New Delhi, June 9 -- DUBAI - It was not the helicopter that made history on Monday night. It was the boat that came to find the crew.

33 p.m. Eastern Time on June 8, the immediate concern was whether the two soldiers aboard had survived the crash into the Gulf waters. They had. What retrieved them from the sea, however, was something that had never been used for that purpose before in a live combat environment: an unmanned surface vessel operated by Task Force 59, the US Navy's Bahrain-based unit dedicated to integrating artificial intelligence and drone systems into maritime operations.

That detail - confirmed to Axios and CBS News by CENTCOM spokesman Capt. Tim Hawkins - is the underreported center of this story. Both crew members wer...