Trajectory Daily Brief: 06 February 2026

Pacific | Defence | Australia’s submarine delays expose fundamental gap between deterrence theory and alliance dependency

Situation

Australia’s AUKUS submarine programme faces mounting delays, with US Virginia-class production running at 1.2 boats annually against contracted targets of two per year. The first SSN-AUKUS submarine is not expected until the early 2040s, leaving Australia without nuclear-powered submarines for two decades amid rising Chinese assertiveness.

Defence planners are quietly considering alternatives, including acquiring B-2 Spirit bombers. However, the US has never exported the B-2 to any ally, and Australia’s 2023 Defence Strategic Review explicitly ruled out the B-21 successor as unsuitable.

Context

The submarine-versus-bomber debate reveals a critical distinction in deterrence strategy. Submarines excel at “denial” deterrence through invisibility and operational uncertainty, while bombers provide “punishment” deterrence but require visible deployment and vulnerable infrastructure.

Australia’s geography compounds the bomber challenge. Northern air bases would need specialised facilities for B-2 operations, which require 50 hours of maintenance per flight hour and climate-controlled environments. More fundamentally, bomber operations would create complete dependency on US supply chains, software systems, and contractor support.

This dependency paradox extends beyond hardware to strategic autonomy. While Australia seeks sovereign defence capabilities, advanced systems increasingly bind it into US-controlled ecosystems.

Trajectory

The AUKUS delays are forcing uncomfortable questions about Australian strategic independence that Canberra has avoided confronting. Submarines offer genuine operational sovereignty—a boat at sea operates independently and cannot be recalled by hesitant allies.

Alternative platforms like bombers provide capability without sovereignty, functioning more as expensive subscriptions to American power than independent deterrents. This distinction will become critical if US strategic priorities shift or attention divides across multiple theatres.

Australia faces a stark choice: accept prolonged capability gaps while pursuing sovereign systems, or embrace deeper alliance integration at the cost of strategic autonomy.

Indo-Pacific | Conflict | Taiwan’s asymmetric warfare doctrine addresses tactical gaps but ignores political will to sustain mass casualties

Situation

Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense has spent a decade implementing the Overall Defense Concept, shifting from symmetric warfare to asymmetric tactics designed to make invasion prohibitively costly. The strategy emphasizes mobile anti-ship missiles, sea mines, and drone swarms rather than expensive platforms vulnerable to Chinese strikes.

Military procurement has aligned with this doctrine, prioritizing Harpoon missiles and portable defense systems over destroyers and fighter jets. Surveys show 68% of Taiwanese express willingness to defend against invasion.

However, the doctrine treats political will as a given input rather than examining whether Taiwanese society can sustain weeks of bombardment and mounting casualties that asymmetric defense requires.

Context

The tactical logic is sound—an amphibious assault across the Taiwan Strait would be history’s most complex military operation, and even degraded asymmetric forces could inflict catastrophic losses on invasion fleets. Ukraine demonstrates democracies can sustain extraordinary sacrifice when survival is at stake.

But Taiwan faces unique constraints: no strategic depth for retreat, uncertain scope of Western support, and an aging society with world-low fertility rates where each casualty represents larger family impact. Survey responses about hypothetical wars poorly predict actual wartime behavior under sustained bombardment.

Taiwan’s political system adds friction, with opposition parties historically blocking defense budget increases even for existential threats. The doctrine’s architects focus on technical solutions—better training, improved reserves—rather than addressing the fundamental political sustainability question.

Trajectory

Taiwan’s asymmetric pivot solves the wrong problem. The island’s actual vulnerability may not be tactical capability gaps but political cohesion under prolonged, high-casualty warfare.

This represents a critical blind spot in defense planning. Technical military solutions cannot generate the social resilience that asymmetric warfare demands. Without addressing political sustainability, Taiwan risks fielding a doctrine that works on paper but collapses under wartime pressure.

The gap between tactical sophistication and political preparation may prove more dangerous than any capability shortfall Beijing’s strategists are likely counting on it.

China | Geopolitics | Middle powers build bilateral tech pacts but cannot break China’s rare earth monopoly by 2030

Situation

Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Canada are bypassing traditional alliances to forge bilateral technology security agreements targeting China dependency. Key deals include Australia-South Korea critical minerals partnerships and Australia-Japan supply chain cooperation covering semiconductors, rare earths, and cyber defense.

These pacts emerged after China weaponized economic coercion—banning rare earth exports to Japan in 2010, retaliating against South Korea over THAAD deployment in 2017, and blocking Australian commodities in 2020. Traditional security alliances provided no commercial remedies.

Japan’s 2022 Economic Security Promotion Act exemplifies the shift, giving Tokyo new powers to screen investment and restrict technology transfers while seeking partners with complementary resources.

Context

China controls 70% of global rare earth mining and 90% of processing—dominance built through three decades of industrial policy that accepted environmental costs Western democracies reject. This creates a temporal mismatch: building alternative supply chains requires 5-10 years while democratic political cycles reset every 3-4 years.

Traditional alliances were designed for territorial defense, not securing semiconductor supply chains or rare earth facilities. NATO’s Article 5 cyber provisions remain ambiguous, with no predefined thresholds for economic coercion responses.

Even optimistic projections suggest non-Chinese rare earth processing will remain below 30% of global demand through 2030, revealing the arithmetic limits of bilateral cooperation.

Trajectory

These pacts function as information-sharing mechanisms and supply chain diagnostic tools rather than China substitutes. They enable faster coordination on export controls and reveal hidden third-tier supplier vulnerabilities that multilateral bodies cannot map effectively.

The real value lies in creating frameworks for sustained cooperation that can survive political transitions. However, success depends on matching China’s generational planning timescales—something democratic electoral cycles struggle to achieve.

Middle powers are building resilience infrastructure, not independence. The question becomes whether partial diversification can reduce China’s leverage enough to matter geopolitically.

Europe | Defence | NATO air defence systems face unsustainable cost ratios against commercial drone attacks

Situation

NATO’s billion-dollar air defence systems are structurally mismatched against low-cost drone threats. A Patriot battery costs $400 million to $1.1 billion, with interceptor missiles running $3-7 million each, while the drones they target cost $35,000-200,000.

The technical challenge compounds the economic one. NATO radars designed for high-altitude missiles struggle to distinguish small drones from birds and weather clutter. Commercial drones present radar signatures of 0.0001-0.01 square metres and fly too slowly for tracking algorithms optimised for fast-moving threats.

Russia has conducted at least 25 massive attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure since September 2022, using over 1,400 missiles and 500 Iranian Shahed drones, demonstrating the tactical viability of this asymmetric approach.

Context

For decades, NATO optimised air defence against expensive, sophisticated platforms that came in small numbers. The cost-exchange ratio favoured defenders when adversaries could only afford limited high-end threats. This calculus assumed clear distinctions between military and civilian airspace, wartime and peacetime operations.

NATO members systematically divested short-range air defence assets after the Cold War, trading air defence units for deployable infantry under the assumption that air superiority would handle aerial threats. Ukraine has exposed this gap brutally.

The production arithmetic favours attackers. Western defence contractors optimise for performance over volume, while drone manufacturers use commercial supply chains and iterate rapidly. China’s drone production capacity exceeds America’s by an order of magnitude, creating a structural industrial disadvantage.

Trajectory

The asymmetry is driving tactical adaptation by adversaries. Russian doctrine now uses cheap drones to exhaust interceptors and reveal defence positions before launching expensive missiles at exposed gaps. This combined-arms approach exploits both cost ratios and system reload times.

NATO’s February 2025 policy acknowledges the threat but capabilities lag years behind doctrine. The alliance faces an “orphaned threat” problem where institutional responsibility fragments across agencies designed for different missions.

Unless NATO develops high-volume, low-cost interceptors or deployable directed energy weapons, the mathematics of exhaustion will favour attackers indefinitely. The current trajectory points toward infrastructure vulnerability despite massive defence investments.

Yesterday’s Assessments

• If AUKUS submarine delivery fails, australia’s bomber alternative delivers expensive dependence, not deterrence
• Australia’s submarine gamble: Why B-2 bombers cannot replace AUKUS

Until tomorrow.