The world’s greatest remilitarisation since the World War II is underway, driven by the imperatives of the flailing United States empire.
The AUKUS war pact places us at the centre of this drive towards war. How should we imagine Australia’s role in the world?
Australia is not just a settler-colonial state; it is a sub-imperial power that has transferred subordination from its one-time colonial ruler, Britain, to the US, its new imperial master.
It is now acting to preserve the military and economic interests of its master state. This is encapsulated in the AUKUS war pact, which, despite no public debate, commits the country to eight nuclear-powered submarines, high-tech weapons development and sharing and the subsequent invasion of US personnel and weaponry in the event of our “interoperability” in a contrived future conflict with China.
Through AUKUS, Australia acts as a mechanism for US force projection into the Pacific, to rattle the sabre against China.
AUKUS makes Australia the first non-nuclear-weapons state to use a loophole in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons for naval propulsion with weapons-grade uranium.
That sets a proliferation precedent.
Climate change is the real security threat. Pacific leaders named climate change their main security threat in the 2018 Boe Declaration. Yet Australia keeps expanding fossil fuel exports while spending hundreds of billions on submarines.
But AUKUS is about so much more than submarines; its more sinister part is AUKUS Pillar II, which is about “advanced capabilities” including: undersea capabilities; quantum science; artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomy; advanced cyber; hypersonics and counter-hypersonics; and electronic warfare.
Any pretense about “defensive” capabilities is put to rest with Pillar II because these technologies are about highly efficient offensive war-fighting capabilities.
The Australian Human Rights Commission said it is arguably impossible for AI to comply with the proportionality rule, because AI is unable to understand the intrinsic value of human life.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that machines determining proportionality in life-or-death situations is “politically unacceptable and morally repugnant”.
Australia said in 2018 that it was premature to regulate Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems. Nearly a decade later, it maintains this position despite significant advances and uses of the technology.
It is instead barrelling ahead with developing the most advanced and lethal forms imaginable.
The first “signature project” of AUKUS Pillar II was announced in May — payloads and systems for uncrewed undersea vehicles are due from 2027, covering surveillance, reconnaissance, strike, anti-submarine and electronic warfare, among other missions.
The stated aim is meeting near-term war fighting objectives. The Ghost Shark project for Australia is being developed by Silicon Valley-based defence contractor Anduril. Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy said they will conduct surveillance and can strike at extremely long distances. It means the weapon is designed to operate far from our shores — not for defence.
AI warfare
Pillar II extends into the realms of software and artificial intelligence. Tests for active warfighting scenarios to integrate Australian, British and US AI models have been ongoing for years.
A 2023 pilot had Australia PA-8 Poseidon aircraft sharing data for submarine detection, amid other tests of “AI-enabled assets” and machine-learning models.
There was a large-scale US trial in 2024. The US Department of War was enthusiastic: “These trials demonstrated significant progress since the first AUKUS RAAIT trails in the UK in April 2023 and show tangible results of the AUKUS Pillar II commitment to making our warfighter more lethal on the battlefield.
“It used to be that each nation used its own datasets to develop separate models and deploy those models on their own platforms. Under RAAIT, we’ve matured the AI pipeline, focusing on interchangeability and interoperability, which allows for any combinations of datasets, models, algorithms and platforms to be used across all three nations.”
These models and cloud computational capacity are key to war power investments today.
The Pentagon’s AI office awarded Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI contracts worth up to US$200 million each for military and intelligence AI last year.
Remember the dispute between Anthropic and the US Department of War earlier this year. Anthropic supposedly wanted assurances its models would not be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance. The Pentagon wanted unrestricted access for all lawful purposes.
When talks failed, the Pentagon declared Anthropic a supply-chain risk and OpenAI announced its own Pentagon deal within hours.
But this is not a technology being planned for the future. It is happening right now. We know what AI-enabled killing looks like as we have been watching it in the Middle East for years.
Palantir’s Maven Smart System uses large language models, including Claude. The Pentagon’s AI chief said Palantir’s Maven Smart System was used to strike 13,000 targets in Iran in just 38 days, with usage peaking at about 20 billion tokens a day.
Reports say Maven has cut the time from days to minutes from spotting a target to striking it.
International law scholar Jessica Dorsey calculated that striking 5000 targets in the first 96 hours left an average of about 70 seconds to verify each one. Following these reports, NATO bought its own version of Maven.
The strike on Minab shows how these technologies go wrong with more than 165 people, mostly girls, killed at an Iranian primary school. US military sources acknowledged a “targeting mistake”.
Elsewhere, the Israeli army’s elite cyber warfare unit is using Microsoft’s cloud servers to store masses of intelligence on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza — information that has been used to plan deadly airstrikes and shape military operations.
The Israeli intelligence agency, Unit 8200, transferred audio files of millions of calls by Palestinians in the occupied territories onto Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure.
This data was then analysed using AI software to develop kill lists. Israel approached Microsoft to develop this capability for it because the scope of Israel’s intelligence on millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is so vast that it cannot be stored on military servers alone.
The Israeli outlet +972 Magazine reported that Israel has been relying on AI to decide whom to target for killing, with humans playing an alarmingly small role in the decision-making.
Early in Israel’s latest assault on Gaza, it was reported there were three AI systems working, in concert, to determine targets. Their decisions were taken as gospel — so much so that one system is called “The Gospel”. It marks buildings it says Hamas is using.
“Lavender,” which is trained on data about known militants, then trawls through surveillance data about almost everyone in Gaza — from photos to phone contacts — to rate each person’s likelihood of being a militant.
It puts those who get a higher rating on a kill list. “Where’s Daddy?” tracks these targets and tells the Israel Defense Forces when they are in their family homes, because it is easier to bomb them there than in a protected military building.
Some 37,000 Palestinians had been marked for assassination by this process at the time of that report’s publication, and thousands of women and children have been killed as collateral damage because of AI-generated decisions.
Officers often spent only about 20 seconds on each target before approving a strike, despite knowing the system made errors in around 10% of cases.
Warfighting and surveillance
The interconnection between warfighting and surveillance is happening more and more.
The colossal quantities of data being hoovered up to achieve sinister ends exceeds nation states’ ability to process and comprehend. This drives even greater investment into AI systems to process the volumes of data and data centres to collect and store it.
It is happening here too. The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) is paying Amazon at least $2 billion over 10 years for a Top Secret cloud, shared across the 10 agencies of the National Intelligence Community.
It involves three data centres at undisclosed locations, to be operational by 2027. This is not for innocent purposes.
Minister for Defence Richard Marles announced the deal saying: “This cutting-edge technology will enhance Defence’s resilience, improve the ADF’s warfighting capacity and strengthen interoperability with key international partners.”
It sits inside ASD’s REDSPICE program, which includes offensive cyber; part of the purpose is sharing intelligence and targeting data with the intelligence sharing alliance, known as Five Eyes.
Since 2013, the Department of Defence has signed Palantir contracts worth about $26 million, including one that embeds Palantir staff in defence and sets terms for handling Australian data.
In February, defence gave its Cyber Warfare Division a $7.6 million Palantir contract — without an open tender.
Britain’s Ministry of Defence awarded Palantir £240.6 million, explicitly for systems that work with NATO and other allied Palantir deployments.
The AUKUS alliance is standardising on one US company’s software — a company with an explicitly fascist ideology.
Ghost Sharks and sub-sea cables
Anduril’s Ghost Shark unmanned submarine was justified by the need to defend sub-sea cables — the same kind as those being used for the data centre build-out across all states and territories across Australia.
Those spruiking for the industry claim that data centres are all about sovereign capability. But their international focus is clear if you overlay their locations with the primary connection points for the cables taking that data offshore and inevitably back to US military bases.
This communications infrastructure is another site of anti-imperialist struggle.
Pacific Island nations have had to route internet traffic through one of three regional hubs: Sydney, Guam or Hawaii — all in Five Eyes jurisdictions.
The Coral Sea Cable, which Australia built to connect PNG and Solomon Islands after blocking Huawei, comes ashore at Tamarama Beach in Gadigal/Sydney.
The US warned Pacific nations in early 2024 that they would lose access to Western-funded cables if they connected them with Chinese equipment.
After a Chinese firm won the bid for the East Micronesia Cable, Micronesia, Kiribati and Nauru dropped it — under US pressure.
The replacement cable plugs into a landing point that links Guam and the Marshall Islands, both home to US bases.
Pillar II’s first signature project is built for the undersea domain: Protecting seabed infrastructure, surveillance, reconnaissance and strike. If there is a US–China war, this network becomes a target.
We are already seeing Pacific nations being pulled further into this imperialist web, precisely through the deployment of AI data centres across the region. Australia is funding two data centres in Vanuatu. Fiji is also planning its first data centre.
Alarmingly, Google is preparing to build a large AI data centre on Christmas Island, which has been used as a forward “command-and-control” node in recent wargames, from which uncrewed systems could be deployed in the event of a regional crisis.
A former US Navy strategist said the data centre would “allow you to do the kinds of AI-enabled command and control … especially if you rely on uncrewed systems” in advanced operations.
How do we fight this when Australia is increasingly hardwired into the US war machine? We do that by fighting the constant encroachment of AI and data centres in our workplaces and communities. We cannot allow ourselves to provide the chips and wires of genocide and global conflict.
We must demand transparency over use and purpose of all digital infrastructure and we must insist on an independent foreign policy, common security diplomacy and a pacific partnership led by climate action.
Pacific Island nations
Importantly, we must elevate the voices of our Pacific neighbours.
The Pacific Regional Non-Governmental Organisations (PRNGO) Alliance condemned recent military activities across the Pacific Ocean. It said it opposes all forms of militarisation and nuclear threats, regardless of which country is responsible.
“We cannot condemn missile tests, military build-ups and strategic military expansion undertaken by one power while remaining silent when comparable actions are undertaken by another,” PRNGO said.
“The Pacific has already paid the price of being treated as a testing ground, a military frontier, and a dumping ground for other nations’ ambitions.
“The Pacific Ocean is not a theatre for great-power rivalry. It is our home. It is the foundation of our cultures, identities, livelihoods and futures.
“If the Blue Pacific is to become a genuine Ocean of Peace, then militarisation must give way to justice, cooperation, and Pacific-led security founded on sovereignty, self-determination and the wellbeing of our peoples.”
Supporting calls like these is how we reject imperialism in the Pacific.
The world is remilitarising when we need to work together to stave off devastating runaway climate change. The expansion of the US-alliance imperial war machine is the greatest single threat to working class communities here and around the world.
More spending on the military industrial complex drives greater environmental breakdown and climate change from expanded fossil fuel production to power the war machines.
It will gut basic social safety nets, derail decarbonisation targets and lock in austerity and financial hardship for generations.
The war machine is a climate policy that will cook the planet, and destroy working-class people’s standard of living. Every dollar fed to the war economy is a dollar torn out of the liveable world. Anyone advocating for war is not fighting for us.
We need to invest in real partnerships of genuine mutual benefit with our Pacific neighbours, respect nature and fight the fossil-fuel powered capitalism that threatens our collective safety and the safety of our planetary climate and ecosystem. That’s how we break the imperialist war machine.
[Abigail Boyd is a NSW Greens Member of the Legislative Council. This is a slightly abridged speech she delivered to the Ecosocialism 2026 conference.]