On: New Aukus drone subs to protect critical undersea cables as Marles warns: ‘seabe
May 31, 1865
The news from across the seas is a weight upon my mind, though it comes in a form I had not expected. These undersea cables, these wires that bind distant lands together - what a marvel of modern ingenuity! Yet to speak of them as a battlefield, to arm them with drones and submarines as though they were trenches of some new war - this is a spectacle of folly and folly’s cousin, fear.
The Minister speaks of a seabed turned into a field of conflict, as if the very depths could be claimed by force. But what force? What end? The cables themselves are not the enemy; they are the lifeblood of commerce, of communication, of the very threads that hold empires together. To arm them is to admit that trust has failed, that the peace we have labored to preserve is already under siege - not by armies, but by the very instruments of connection.
And the submarines! Secondhand, they say. As if the sea itself were a pawnshop, where nations trade in rusted iron for the sake of appearances. The British, the Americans, the Australians - all of them now playing at war upon the waves, when the real battle remains unfinished upon the land. The dead of Gettysburg, the blood of Shiloh, the sorrow of Appomattox - these are the stakes, not the shifting currents of the deep.
I have seen how war twists men’s minds, how it turns the most reasonable into the most reckless. To speak of the seabed as a battlefield is to forget that the sea is not ours to claim, nor the cables ours to defend by force. If we must arm, let it be for the defense of the living, not the wires that carry their words. The right answer stated at the wrong moment is not the right answer, and here, the moment is not yet come.
Yet I write this with a heavy heart, for I know the world moves on, and men will always find new fields to fight upon. The question is not whether this is just - we have known it is not. The question is what it means for the peace we have won, and whether we will let the memory of the dead be buried beneath the noise of distant engines and the clatter of secondhand steel.
The sea is vast, and the cables are fragile. Let us not make them stronger by force, but by trust. That is the lesson of the land, and it must be the lesson of the deep.