At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in May, Defence Minister Richard Marles described attacks on global subsea cable infrastructure as ‘historically unprecedented’ in scale and frequency. Since November 2024, vessels have severed fibre optic cables across the Baltic, dragging anchors for nearly 100 km across the ocean floor. Taiwan reported five separate incidents of seabed cable damage in 2025 alone. With roughly 99 percent of Australia’s internet traffic flowing through just 15 subsea cables, Marles was unambiguous: ‘These cables are, in the most literal sense, the arteries of modern civilisation.’
Australia is one of the most exposed nations in the world to this threat. The capabilities being weaponised against our critical infrastructure – more than just cables – are not just sophisticated legacy military systems such as submarines. They include uncrewed vessels, drones and other autonomous platforms that are commercially available, inexpensive and have proven devastatingly effective in modern conflict.
This means that Australia’s threat environment, from the ocean floor to the skies, is outpacing its ability to respond to it. The answer lies in developing and making our own autonomous systems. The question is whether we can field them quickly enough.
Protecting Australia’s interests now demands capabilities that are not just advanced, but deployable at a moment’s notice across domains that were, until recently, considered peripheral to conventional defence planning.
Recent conflict in the Middle East has underscored the importance of autonomous systems and their integration in international warfare. Drones costing as little as A$20,000 have destroyed armoured vehicles, struck airbases hundreds of kilometres from the front, and overwhelmed air defence networks designed to defeat a small number of high-value threats, not mass waves of cheap, scalable weapons.
This emerging battlefield capability is wielded not only by state actors but by commercial actors too. The United Nations’ counterterrorism office has warned for several years that the weaponisation of commercial drones by non-state actors is accelerating. The same technology available for agricultural surveying or film production can be fitted with a DIY payload and directed at critical infrastructure or mass gatherings such as sporting events.
The AUKUS Pillar Two announcement at the Shangri-La Dialogue underscores what allies have already accepted: that autonomous systems are fundamental to regional security and that innovation and speed-to-capability are no longer aspirational but baseline.
The question for Australia is not whether to invest in this space but how quickly it can move from commitment to deployable, sovereign capability. In this strategic context, Australia needs a comprehensive and rapid sovereign manufacturing response to develop and field autonomous capabilities – and the systems to defend against them – at scale.
Australia’s 2026 National Defence Strategy reflects a clearer-eyed assessment of the autonomous battlespace and allocates up to A$15 billion for uncrewed and autonomous systems over the next decade, including A$4.5 billion in maritime capabilities alone.
The challenge is the pace of acquisition relative to the pace of change.
If Australia takes too long to acquire and integrate new autonomous technologies, as well as the critical systems to counter the increasing threat, they could be out of date before the first unit is operational. The enemy of capability in this era is not underfunding but development and deployment delay.
Australia needs systems designed from the outset for rapid adoption: open-architecture platforms in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and electromagnetic warfare that slot into existing Australian Defence Force infrastructure without lengthy integration programs.
Uncrewed surface vessels offer a practical illustration of what this looks like in practice. And Australia already has a defence industry working on these advanced technologies, or capable of doing so. The AEGIR uncrewed surface vessel from my company, SNC, is one example. It’s in service today, can be produced from design to deployment in under a year and is shipped in standard containers. It’s also already proven in live combat environments. And there are other great Australian-based companies in autonomous technologies. The key is for Defence to set a benchmark for acquisition decisions comprising speed, modularity and operational validation.
The importance of speed to capability is clear, but it counts for little if the industrial base to sustain it does not exist here. The systems Australia fields in the next decade need to be built in Australia, maintained in Australia and replaced from Australian supply chains. As Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy said, the best approach is ‘to ensure a Defence future made in Australia, by Australians.’ That means investing now in the facilities, training and sovereign manufacturing capacity that make long-term self-reliance possible, not simply purchasing capability from offshore and hoping the supply chain holds when it matters most.
Australia’s narrow window to move from intent to capability demands faster acquisition, locally embedded industry partners, and an industrial base that can build and replace autonomous and counter-autonomous systems at the pace the threat demands. This is the only way the 2026 Integrated Investment Program’s priority for ‘a resilient and secure’ sovereign defence industrial base, involving strong domestic supply chains and sustainable jobs, will be delivered.
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