Trajectory Daily Brief: 05 February 2026

Pacific | Indo-Pacific | Australia cannot maintain secure communications with Pacific partners if China severs subsea cables during Taiwan crisis

Situation

Australia’s communications infrastructure with Pacific island nations remains vulnerable to disruption during potential conflict scenarios. Analysis indicates that severing of subsea cables would create immediate connectivity gaps that cannot be maintained at pre-crisis operational levels.

Insurance companies present a critical bottleneck in restoration efforts. Underwriters are expected to refuse coverage for repair vessels operating in contested waters, fundamentally altering recovery timelines from standard weeks-long repairs to months-long outages.

Context

Subsea cables carry over 95% of international communications traffic, making them critical infrastructure for alliance coordination and intelligence sharing. The Pacific’s geography creates natural chokepoints where limited cable routes connect Australia to partner nations across thousands of kilometers of ocean.

Historical precedent shows cable repairs in peacetime average 2-4 weeks, but conflict zones change these calculations entirely. During the 2006 Taiwan earthquake, multiple cable breaks took months to fully repair even without active hostilities.

The insurance dimension reveals a often-overlooked civilian constraint on military contingency planning. Commercial risk assessment may prove more decisive than technical repair capabilities in determining restoration speeds.

Trajectory

Australia faces a strategic communications gap that satellite systems cannot fully compensate for given bandwidth limitations and vulnerability to anti-satellite weapons. This creates pressure for pre-positioning alternative communication infrastructure before any crisis escalates.

The insurance bottleneck suggests Australia may need government-backed repair capabilities independent of commercial underwriters. This points toward treating subsea cable security as critical national infrastructure requiring sovereign repair capacity rather than relying on market solutions during contingencies.

Read the full analysis →

Indo-Pacific | Conflict | Taiwan’s asymmetric defense pivot stalls on implementation despite strategic logic

Situation

Taiwan’s military has embraced asymmetric warfare doctrine—the “porcupine strategy”—emphasizing cheap, dispersible weapons like missiles, drones, and sea mines over expensive conventional platforms. Admiral Lee Hsi-min’s Overall Defense Concept (2017-2019) proposed 60 micro missile boats and mobile coastal systems to counter China’s numerical superiority.

The doctrine exists largely on paper. Lee’s successors shelved the missile boats after his retirement. Taiwan’s 2023 National Defense Report includes asymmetric concepts but defense analysts note the ODC “is not explicitly used” in current strategy, diluted by institutional inertia favoring traditional force structures.

Public polling shows 68% of Taiwanese willing to fight if invaded, but deeper analysis reveals concerning gaps in elite political will and military preparedness that undermine defensive credibility.

Context

The implementation gap reflects broader challenges in democratic defense planning. Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan treats defense budgets as partisan issues, while the KMT opposition favors accommodation with Beijing over confrontation. Defense posture swings with electoral cycles that China can observe and exploit.

Demographic realities compound the political challenge. Taiwan’s collapsed fertility rate means each child has become precious in ways that amplify casualty aversion. Younger Taiwanese, raised in prosperity, show less willingness to fight than older generations who remember authoritarian rule.

China’s “three warfares” doctrine specifically targets Taiwanese political will through legal, media, and psychological operations. Research indicates sustained disinformation campaigns are “causing mental disarray and confusion among the Taiwanese population,” eroding confidence in resistance capabilities.

Trajectory

Taiwan faces a strategic paradox: sound asymmetric doctrine undermined by weak implementation capacity. The gap between strategic pronouncement and procurement reality suggests institutional forces favor prestige platforms over effective deterrence.

Political will remains the critical vulnerability. Beijing may not need to invade if it can simply wait for electoral outcomes or erode resolve through influence operations. Taiwan’s defense credibility depends less on weapon systems than on sustained political commitment to difficult choices.

The window for building genuine asymmetric capabilities is narrowing as China’s military modernization accelerates faster than Taiwan’s defensive preparations.

Middle East | Defence | US Gulf basing and Iran strike capability form single strategic organism vulnerable to simultaneous failure

Situation

The US maintains approximately 40,000 service members across Gulf bases including Al Udeid (Qatar), Al Dhafra (UAE), and Naval Support Activity Bahrain. These installations enable F-35s to reach Iranian airspace within an hour, supporting sustained high-tempo operations against hardened targets like Fordow and Natanz nuclear facilities.

Without Gulf basing, strike operations shift to Diego Garcia—3,000 miles away—converting every mission into a 30-hour expedition requiring multiple aerial refuelings. This transforms capability from sustained pressure operations to periodic symbolic strikes.

Gulf states face an impossible calculation: American protection becomes valuable precisely until it makes them targets for Iranian retaliation against their desalination plants, oil infrastructure, and financial centers.

Context

Iran’s missile arsenal, including the Fattah-2, can reach every US installation in the Gulf. Iranian doctrine treats American bases as hostages rather than deterrents, creating a commitment problem where Gulf states want American protection as deterrence but not active combat capability.

War risk premiums for Strait of Hormuz shipping double during tension periods. Gulf economic diversification projects—Saudi Vision 2030, UAE’s post-oil transformation—depend on regional stability that Iran strikes would shatter. The Abraham Accords paradoxically created both intelligence-sharing benefits and Iranian target lists.

The conventional framing misses that military capability and regional alliances are not separate systems. Strategic coherence and political credibility are identical phenomena: remove effective strike capability, and security guarantees become worthless promissory notes.

Trajectory

Gulf states will increasingly restrict basing access as Iranian precision strike capabilities mature, forcing Washington to choose between theoretical long-range options and practical regional influence.

The US faces a strategic paradox: the bases needed to deter Iran make partners vulnerable to Iranian retaliation, while losing those bases makes deterrence incredible. Alternative platforms exist but enable punishment rather than sustained pressure.

This geometry of distance will reshape alliance structures. Regional partners may seek accommodation with Tehran rather than risk becoming collateral damage in American-Iranian confrontation they cannot control.

China | Geopolitics | Middle powers bypass traditional alliances with bilateral tech security pacts but face structural limits

Situation

Middle powers are constructing bilateral technology security partnerships outside traditional alliance frameworks. Australia and South Korea signed a critical minerals partnership in December 2021. Japan and Australia upgraded their security declaration in October 2022, focusing on cyber defense, space, and resistance to “economic coercion.”

Similar arrangements are emerging between South Korea-Netherlands on semiconductors and Canada-Germany on rare earths. These pacts deliberately avoid multilateral structures, instead creating sector-specific working groups that can move faster than alliance consensus.

Context

Traditional alliances suffer structural mismatches with technology competition. NATO’s Article 5 lacks defined thresholds for supply chain attacks or economic coercion. The US hub-and-spoke system in Asia cannot prevent allies from weaponizing supply chains against each other, as Japan demonstrated against South Korea in 2019.

China controls 70% of rare earth mining and 90% of processing, creating single-point-of-failure dependencies for critical technologies. Middle powers recognize that coordinated bilateral action might create alternative supply chains faster than multilateral deliberation.

The semiconductor industry’s nested dependencies—Dutch lithography machines, Taiwanese manufacturing, Japanese chemicals, Korean memory—cannot be untangled by any single partnership but offer opportunities for marginal diversification.

Trajectory

These bilateral arrangements achieve tactical diversification while core dependencies remain unchanged. Building alternative processing capacity requires not just capital but tacit knowledge accumulated in Chinese facilities over decades—expertise that resists transfer through licensing agreements.

The pacts represent a pragmatic middle path: insufficient to eliminate China dependency but potentially effective at reducing vulnerability at the margins. Success depends on sustained coordination across multiple bilateral relationships rather than any single partnership delivering strategic autonomy.

Yesterday’s Assessments

• Can australia maintain secure communications with Pacific island partners if China severs subsea cables during a Taiwan crisis?
• Australia’s Pacific communications would collapse in a Taiwan crisis. Here’s why.

Until tomorrow.