The Billion Dollar Brick: AUKUS and the Illusion of Sovereign Capability

U534 U-Boat submarine on display, by Dave Verwer, on Flickr "U534 U-Boat" by Dave Verwer (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) A few months ago, I wrote about the growing graveyard of “smart” home devices — expensive bits of plastic and silicon that turned into bricks the moment a corporate server in Virginia or San Francisco was switched off. It’s a personal annoyance when your $300 security hub stops talking to your lightbulbs. Scale that logic up to national defence and critical infrastructure, and the stakes shift from a darkened living room to a crippled nation.

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