEMONSTRATION SQUADRON
At some point, it stopped being just flights. They started painting jets. Building identities. Creating teams within the team.
What made the Wet Boys different wasn't just how they flew. It was how they operated. No ego in the formation. No hesitation on execution. No separation between skill and personality. They blurred the line between simulation and reality, discipline and chaos, performance and identity.
The Wet Boys didn't start with a mission. They became one. And now: the tide takes all.
Carrier Air Wing ZERO, USS Leviathan and the operations depicted in the Wet Boys fictional universe are fictional. The Wet Boys DCS community is real. This site is not affiliated with or endorsed by the United States Department of Defense.