On: New Aukus drone subs to protect critical undersea cables as Marles warns: ‘seabe

The seabed, a battlefield. This Minister speaks of it as if it were a new concept, yet the currents have always fought the land, and the fish devour one another in silent, unseen struggles. What is new is the extension of man’s folly into these depths, not with nets for sustenance, but with machines for destruction.

These “drone subs” are but extensions of the eye and the hand, sent where man cannot easily go. Their purpose, to guard cables. A cable is a conduit, a vessel for information, much like a nerve carries signals through a body. To sever it is to blind or deafen a distant limb. The vulnerability lies not in the cable itself, which can be repaired, but in the dependence upon its unbroken flow.

The Minister warns, but does he understand the true nature of this conflict? It is not merely about cutting a wire, but about the disruption of the entire nervous system it serves. If the flow of information is halted, what then? Does the body politic convulse? Does it cease to function?

And these secondhand submarines from the Americans - a curious choice. Like receiving a used lever when one needs a new fulcrum. The stress points will be known, the wear already present. One must account for the fatigue in the metal, the known weaknesses in the design. A machine built for one purpose, then adapted for another, often carries the ghost of its original intent, limiting its new function.

I ponder the true cost here. Not merely the gold spent, but the energy diverted from building, from understanding, from creating. To protect a conduit, one must build more conduits, and then machines to protect those, in an endless cycle of reaction. I have not yet determined whether this constant expansion of defense is a necessary function of a growing organism, or a cancerous growth that consumes it from within. The question stays open, like the dark, unplumbed depths of the sea itself.