Indo-Pacific Unplugged - Digital Connectivity as Critical Infrastructure

Indo-Pacific Unplugged is a closed-door executive tabletop simulation that treats international digital connectivity—especially undersea cables—as critical infrastructure for the modern economy. The exercise stress-tests scenarios of degraded or disrupted connectivity and the cascading impacts across national security, transport and logistics, communications, utilities, finance and payments, and health services.

Australia is the scenario “home base,” with Western Australia as the live stress-test environment—anchored by Perth, one of the world’s most geographically isolated capital cities, which makes WA a uniquely valuable resilience laboratory for the Indo-Pacific. WA is rapidly strengthening its position as a green digital infrastructure and connectivity hub—linking renewable energy, data centre growth, subsea routes, and sovereign-grade capability. This simulation highlights the benefits of that trajectory while pressure-testing the assumptions it relies on, including degraded-mode operations, cross-sector coordination, and the role of decentralised / distributed networks as additional layers of continuity when “always-on connectivity” cannot be taken for granted.

Participants will stress-test realistic scenarios involving partial degradation or temporary loss of international connectivity, and work through the operational choices that follow—what to prioritise, what to throttle, what to switch to, how to coordinate across sectors, and how to communicate credibly under uncertainty. This simulation prepares leaders for decision-readiness in extreme situations where there is no time to prepare.

Following the precedent of Iceland’s “Unplugged” exercise and similar industry-led resilience simulations, this session is designed to surface hidden dependencies, identify second- and third-order impacts, improve public–private coordination, and generate a short list of practical mitigations that organisations can act on immediately.