Google's Private Navy: The Deputy Secretary of Defence, The Seabed, and a Coincidence So Tidy It Practically Files Its Own Maritime Notice

Google has quietly built the world's largest privately owned submarine cable network. It maintains that network through a single contractor with unusually deep ties to the Department of Defense. The man who built that contractor into what it is today is now the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the No. 2 at the Pentagon, the department's chief operating officer, the man who manages the defence budget of the United States of America. He has filed paperwork saying he has divested his interests in the firm. The paperwork contains a clause saying he hasn't, quite. This is not a scandal. This is just Tuesday in the America Inc project, and the ships are already at work.

Three Ships, One Cable, and a Geography That is Definitely Just a Coincidence

On the morning of 2 June 2026, three cable ships were simultaneously at work on a single Google-owned submarine cable system in Australian waters.

The Responder had been working the eastern Bass Strait since 30 May, inching along a bearing of 138° at half a knot with its dynamic positioning system nailed to a coordinate 38 kilometres south of the Victorian coast. The Dependable was five kilometres to its west, working the same corridor on the same cable, nav_status 3, which is the maritime community's polite way of saying "attached to the seabed and not going anywhere," a condition cable ships share, philosophically, with most defence procurement programmes. And in the Indian Ocean, 3,500 kilometres away near Christmas Island, the Resolute was doing the same thing on the same cable, confirmed by satellite on 2 June at 1.15 kilometres from the declared Bosun cable route, destination CABLE GROUNDS, speed zero, heading 50°, the picture of industrious innocence.

All three vessels are operated by SubCom, a New Jersey-based company that is simultaneously Google's preferred cable contractor and the operator of the US government's Cable Security Fleet, a DoD-funded programme designed to ensure America retains the domestic capability to install and repair the submarine cables upon which its national security depends. The same CS Dependable that our tracking data shows working Google's cable in Bass Strait is, formally and explicitly, one of the two vessels in America's strategic cable maintenance fleet. It wears both hats. It does not appear to find this awkward. Neither, apparently, does anyone else.

The cable they were working is Bosun, the centrepiece of Google's Australia Connect initiative, announced in November 2024. Bosun connects Darwin, Australia, home to a rotating US Marine Corps force of approximately 2,500 personnel and, increasingly, Japanese troops, because the 21st century is nothing if not a series of arrangements that would have seemed improbable described in advance, to Christmas Island, which sits 350 kilometres from Jakarta astride the main maritime corridor between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. From Christmas Island, Bosun runs onwards to Singapore. Google applied for Australian environmental approvals for the cable at the same time as the military announcements about Darwin. Google has also proposed building a data centre on Christmas Island, an island of 1,250 residents, because apparently someone at Google looked at an island best known for its annual red crab migration and thought: data centre. Obviously.

None of this was secret. Maritime notices were filed in three separate jurisdictions: NAVAREA X AUSCOAST WARNING 203/26 covered Responder's operations from Port Phillip Bay to the Sunshine Coast. HYDROPAC 1514/26 and its superseding notice 1547/26 covered Resolute's Christmas Island operations until further notice. The notices are in the public record. The vessels were broadcasting on AIS. The operation was, in every technical sense, entirely visible.

The problem, if you want to call it that, is that nobody was watching.

A Decade of Private Cable Building, Summarised for People Who Are Very Busy Being Important

Google has been building its own submarine cable network since 2010, but the pace has accelerated dramatically since 2019, as the company apparently looked at the global telecommunications infrastructure upon which human civilisation depends and thought: we could do this ourselves. They now have ownership stakes or sole ownership in more than 20 cable systems worldwide, including several built entirely with private Google funding, with no participation from traditional telecoms operators, which is the infrastructure equivalent of quietly buying the roads.

SubCom has been the contractor of choice for Google's most significant cables. The company built Grace Hopper, Google's 16-fibre-pair transatlantic cable, completed in 2022. It built Firmina, Google's 12-fibre-pair cable connecting North and South America, designed, at Google's specific request, to be capable of operating from a single power feed even if one end is severed. This is the kind of design specification that sounds routine until you sit with it for a moment and consider what circumstance would actually require a cable to keep operating after one of its landing stations has been destroyed, at which point it stops sounding like an engineering requirement and starts sounding like a conversation someone had with someone in a room you weren't invited to.

"It is our privilege to once again partner with Google," SubCom CEO David Coughlan said when announcing the Firmina contract in 2021.

"Once again." Two words, doing the work of an entire relationship history. SubCom and Google have a recurring, deepening partnership across the most strategically significant cable corridors in the world, the Atlantic, the Americas, now the Indo-Pacific approach to the South China Sea. At some point "once again" becomes "always," and "always" becomes infrastructure, and infrastructure becomes, as the people who study these things will tell you, geopolitics with better engineering.

The DoD Connection, Which Has Become Considerably More Interesting Since the Last Time Anyone Wrote About It

SubCom is not simply a cable contractor. It is the sole operator of the US Cable Security Fleet, established under President Trump in 2019 and funded at $10 million per year through a Department of Transportation contract. Two US-flagged vessels, CS Dependable and CS Decisive, are specifically designated for the installation, repair, and maintenance of submarine cables critical to US national security, in partnership with the DoD. The same CS Dependable that is presently in Bass Strait, attached to the seabed, working Google's cable, is one of them.

SubCom is owned by Cerberus Capital Management. In 2023, Reuters reported on SubCom's deepening ties with the Pentagon alongside its confidential Google contract, describing the combination as "the kind of America Inc project" the Biden administration had been calling for. SubCom employees told Reuters the company now works "almost exclusively" for the US military and large US tech firms. Cerberus's founder and then-chairman, one Stephen Feinberg, had served on President Trump's Intelligence Advisory Board. Reuters noted this as context. It was, at the time, a reasonable amount of context to apply to the situation.

The situation has since developed.

In March 2025, Stephen Feinberg was confirmed as the 36th Deputy Secretary of Defense of the United States. This is the second-highest position in the Pentagon. He is the department's chief operating officer. He manages the defence budget. He oversees, among many other things, the Cable Security Fleet that operates CS Dependable. Cerberus, whose portfolio explicitly includes SubCom, issued a press statement saying they were "incredibly proud" of him, which is the kind of sentence that a compliance department would normally review quite carefully before releasing, but here we are.

Feinberg filed paperwork saying he had divested his interests in Cerberus. The paperwork contains a clause allowing him to continue contracting with Cerberus indefinitely for accounting, tax, and healthcare services, because apparently the second-most powerful person in the US Defence Department cannot locate an accountant who isn't connected to the private equity firm that owns an undersea cable contractor. This seems like the sort of thing a resourceful person could resolve, but Feinberg confirmed in 2026 ethics filings that he had been unable to find a suitable alternative provider. The Defence Department approved an extension without an end date. After his confirmation, the Pentagon contracted with at least four firms owned by Cerberus.

One of those firms builds and maintains submarine cables. One of those cables is currently being worked by three ships simultaneously in Australian waters. The Deputy Secretary of Defense, who helps manage the budget of the department that funds the Cable Security Fleet, has an ongoing financial relationship with the firm that owns the company that operates the vessel in that fleet that is right now on the seabed in Bass Strait working on Google's infrastructure.

One hesitates to draw a diagram. The diagram would be embarrassing in its simplicity.

What the Vessels Actually Tell Us, For Those Who Prefer Their Geopolitics With Evidence

We track the global fleet of submarine cable ships using AIS telemetry, satellite position data, and proximity analysis against cable route geometry. The data from May–June 2026 documents the following:

The Responder alone worked three separate Google-affiliated cable systems in four weeks:

• 9–12 May 2026, Southern Cross Cable Network, offshore Sydney (Clovelly landing station). Six confirmed segments totalling 27 kilometres.
• 27–31 May 2026, Bosun cable, Bass Strait. Five promoted candidates, co-operating with Dependable five kilometres to the west, both vessels nav_status 3 on the same corridor.
• 2 June 2026, still in Bass Strait, on station since 30 May. Dependable likewise, pinned at the same coordinates since 30 May, heading locked 126°, speed 0.0 knots, apparently quite comfortable.

Meanwhile, Resolute was working the Christmas Island shore-end 3,500 kilometres away, confirmed by satellite query at 10.27°S 105.24°E on 2 June, 1.15 kilometres from the declared Bosun route geometry, declared destination CABLE GROUNDS, speed zero. Our pipeline had not seen a position from Resolute since 12 May, when she departed Fremantle heading NNW at 11 knots with a draught of 7.6 metres, which is the maritime equivalent of leaving the house with a very large bag and not saying where you're going. She surfaced, on satellite, on the other side of the Indian Ocean working Google's cable. This is, in the intelligence business, what is known as a satisfying outcome.

Three SubCom vessels. One Google cable system. Simultaneous operations across three separate maritime zones, Bass Strait eastern approach, Bass Strait western approach, Indian Ocean Christmas Island shore-end. The operation had been declared in the notices. The vessels had been broadcasting. The geometry matched.

Nobody had assembled it. We have assembled it. You're welcome.

The Strategic Geography, Which Google Would Prefer You Think of as a Series of Sensible Commercial Decisions

Christmas Island sits astride the main maritime corridor between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Darwin is home to a rotating US Marine Corps force and, increasingly, Japanese troops. Google applied for environmental approvals for the Bosun cable at exactly the same time as the military announcements about both locations. The proposed Christmas Island data centre would require 7 megawatts of power, which is modest by Google's standards and extraordinary for an island whose entire population could fit inside a medium-sized concert venue, suggesting that either Google has located a very enthusiastic local user base or the facility is not primarily for local users.

None of this makes Bosun a military cable. Google has not said it is. The cable almost certainly serves legitimate commercial purposes, because Google's commercial purposes and America's strategic interests have, over the past decade, achieved a level of geographic alignment that removes the need for anyone to make awkward phone calls. The infrastructure is just there, in the places that matter, maintained by the contractor whose owner runs the Pentagon, because that is what happens when you leave the America Inc project running unsupervised for long enough.

In Conclusion, An Observation About Diagrams

There is a version of this story in which everything described is entirely above board. The Cable Security Fleet exists. SubCom operates it. Google builds cables. SubCom builds them for Google. The Deputy Secretary of Defense used to run Cerberus. He filed the paperwork. The paperwork has some unusual clauses. The cables are in important places. The ships are at work. None of this is classified. All of it is in the public record.

The version of this story in which it is entirely above board is also, structurally, identical to the version in which it is not. That is the point. Not that something sinister is happening. That we have built an arrangement in which sinister and legitimate are, from the outside, completely indistinguishable, and then decided that the arrangement does not require a framework for examination because everything is technically disclosed.

The vessels filed their notices. They broadcast their positions. We were watching.

We will keep watching.

References:

American Maritime Officers (2021) Two SubCom cable ships to serve in U.S. Cable Security Fleet. American Maritime Officers Union, 28 October. Available at: http://m.amo-union.net/article.php?a=4568 (Accessed: 2 June 2026).

Coughlan, D. / SubCom (2021) SubCom announces contract-in-force for Firmina; a new undersea cable system connecting North and South America. SubCom press release, 9 June. Available at: https://www.subcom.com/documents/2021/Firmina_CIF_SubCom_9JUNE2021.pdf (Accessed: 2 June 2026).

Obis, A. (2025) Feinberg says his private equity background positions him to fix Pentagon. Federal News Network, 25 February. Available at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2025/02/feinberg-says-his-private-equity-background-positions-him-to-fix-pentagon/ (Accessed: 2 June 2026).

Koley, B. (2020) Announcing the Grace Hopper subsea cable, linking the U.S., U.K. and Spain. Google Cloud Blog, 28 July. Available at: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/announcing-googles-grace-hopper-subsea-cable-system (Accessed: 2 June 2026).

Quigley, B. (2024) Australia Connect initiative delivers new digital pathways for the Indo-Pacific. Google Cloud Blog, 26 November. Available at: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/bosun-australia-connect-initiative-for-indo-pacific-connectivity (Accessed: 2 June 2026).

Kladzyk, R. (2026) Epstein files show financial ties to DoD Deputy Secretary Feinberg. Project on Government Oversight (POGO), 6 February. Available at: https://www.pogo.org/investigates/epstein-files-show-financial-ties-to-dod-deputy-secretary-feinberg Accessed: 2 June 2026).

Johnson, C.G., Roberts, B., and Shaw, A. (2026) Documents reveal a web of financial ties between Trump officials and the industries they help regulate. ProPublica, 5 March. Available at: https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-administration-financial-disclosures-steve-feinberg (Accessed: 2 June 2026).

Brock, J. (2023) Special report: Inside the subsea cable firm secretly helping America take on China. Reuters, 6 July. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/us-china-tech-subcom/ (Accessed: 2 June 2026).

Cerberus Capital Management (2025) Cerberus co-founder Steve Feinberg confirmed as US Deputy Secretary of Defense. Cerberus Capital Management press release, 14 March. Available at: https://www.cerberus.com/media/cerberus-co-founder-steve-feinberg-confirmed-as-u-s-deputy-secretary-of-defense/ (Accessed: 2 June 2026).

Australian Maritime Safety Authority (2026) NAVAREA X AUSCOAST Warning 203/26: Cable laying operations, CS Responder, Bass Strait to Sunshine Coast. Australian Maritime Safety Authority, 28 May.

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (2026) HYDROPAC 1514/26: Cable operations in progress, CS Resolute, Christmas Island, Eastern Indian Ocean. NGA Maritime Safety Information, 21 May.

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (2026) HYDROPAC 1547/26: Cable operations in progress, CS Resolute, Christmas Island, Indian Ocean. NGA Maritime Safety Information, 26 May.