Trajectory Daily Brief: 11 February 2026

China | Indo-Pacific | AUKUS submarine basing at HMAS Stirling outpaces China’s current missile reach but lacks air defence before bomber gap closes

Situation

Up to four U.S. and one British nuclear-powered submarine will rotate through HMAS Stirling in Western Australia beginning around 2027 under AUKUS Pillar I. The base sits more than 5,500 kilometres from China’s nearest confirmed conventional missile capability, placing it beyond DF-26 range.

Australia is pouring an estimated A$8 billion into base expansion, with A$738.1 million in priority infrastructure works already programmed. Surrounding suburbs are experiencing a property boom driven by up to A$70 billion in anticipated defence spending.

China’s ISR constellation has grown to over 510 satellites capable of tracking surface vessels and pierside submarines. Its forthcoming H-20 stealth bomber, with an anticipated range exceeding 10,000 kilometres, could bring Stirling within strike range by the early 2030s.

Context

The strategic logic is dispersal: force Beijing to divide targeting across more nodes rather than concentrating a saturating salvo against Guam and Okinawa. Submarines that leave Stirling and dive into the Indian Ocean generate uncertainty across multiple transit corridors — Lombok Strait, Malacca approaches, the eastern Indian Ocean — compelling China to plan against all simultaneously.

But Stirling currently hosts no Patriot batteries, no THAAD, and no integrated air and missile defence architecture. This is a base designed around a distance buffer with no fallback when that buffer erodes. Hardening submarine wharves is inherently limited since they must remain open to the sea.

The base also sits at the end of a single rail corridor through some of Australia’s most sparsely populated terrain. The U.S. Navy’s four existing submarine maintenance yards are already strained. Adding a fifth node 8,000 nautical miles down the supply chain risks diluting maintenance capacity rather than multiplying it.

Trajectory

Stirling’s value is real but time-limited. It buys a window — roughly 2027 to the early 2030s — in which distance alone complicates Chinese targeting. That window closes as the H-20 matures and China’s undersea surveillance improves.

The investment profile creates its own strategic trap. The more Australia spends on fixed infrastructure, the harder it becomes politically to treat Stirling as one expendable node in a distributed network rather than a defended fortress. The base needs air and missile defence, redundant logistics corridors, and dispersed maintenance capacity before the distance advantage expires.

Dispersal works only if each node is independently viable. Stirling is not there yet, and the procurement timeline to get there runs a race against the threat timeline closing in.

Middle East | Analysis | US Navy expended 220 missiles defending against cheap Houthi drones, exposing unsustainable cost-exchange ratio in carrier operations

Situation

Between November 2023 and early 2025, twenty-six US Navy vessels rotated through the Red Sea to counter Houthi drone and missile attacks. The fleet fired 220 missiles and 160 five-inch shells across 380 separate engagements. The USS Carney alone fought for ten continuous hours in a single engagement — the Navy’s most intense surface combat since World War II.

No carrier was hit. But interceptors costing $1–5 million each were used against Iranian-designed Shahed drones worth roughly $20,000 apiece. The Navy cannot reload vertical launch cells at sea; each ship must withdraw to port for weeks to rearm, creating persistent gaps in coverage.

Context

The carrier strike group’s layered air-defence architecture — Aegis radar, Standard Missiles, Evolved SeaSparrow, Phalanx CIWS — was engineered to counter Soviet-era anti-ship cruise missiles launched from high-value platforms like bombers. Destroying the launcher removed both platform and weapon. A Houthi drone launcher is a truck. The Shahed-136’s tiny radar cross-section, low infrared signature, and sea-skimming flight profile do not defeat Aegis — they exhaust it.

This is an architectural mismatch, not a technological failure. The Navy’s own Navigation Plan 2024 identifies terminal defence and contested logistics as priority capability gaps, with a 2027 China readiness deadline. A Ticonderoga cruiser carries 122 vertical launch cells; an Arleigh Burke destroyer carries 90–96. Once empty, reloading requires pierside cranes.

Iran’s drone programme was never designed to sink a carrier. It was designed to make carrier operations so costly and logistically punishing that sustained presence becomes untenable — converting America’s most expensive asset into a liability.

Trajectory

Chinese military planners are studying the Red Sea campaign closely. Beijing has already launched a prototype drone carrier. The strategic lesson is direct: force American ships to defend against cheap, mass-produced munitions, and magazine depth — not firepower — becomes the decisive constraint. In the Taiwan Strait, where distances compress and resupply routes face interdiction, this calculus worsens sharply.

The US Navy’s SM-6 production runs at roughly 500 per year. Iran and proxies manufacture drones in days from commercial automotive components. Until the Navy fields affordable directed-energy weapons or develops at-sea reloading, every drone engagement accelerates a rate of strategic erosion that tactical success cannot reverse.

Global | Technology | AI-enhanced cyber espionage operates beyond the detection threshold of current defensive architectures

Situation

Current cyber espionage detection systems — endpoint sensors, network monitors, behavioural analytics — were built to catch human operators making mistakes at human speed. AI-enhanced reconnaissance makes fewer mistakes and operates at machine tempo. The result is a category failure, not a gradual erosion.

Mandiant’s 2024 data puts espionage-specific dwell time past 200 days, while red teams achieve objectives in five to seven. Fifty-seven state-linked threat actors from China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia used AI operationally in 2024, for tasks ranging from malware debugging to automated attack sequencing. A tool called Villager, built on DeepSeek AI, was downloaded over 17,000 times.

Context

The gap is structural, not budgetary. Each defensive layer assumes something the adversary has learned to deny it. EDR assumes malicious code will execute; AI-driven living-off-the-land techniques use only signed, trusted system tools. SIEM platforms retain detailed logs for 30 to 90 days; espionage campaigns unfold over months or years. UEBA flags behavioural deviations; AI agents randomise timing, vary command syntax, and dissolve into legitimate administrative noise.

The temporal mismatch is the most consequential dimension. SOCs operate on alert cycles measured in minutes and reward speed on individual incidents. Nation-state campaigns operate on planning horizons measured in years. Salt Typhoon’s 2024 penetration of major US telecom providers exposed a further blind spot: cloud and telecom control planes generate logs that are often incomplete, proprietary, or inaccessible to the organisations they serve. Defenders cannot detect what infrastructure was never designed to make visible.

Trajectory

The asymmetry is mathematical, not just operational. Offensive AI needs to find one viable path through defences. Defensive AI must secure all paths simultaneously. AI gives attackers autonomous decision-making within the kill chain — agentic systems exploring multiple attack paths in parallel, abandoning blocked routes, pursuing open ones without human direction or detectable command-and-control traffic.

Every detection rule an organisation deploys teaches a probing AI what to avoid. The defensive perimeter becomes self-undermining at scale. Until detection architectures shift from signature-and-anomaly models to something that matches the temporal and adaptive characteristics of AI-driven espionage, the structural advantage compounds with each improvement defenders publish.

Indo-Pacific | Conflict | Taiwan’s asymmetric arsenal targets blockade escalation risk, not battlefield victory

Situation

Taiwan continues accelerating procurement of anti-ship missiles, sea mines, drone swarms, and indigenous submarines under its “Defensive Posture, Layered Deterrence” framework, codified in the 2025 Quadrennial Defence Review. The buildup proceeds despite consensus that China’s most likely coercive move is a grey-zone quarantine — a coast-guard-led economic stranglehold — rather than an amphibious invasion.

The island imports 97% of its energy, produces roughly 30% of its food domestically, and depends on fourteen undersea cables for connectivity. China’s Coast Guard, now the world’s largest by tonnage, backed by thousands of militia fishing vessels, could throttle commercial shipping without formally crossing a wartime threshold.

Context

The standard critique — why buy weapons for a war Beijing plans to skip — misreads the function of Taiwan’s arsenal. These systems do not exist to win a kinetic exchange. They exist to collapse the grey zone by forcing every Chinese planner to answer a binary question: is this a law-enforcement action or a military campaign? Each dispersed missile launcher and lurking submarine narrows the corridor of calibration Beijing needs to coerce without triggering escalation.

A blockade demands sustained surface visibility — patrols, intercepts, station-keeping — across weeks or months. Taiwan’s hidden, mobile, and distributed systems exploit that exposure asymmetry. One submarine that might be present ties down an entire anti-submarine warfare task group. Mines convert predictable shipping lanes into actuarial hazards. The blockader must advertise its position; the defender shoots from concealment.

The strategic logic is sound. Execution is another matter. Taiwan’s defence establishment still funds legacy platforms — F-16 squadrons, large surface combatants — that serve institutional prestige but would not survive the opening hours of a conflict against PLA missile forces.

Trajectory

The operative question is not whether Taiwan can defeat a blockade militarily. It cannot. The question is whether its arsenal makes a non-escalatory blockade operationally implausible — denying Beijing the comfortable space where coercion works without consequences. On paper, the logic holds: no PLA planner can guarantee zero kinetic engagement when launchers are mobile and hidden.

The gap between doctrine and procurement remains the critical vulnerability. Every dollar spent on legacy platforms that buy institutional face rather than asymmetric uncertainty is a dollar subsidising exactly the clean blockade scenario Taiwan claims to be deterring. The porcupine strategy works only if the quills are real.

Yesterday’s Assessments

• Hmas stirling buys America maintenance time and sells australia a place on China’s target list
• Does moving US submarines to Western Australia actually deter China—or just create a new target?

Until tomorrow.