It Is Amazing To Think It Is Almost A Quarter Of A Century Since This Horror Happened.

This appeared a few days ago:

The 9/11 attack was a clash of civilisations, two decades on and the reality is ours is losing

Whereas older voters generally remain more pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian, younger cohorts have swung the other way. Perhaps that’s because to Gen Z, September 11 is a faint memory.

Niall Ferguson

On the day of the attack, Niall Ferguson was in Oxford, staring incredulously at the pixelated live video of the World Trade Centre twin towers first blazing.

12:00 AM September 20, 2025.

Last week’s azure September skies over New York brought back memories. Twenty-four years ago I was due to give a lecture at New York University. The date of the lecture was September 12. I never flew.

On the day of the attacks, I sat in my study at Jesus College, Oxford, staring incredulously at the pixelated live video of the World Trade Centre twin towers first blazing, then collapsing. Not long after, in April 2002, I accepted a chair at the Stern School of Business at New York University and resigned my Oxford professorship.

My motivation was partly the hereditary Scottish tendency to march towards the sound of gunfire. As a teenager in 1914, my grandfather John Ferguson had volunteered to fight the Germans. This seemed easier.

Regardless of the 9/11 attackers’ motives, I had a strong objection to terrorism as a political method – a result of growing up in Glasgow in the 1970s, when “the Troubles” in nearby Northern Ireland did more than merely resonate.

My first impulse after the attacks, in a piece for The New York Times, was to liken the sympathetic British reaction to 9/11 to the American reaction to the Blitz of 1940-41.

A man stands in the rubble, and calls out asking if anyone needs help, after the collapse of the first World Trade Center Tower. Picture: Doug Kanter / AFP

But I also warned Americans to “steel themselves for a long, inglorious kind of war that governments in Europe already know only too well”. In wars against terrorists, I wrote, “there are no quick victories. The foe does not line up his tanks for you to flatten, his ships for you to sink. His troops live among you.”

Yet this was not the Provisional IRA. Re-reading a transcript of Osama bin Laden’s first post-9/11 video, from November 3, 2001, I am reminded of how explicitly he declared a war of religion. “People were divided into two parts” after 9/11, he declared. “The first part supported these strikes against US tyranny, while the second denounced them.

“The vast majority of the sons of the Islamic world were happy about these strikes,” bin Laden went on, “because they believe that the strikes were in reaction to the huge criminality practised by Israel and the United States in Palestine and other Muslim countries.”

Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden.

There were demonstrations of support for his action “from the farthest point in the eastern part of the Islamic world to the farthest point in the western part of the Islamic world”. This revealed the key reality: “This war is fundamentally religious. The people of the East are Muslims. They sympathised with Muslims against the people of the West, who are the crusaders.”

With the passage of 2½ decades, it is startling just how unambiguous bin Laden was about his religious motive. “Under no circumstances,” he declared, “should we forget this enmity between us and the infidels. For the enmity is based on creed … It is a question of faith, not a war against terrorism.” The goal of all Muslims should now be to “resist the most ferocious, serious and violent Crusade campaign against Islam ever since the message was revealed” to Mohammed.

Bin Laden saw the war he was waging as a counter-attack – “to take revenge for those innocent children in Palestine, Iraq, southern Sudan, Somalia, Kashmir and The Philippines”. The US president, George W. Bush, might be the latest “crusader”, who “carried the cross and raised its banner high”, but bin Laden traced his war back to the aftermath of World War I when “the whole Islamic world fell under the crusader banner … and Palestine was occupied by the British”. Now the tables had been turned. And he had turned them with just 19 men whose faith exalted martyrdom.

George W Bush standing next to retired firefighter Bob Beckwith, speaks to volunteers and firemen as he surveys the damage at the site of the World Trade Center in on September 14 2001. Picture: AFP

You can see why, at the time, many commentators saw 9/11 as vindicating Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, whose seminal essay on The Clash of Civilisations had been published in 1993, as well as Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, who had long argued that Islam was chronically unable to modernise.

My wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was born in Somalia and shared this view, not because she was a scholar of Islam but because she was a Muslim – and, indeed, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood. In September 2001, she was working at a political think tank in the Netherlands, having sought asylum there in 1992 to escape war-torn Mogadishu and an arranged marriage.

Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In her memoir, Infidel, she recalls how, after hearing bin Laden’s video, she “picked up the (Koran) and the hadith and started looking through them, to check. I hated to do it, because I knew that I would find bin Laden’s quotations in there.” She shot to notoriety by telling the Dutch that the 9/11 attackers were simply following the Prophet Mohammed’s injunction to wage holy war.

Over the past 24 years I have valiantly tried to see 9/11 differently – not as a civilisational clash between Islam and “the West” but as something that fit better into my own secular frame of reference. Raised an atheist, trained as an economic historian, I felt obliged to look behind what I took to be the facade of religious zealotry.

A decade after the attacks, in a piece I wrote for The New York Times Magazine, I portrayed them as the product of four underlying historical trends. First, the spread of terrorism from the Middle East and Europe to the US. Second, the post-2000 economic downturn, combined with widening inequality between nations and a coming oil shock, possibly compounded by a Saudi revolution akin to the one that overthrew the shah in Iran in 1979. (I completely failed to foresee the shale oil revolution and bought into the “peak oil” myth.) Third, the transition of American global power from informal to formal imperialism. And last, the fragmentation of the multicultural polity. (“Rather than anticipating a clash between monolithic civilisations, we should expect a continued process of political disintegration as religious and ethnic conflicts challenge the integrity of existing multicultural nation-states.”)

Missing in this – and in much of my work that followed – was Islam.

In The War of the World (2006), I got a little closer to Huntington, portraying 1979 as a much bigger turning point than 2001 in terms of the demographic as well as political rise of Islam, a point I returned to in Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011). However, laboriously quantifying every war since Huntington’s essay had appeared, I argued that most conflicts since 1993 had, in reality, been within rather than between civilisations. In The Square and the Tower (2017), I applied network theory to the problem, showing how al-Qaeda itself was a network within a much larger network of Islamist organisations; and that its expansion in response to the invasion of Iraq ultimately necessitated a networked response (in the form of General Stan McChrystal’s Joint Special Operations Command). Most recently, in Doom (2021), I downgraded 9/11 to just another disaster, and not a very big one: “In terms of excess mortality, April 2020 in New York City was … three and a half times worse than September 2001, the month of the 9/11 terrorist attack.”

00:12 / 05:45

‘Too dangerous’: Pro-Palestine mob hijacks Albanese’s office

On reflection, I see that I was overthinking the event. Or perhaps under-thinking it.

Huntington, Lewis and my wife were right.

In Huntington’s original formulation, “the fundamental source of conflict” in the world after the Cold War would be cultural; “the principal conflicts of global politics” would be “between nations and groups of different civilisations” – “Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African”. In particular, Huntington predicted, the “centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam” could become “more virulent”. He also foresaw a “Confucian-Islamic military connection” that would culminate in a conflict between “The West and the Rest”.

Among the younger generation of proto-woke Ivy League professors, Huntington was widely mocked for his “essentialism”. But consider, with Huntington’s argument in mind, all that has happened since September 2001.

Terrorism has largely been contained in the US and EU, though not globally. In that sense, we won the “war on terror”, which was successfully displaced from the US to the periphery. It was ultimately defeated in Iraq, though not in Afghanistan. Today, as a result, terrorism in the world looks very different from what I foresaw in 2001. According to the Global Terrorism Index 2025, published by the Institute for Economics & Peace, the top five countries most impacted by terrorism last year were: Burkina Faso, Pakistan, Syria, Mali and Niger. Globally, terrorism peaked in 2014-15. In countries such as Iraq, it has declined dramatically. (In 2007, terrorists claimed 6249 lives in Iraq. Last year, the total was just 59.)

In the US, it is widely asserted, white supremacists now pose a bigger terrorist threat than Islamists – although the attack in New Orleans on January 1, 2025, when Shamsud-Din Jabbar killed 14 people by driving a pick-up truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street, is a reminder that Islamic State has not entirely gone away. We now know who murdered Charlie Kirk, and a white supremacist he was not.

Still, the latest Global Terrorism Threat Assessment by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies makes clear just how wrong I was in 2001 to anticipate a sustained campaign of jihadist terrorism in the US. Say what you like about our national security agencies, they won that war.

Yet nonviolent radicalisation (what Islam calls dawa as opposed to violent jihad) has advanced significantly everywhere in the Western world, wherever there are Muslim communities. The critical point – as my wife explained in a book on the subject – is that Islamism as a deeply illiberal political ideology does not need to engage in acts of terrorism to spread.

I never cease to marvel at the ingenuity with which the Muslim Brotherhood and other proselytising organisations spread their networks, through mosques, Islamic centres, schools, colleges and local politics. Consider only the effectiveness of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, founded in 1994, which today boasts on its website of having “100+ active lawsuits” and “600,000+ Legislative Action Alerts”, whatever that means. It has almost 30 offices throughout the country.

Most people who encounter CAIR take it to be something like the Anti-Defamation League for Muslims – a civil rights organisation that just happens to be concerned about the rights of Muslims. But it is not that at all.

Ten countries have recognised the non-existent Palestinian state since October 7, including three European Union EU member states, Ireland, Slovenia, and Spain. Canada, France, Australia and the United Kingdom Britain are itching to join them. Picture: AFP

Rather, it is more like a front organisation for the Muslim Brotherhood of America. In a recent article, Ayaan has brilliantly described the many ingenious ways that CAIR exploits the institutions of our open society, most recently settling a lawsuit to avoid revealing its sources of funding.

Good luck following the money. In her words: “The North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) controls mosque properties and financial assets. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) lends the Brotherhood a degree of religious legitimacy. The American Muslim Council (AMC) works the political front, cutting deals and building alliances. The Muslim American Society (MAS) runs operations on the ground, embedding itself firmly in local communities. In universities, the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) shapes the narrative. On campuses, the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) targets the next wave of recruits. The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and Young Muslims (YM) focus on families and youth.”

Even the United Arab Emirates has proscribed CAIR as a terrorist organisation. Yet dozens of Democratic legislators are on the record on the CAIR website, praising its work as they doubtless also praise the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

A complementary effort is the way Qatar – the largest source of foreign donations to US universities since reporting began in 1986 – funnels money into academia. According to the Network Contagion Research Institute, as reported in The Free Press, nearly a third of Qatari donations to American colleges – more than $US2bn – were given between 2021 and 2024. As Mitchell G. Bard shows in Arab Funding of American Universities (2025), this money is one of the reasons college campuses have become such hotbeds of anti-Semitism in recent years.

It is not just that the West has been successfully penetrated by an antagonistic civilisation that fundamentally rejects the fundamental division between religion and politics – church and state – that lies at the heart of both Christianity and Judaism. The West is also being geopolitically outmanoeuvred by “the rest” in just the way Huntington foresaw.

Former Hamas leaders Ismail Haniya and Yahya Sinwar wave during a rally marking the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Islamist movement in 2017. Picture: AFP

Contrast the global order after 9/11 with the global order today. We have come a long way since NATO secretary-general George Robertson’s statement on September 11, 2001: “Our message to the people of the United States is … ‘We are with you’.”

In the past three years, Zbig Brzezinski’s worst-case scenario has come about. “Potentially, the most dangerous scenario,” he wrote in The Grand Chessboard (1997), “would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances”.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that grand coalition has come into being, with North Korea as a fourth member. The “axis of upheaval” (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) is now co-operating in military, economic and diplomatic ways.

Moreover, the Trump administration’s combative treatment of US allies (the EU, Japan, South Korea) and neutrals (Brazil, India and Switzerland), not least with respect to trade policy, is alienating not only the traditionally non-aligned but also key partners.

The upshot is that Israel is now virtually alone in fighting against the Islamists, so that even the US wants plausible deniability when, as earlier this month, the Israeli Air Force strikes the leadership of Hamas in the Qatari capital, Doha.

The point is that the clash of civilisation continues. Now ask yourself: Who’s winning?

The Hamas attack on Israel two years ago was essentially an Israeli 9/11 (worse in relative terms). But compare the global reactions.

UN Security Council Resolution 1373, adopted unanimously on September 28, 2001, called on all member states to freeze terrorist financing, pass anti-terrorism laws, prevent suspected terrorists from travelling across international borders, and screen asylum-seekers for possible terrorist ties. This was an unprecedented show of international unity.

By contrast, no Security Council resolution could be passed in the wake of October 7. UN General Assembly Resolution ES-10/21 – which called for an “immediate” and “sustained” humanitarian truce and “cessation of hostilities” in Gaza and condemned “all acts of violence aimed at Palestinian and Israeli civilians” – was introduced by Jordan on behalf of a group of Arab states. When it was adopted on October 27, 2023, 121 voted in favour, 44 abstained, 14 absented themselves and only 14 (including Israel and the US) voted against.

This video grab from footage released by the Israeli Hostage and Missing Families Forum campaign group shows what the group described as Israeli female soldiers being captured by Hamas during the October 7 attack on Israel

Ten countries have recognised the non-existent Palestinian state since October 7, including three EU member states, Ireland, Slovenia, and Spain. Canada, France, Australia and Britain are itching to join them.

In short, comparing the world today with that of 24 years ago, I am tempted to say bin Laden lost the war on terror but is winning the clash of civilisations. That’s not to say his particular brand of Salafist jihadism is winning; it can even be argued that it’s in decline. Bin Laden’s creed was always too uncompromising to form alliances of convenience. By contrast, the pro-Palestinian “global intifada” is much more omnivorous, and can easily absorb the old left (Marxism and pan-Arabism) and the new (anti-globalism and wokeism).

Demographically, Islam is certainly winning. According to Pew Research (June 2025), “The number of Muslims around the world grew 21 per cent between 2010 and 2020, from 1.7 billion to 2.0 billion.” That was twice as fast as the rest of the world’s population, increasing the Muslim share from 24 per cent to 26 per cent. Earlier research by Pew (from 2015) forecast that “if current trends continue, by 2050 the number of Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world”. In Europe, Pew estimated, Muslims would make up 10 per cent of the overall population, up from 5.9 per cent in 2010. In the US, Muslims would outnumber Jews. This does not seem implausible.

00:06 / 18:57

John Howard slams Albanese’s move to recognise Palestine as ‘political expediency’

Former prime minister John Howard joined Sky News host Sharri Markson to discuss a range of issues, including...

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Already in Britain, Muhammad has overtaken Noah as the top name for baby boys in England and Wales, having been in the top 10 since 2016.

At the same time, Western civilisation today is so much more divided than it was 24 years ago. The public response to October 7 illuminated the divisions. Whereas older voters generally remain more pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian, younger cohorts have swung the other way. Perhaps that’s because to Gen Z, September 11 is a faint memory – as distant as the Cuban missile crisis and John F. Kennedy’s assassination were to my generation. But it’s also because the Islamists have done such a good job of co-opting the campus radicals, somehow overriding the cognitive dissonance in slogans such as “Queers for Palestine”, while tapping the anti-Semitism that still lurks on the far right.

According to Brookings, “young Republicans aged 18-49 have shifted from 35 per cent having an unfavourable view of Israel to 50 per cent unfavourable … Among Democrats, there has been an increase of 62 per cent to 71 per cent (with an unfavourable view of Israel) in the 18 to 49-year-old demographic … Only 9 per cent of those aged 18 to 34 approve of Israel’s military actions in Gaza.”

Supporters of Yemen's Houthi’s gather with pictures of Hamas' slain leader Yahya Sinwar during a rally last year. Picture: AFP

A recent poll in Britain by Campaign Against Anti-Semitism revealed a striking shift in attitudes towards Jews. Once again, the swing towards anti-Semitism is more pronounced among the young: “Forty-five per cent of the British public … believes that Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews … 60 per cent of young people believe this.

“Forty-nine per cent of 18-24-year-olds are uncomfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel.

“Only 31 per cent of young voters agree that Israel has a right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people.

“Twenty-six per cent of the British public believes that Israel can get away with anything because its supporters control the media.

“Nineteen per cent of young people believe that the Hamas attack on Israel was justified.”

Such attitudes can be found in Britain on both the political left and the political right. A third of Labour voters say they are uncomfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel, as do 54 per cent of Green Party voters, 15 per cent of whom believe Hamas’s attack on Israel was justified. But almost one in four supporters of the rapidly growing Reform UK party, led by Nigel Farage, believe Jewish people “chase money more than other people do”.

During the Cold War, the West was often referred to as a “Judaeo-Christian” civilisation. That term is starting to seem like an anachronism. Two years ago, another bin Laden pronouncement – his Letter to America, originally published on the first anniversary of September 11 – enjoyed a sudden resurgence of interest, not least because its attacks on the power of American Jews seemed to strike a chord with young users of TikTok.

Palestinians celebrate their return after crossing the border fence with Israel on October 7, 2023. Picture: AFP

One popular video showed a young woman brushing her hair with the caption, “When you read Osama bin Laden’s letter to America and you realise you’ve been lied to your whole entire life.” At one point in November 2023, a TikTok search for #lettertoamerica found videos with 14.2 million views. In total, about 300 videos were posted under that hashtag.

Walking the streets of New York last week, I felt old. To my children, my students and my employees, September 11 is not a memory. It is not even a historical fact. It is something people argue about on social media.

As I write, Tucker Carlson has just told Piers Morgan that an “FBI document” indicated “an Israeli spy ring in the United States … knew 9/11 was coming”. The reality is, of course, that only the conspirators themselves knew that. They also knew, very clearly, why they were going to do it.

It has taken me all these years to understand that 9/11 really was a clash of civilisations. And it has taken me until now finally to face the reality that ours is losing.

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is the author of 16 books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist. This essay originally was published in The Free Press.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/the-911-attack-was-a-clash-of-civilisations-two-decades-on-and-the-reality-is-ours-is-losing/news-story/dc0eb611984be202af319fae183239cd

Hard to believe so many years have passed and sadly not much seems to have changed for the better….

We seem to be rather slow learners as a group! I am not sure great progress has been made which is rather sad!

David.

AusHealthIT Poll Number 809 - September 21. 2025

Here are the results of the recent poll.

Do You Believe The Government Is Over-Regulating Adult Usage Of The Internet?

Yes                                                                       15 (65%)

No                                                                          8 (35%)

I Have No Idea                                                      0 (0%)

Total No. Of Votes 23

A very clear vote with most seeing a bit too much regulation!

Any insights on the poll are welcome, as a comment, as usual!

Poor voter turnout – question must have been useless. 

0 of 23 who answered the poll admitted to not being sure about the answer to the question!

Again, many, many thanks to all those who voted! 

David.

 

I Really Feel Large Submarines Are, By And Large, Obsolete

 This article appeared last week:

 Australian military

Billion-dollar coffins? New technology could make oceans transparent and Aukus submarines vulnerable

Quantum sensing, satellite tracking and AI are part of an accelerating arms race in detection that should prompt a re-evaluation of Australia’s defence strategy

Ben Doherty

Sun 14 Sep 2025 06.00 AEST

Military history is littered with the corpses of apex predators.

The Gatling gun, the battleship, the tank. All once possessed unassailable power – then were undermined, in some cases wiped out, by the march of new technology.

“Speed and stealth and firepower,” the head of the Australian Submarine Agency, Jonathan Mead, told the Guardian two years ago of Australia’s forthcoming fleet of nuclear submarines. “The apex predator of the oceans.”

But for how much longer?

In the first quarter of the 21st century, nuclear submarines have proven a formidable force: essentially undetectable deadly attack weapons. Some also carry a vital “second-strike” deterrent effect: any attack on a country armed with nuclear-powered submarines is made with the knowledge that retaliation is certain – from a warship hidden beneath the waves.

The lethal legacy of Aukus nuclear submarines will remain for millennia – and there’s no plan to deal with it

 But a drumbeat of declarations – much of it speculative, but most of it from China, the very nation the Aukus pact was established to counter – report rapid developments in submarine-detection technologies: vast networks of acutely sensitive sonar arrays; quantum sensing; improved satellite tracking able to spot tiny perturbations in the ocean’s surface; technologies that detect minute disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field; real-time AI processing of vast reams of data.

Could emerging technologies render the last opaque place on Earth – the oceans – transparent?

It may not be so binary. The oceans may become, in parts, less impenetrable: key contested sea lanes and littoral areas may be intensely surveilled, while remote, deep trenches remain arcane.

Forecasting a future conflict is fraught. But the consequences for Australia, having dedicated an extraordinary $368bn towards its Aukus nuclear submarine fleet, are immense: will the apex predator of today become the prey of tomorrow?

One brutal assessment put it in stark terms: Australia’s fleet of nuclear-powered submarines may end up being “billion-dollar coffins”.

Q&A

What is Aukus pillar one?

Underwater arms race

There is an arms race under way underwater, dedicated to perfecting the technologies that can find submarines, and finding new ways to keep them hidden.

Vast resources are being poured into improving detection technologies and developing new ones: drones, sonobuoys, satellites, magnetometers, quantum sensors. All seek to shrink the spaces where submarines can hide.

Everything is being monitored: the tiniest disturbance in waves across vast stretches of ocean, fractionally altered sea temperatures, faint magnetic disturbances, bioluminescent trails – each could give a tiny clue to a submarine’s path. Combined, they could reveal precisely where it is.

Allied to the extraordinary data-processing power of artificial intelligence, these present a formidable threat to submarines’ invisibility. AI programs are able to cut through the “noise” of masses of information, spotting unseen patterns or finding connections between disparate pieces of data, imperceptible to a human analyst.

Much of the technological advancement is being driven by China.

Submarines, made of metal, cause tiny distortions in the Earth’s magnetic field as they move through the water, changes increasingly detectable to sophisticated magnetometers.

Last year a research team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University reported the development of a new seabed sensor able to detect the faint electromagnetic waves generated by a rotating submarine propeller from nearly 20km away, about 10 times the previous detection range.

And in a peer-reviewed study published in December, researchers in Xi’an claimed to have developed an airborne magnetometer that can track the persistent trace of a submarine’s magnetic wake.

Quantum sensors, which can detect infinitesimally small perturbations in the environment at an atomic level, promise even greater sensitivity and accuracy.

In April scientists from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation said they had developed a drone-mounted quantum sensor system that could track submarines with pinpoint accuracy. They claim the coherent population trapping atomic magnetometer is as sensitive as the MAD-XR system used by Nato countries but far cheaper, and so able to be deployed at a massive scale.

These are the technologies that are known about but, as Dr Anne-Marie Grisogono of Flinders University points out, if an adversary had a technology to accurately detect submarines, would it tell anyone?

The arms race is, of course, accelerating on both sides – designers are working on counter-detection measures to make submarines ever more covert: anechoic tiles to defeat or confuse sonar; cooling systems to weaken detection by thermal imaging or infrared detection by satellites; “degaussing” submarines to reduce magnetic signatures; and using pump-jet propulsors to produce less wake.

‘We should be asking bigger questions’

Grisogono was a co-author of the 2020 report Transparent Oceans, which argued that by the 2050s – as new Australian Aukus boats continued to be sent to sea – nuclear submarines “will be able to be detected in the world’s oceans because of the evolution of science and technology”.

She told Guardian Australia this year: “The likelihood that the oceans will become transparent at some time is basically 100%, it’s just in what time frame.

“And they could become transparent much sooner. We’ve seen tremendous advances in artificial intelligence ... an accelerant for all of these detection technologies that we are seeing developed.”

Grisogono argued that it may not be one technology that renders submarines detectable. She can envisage a future of “underwater meshes of networked sensors” using different technologies, all of which are expendable and none of which is critical to the network functioning.

“It’s an adaptive mesh of cheap components, and importantly, it’s a distributed system, so you can’t really take it out,” she said. “You can lose quite a lot of them and still have a functioning network … and it’s cheap.

“If your defensive system is really cheap and can take out really expensive assets from your opponent … the advantage is now to the defence, not to the attack.”

Grisogono said Australia should use the opportunity before too much is committed to Aukus to re-evaluate its capacity, not to fight a war in 20 years but in 30, 40 or 50.

“We should be asking bigger questions about our defence posture,” she said. “I think acquiring these nuclear-powered submarines really only makes sense if you’re wanting to contribute and join into much bigger conflicts in the region with the US.

“Perhaps when the decision was first taken, the logic of Aukus might be defensible in some way. But does that still stand up now?”

‘We are very confident’

On a rainswept dock in Sydney this week, the Australian government announced it had committed $1.7bn towards buying “dozens” – precisely how many is classified – of Ghost Shark autonomous underwater vehicles.

Ministers Richard Marles and Pat Conroy pose for photos in front of a Ghost Shark in Sydney in Wednesday. Photograph: Kym Smith/ADF/AFP/Getty Images

Essentially an uncrewed submarine powered by AI, the Ghost Shark, the government says, will be able to “conduct intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and strike at extremely long distances from the Australian continent”. With each one about the size of a minibus, they can be deployed from warships or launched off the coast.

The Guardian asked the defence minister, Richard Marles, whether the investment was a “hedge” against a future where crewed submarines were detectable.

“We are very confident about Australia’s future submarines being fundamentally critical to Australia’s military capability,” Marles responded, saying the Ghost Sharks would “complement” crewed nuclear submarines.

“While there’s a whole lot of advancements in technologies about detecting submarines, there’s also a lot of advancements in technologies around making submarines harder to detect, and we are really confident about … giving Australia a highly capable, long‑range submarine capability in the future.”

Standing alongside the minister, Australia’s chief of navy, V Adm Mark Hammond, said he believed crewed submarines would grow more stealthy as efforts to detect them strengthened.

“I’ve heard about ‘transparent oceans’ since I qualified in submarines 31 years ago, and nothing’s really changed: every advancement in detection capability is usually met by an advancement in encounter detection capability and increased stealth.”

The land and the air were “completely transparent”, Hammond said, “and no one has stopped building ships and aircraft.”

“My personal belief is that the undersea battle space will continue to be increasingly congested, increasingly contested – but ultimately that is the most opaque environment on the planet, and I believe that our allies and partners will continue to enjoy the capability advantage in that space.”

Detectable equals destroyable

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Prof Peter W Singer, a strategist at the New America thinktank, cites Arthur C Clarke’s famed third law.

He tells the Guardian that the rapid pace of change across technological domains, accelerated by developments in AI, makes predicting future developments – especially beyond the span of a human or technological generation – increasingly fraught.

Australia’s first Aukus submarines are scheduled to be in the water in the 2040s. They will still be under construction into the 2060s.

“Twenty years is a very long time when it comes to technology … what’s a generation for undersea warfare: is it every 30 years? Every 15 years? Every 10 years? We’re talking about a pretty substantial period of time,” Singer says.

An accelerating trend is “greater observation of the battlefield, and the worry that once stealthy systems might be detectable”.

“If they’re detectable, they’re destroyable,” he says.

Surface tension: could the promised Aukus nuclear submarines simply never be handed over to Australia?

“Military leaders around the world are wrestling with this – whether they are in the ADF, Nato, the US Navy, Marine Corps – there’s a trend where essentially the apex predators are looking around and wondering if they are now the prey.”

The Marianas Trench – largely uncharted and reaching depths beyond human exploration – might remain unknowable, Singer says, but key sea lanes in the South China Sea could be intensely surveilled.

He cites the cold war example of the GIUK Gap – naval choke points in the North Atlantic – which was populated by a battery of hydrophones designed to detect the passage of Soviet submarines.

Singer predicts that undersea warfare of the future will not be a battle between crewed submarines but between hybrid fleets of new technologies, including unmanned underwater vehicles, potentially working in concert with crewed subs. UUVs will be far cheaper and expendable in comparison with traditional submarines.

The terrestrial equivalent is Ukraine’s revolutionary use of cheap but lethal armed drones to counter Russia’s invasion. Expendable drones worth a few hundred dollars a unit are taking out tanks that cost tens of millions, halting entire offensives.

“The uncrewed systems are not all going to be like a pet on a leash, they’re going to be increasingly operating on their own,” Singer says.

“So you may have some physically large systems that need to go long distances and carry massive payloads, but you may also have smaller systems, maybe with less range but, because they’re smaller, they’re cheaper, and you can essentially fill the battle space with them.”

The upshot is a balancing act, Singer says – accepting that decision-makers have neither a perfect view of the future nor an unlimited budget.

“I am not saying ‘don’t buy Virginia Class’ or ‘don’t buy Aukus’,” he says. “I think they do bring value. The question is how much of a bet do you want to make?”

Here is the link: 

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/sep/14/aukus-australian-submarines-vulnerable-new-technology 

I really think the billion dollar subs will be totally obsolete long before we see the first of ours!

What do you think?

David.

 

Chagas Sounds Like A Disease We Should All Avoid If Possible!

This appeared a few days ago...

 US news

‘Kissing bug’ disease should be treated as endemic in US, scientists say

People in at least eight states have been infected with Chagas, new report says, amid low awareness of disease

Eric Berger

Sat 13 Sep 2025 21.00 AEST

In February, Luna donated blood at her high school in Miami, with the goal of helping save others.

“She was very proud to come home and say, ‘I gave blood today,’” her mother, Valerie, said. (The Guardian is not using the mother or daughter’s full names to protect their privacy.)

It turned out, she was not able to save someone else’s life but potentially prevented herself from having serious health issues.

A couple months later, she received a letter from the blood donation company informing her that she could not give blood. She had tested positive for Chagas disease, which is caused by a parasite spread by triatomine bugs, otherwise known as kissing bugs.

Neither Luna nor Valerie had heard about the disease, which is most common in rural parts of Mexico and Central and South America, where their family had traveled.

“If you get a letter that tells you, you have blood cancer, you know what it is. But when you receive a letter and you hear, ‘Oh, your daughter has Chagas,’ … you’re like, oh, what is this?” said Valerie.

Dr Norman Beatty, who has studied the kissing bugs, said that like Valerie and Luna, most people in the US have not heard of Chagas, even though it is not just present south of the border but within the country.

Beatty, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Florida College of Medicine, is part of a group of scientists that authored a new report arguing that the United States should treat Chagas as an endemic disease, meaning that there is a constant or usual prevalence of a disease or infectious agent in a population within a geographic area.

They hope to increase public awareness of Chagas, which while rare, can cause serious health problems.

“My hope is that with more awareness of Chagas, we can build a better infrastructure around helping others understand whether or not they are at risk of this disease” and cause people to think about it similarly to other vector-borne illnesses, like from mosquitoes and ticks, said Beatty. “We need to add kissing bugs to this list.”

Bugs spread the parasite through their droppings, which can infect humans if they enter the body through a cut or via the eyes or mouth, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It can cause symptoms such as fever, fatigue and eyelid swelling in the weeks or months after infection.

Some people, like Luna, do not develop any symptoms – at least initially – but about 20 to 30% of people infected can develop chronic issues later in life such as an enlarged heart and heart failure, or an enlarged esophagus or colon, leading to trouble eating or going to the bathroom.

About 8 million people, including 280,000 in the United States, have the disease, according to the CDC.

It is not a recent arrival to the US. The 1,200-year-old remains of a man buried in south Texas revealed that he had Chagas and an abnormally-enlarged colon, according to a report in the Gastroenterology journal.

More recently, human development in new areas has brought us “closer to the kissing bugs’ natural environment”, Beatty said.

People in at least eight states have been infected with Chagas from local bugs, according to the new report, which was published in the CDC’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal.

But the fact that it has not been declared endemic to the United States has led to “low awareness and underreporting”, the report states.

A 2010 survey conducted of some American Medical Association providers found that 19% of infectious disease doctors had never heard of Chagas and 27% said they were “not at all confident,” in their knowledge of the disease being up to date.

“If you ask physicians about Chagas, they would think that it is either something transmitted by ticks … or they would say that’s something that doesn’t exist in the US,” said Dr Bernardo Moreno Peniche, a physician and anthropologist who was one of the authors of the report with Beatty.

But Beatty sees people with Chagas every week at a clinic in Florida dedicated to travel medicine and tropical diseases. (Those patients were infected with Chagas in Latin America.)

Beatty said there is a misconception that tests for Chagas are not reliable or available in the United States.

“We have the infrastructure to start screening people who have had exposure to these bugs and who may be in a region where we had known transmission, so we should be thinking about this as kind of routine care,” Beatty said.

After Valerie received the letter about Luna’s infection, she contacted her pediatrician who quickly responded and told them to see an infectious disease doctor.

That physician told them it was likely a “false positive” and ordered additional tests before eventually starting treatment, Valerie said.

Frustrated by the medical care, Valerie sought out a new physician and found Beatty, who prescribed a different anti-parasitic therapy.

Even among people like Luna who are not experiencing any symptoms, such treatment is often recommended, Beatty said.

The goal is to “detect early and treat early to avoid the chronic, often permanent damage that can occur”, Beatty explained.

The treatment took two months, during which Luna experienced side effects like hives and severe swelling in her hands and feet, she said.

While she is finished with the treatment, there is no definitive test to determine whether such patients will develop chronic Chagas symptoms, but it’s less likely, Beatty said.

“I hope the CDC takes it seriously,” Valerie said, “and that we can move forward and have good awareness, so that people want to be tested and get tested and get the treatment they need.”

Here is the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/13/kissing-bug-chagas-disease 

Sounds like one to avoid!!!! 

Luckily in the US only at present!!

David.