Modern digital economies rely heavily on physical cables, data centers, and compute facilities constructed above ground. These centralized assets can be rapidly knocked offline by inexpensive missile strikes, prompting a strategic push toward deep underground hardening or space deployment.

The global economy relies on a network of undersea cables transmitting trillions of dollars in transactions daily. Many of these cables are exposed and physically vulnerable to sabotage, representing a critical, often overlooked, national security threat with massive economic implications.

Despite the advanced technology of fiber optics, the physical repair process for a severed undersea cable remains surprisingly old-fashioned. Ships are sent to the fault location, where they drag a grapnel hook along the seafloor to snag the cable, a method largely unchanged from the telegraph era.

The funding model for undersea cables has shifted from state-owned telecom consortiums to private investment, and now to big tech. Giants like Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft now fund and own two-thirds of all new cables, giving them unprecedented control over the internet's physical infrastructure.

Unlike the drone or self-driving car industries, which benefit from vast open-source datasets and research, the maritime sector is a 'data desert.' This is due to a lack of commercial adoption and the immediate classification of advanced subsea data, forcing pioneers to build from scratch.

With roughly 100 undersea cables cut accidentally each year, the internet remains stable due to immense redundancy. This is achieved through a form of 'coopetition,' where rivals like Google and Meta will purchase backup capacity on each other's proprietary cables to ensure their own services never go down.

Due to inertia and the high cost of building new landing infrastructure, today's fiber optic cables often terminate in the exact same coastal cities as telegraph cables did over a century ago. This historical path dependency creates concentrated points of failure instead of a more distributed, resilient network.

Just like global shipping, the internet's physical infrastructure is concentrated in geographic chokepoints. The Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz are critical corridors for data traffic between Asia and Europe, making them highly vulnerable to disruption by malicious actors.

Because underwater communications are limited to ultra-low-bandwidth acoustic pings and transit causes excessive drag, Ulysses pairs an autonomous surface craft with underwater drones. The surface craft handles long transit distances, drops the submersibles, recharges them wirelessly, and routes real-time telemetry back via satellite.