SET ASIDE, for a moment, the question of which among France, Japan or Germany will win the contract to build Australia's next-generation submarines; and set aside the politics of whether or not they will be built in South Australia.
Instead, cast ahead to around 2035, or 2040, when the first of the new subs will finally be approved to go to work with the Royal Australian Navy. By that time, the contested seas will be bristling with drone technology: small, fast, armed, unmanned, surface and underwater vessels. The risk of sending 60 or more RAN personnel to the depths in lumbering diesel-electric hulks could be so great it may be an unacceptable risk to even deploy them. 
More costly than the NBN, the price for Australia's new submarine fleet is likely somewhere between $50bn to $80bn, with the number of boats - eight, 10 or 12 - undecided. It is likely our most expensive "infrastructure" project ever, if ongoing maintenance costs over the lifetime of the subs is factored.
From 2009, when it was decided to build them, it will be two decades before the first sub is christened. By then, they will stand face-to-face with a new epoch in small-is-better undersea technology.
As Malcolm Turnbull urges the nation to be agile and innovative, and his SA-based Minister for Innovation, Christopher Pyne, counts on the subs being built in his home state for his political survival, is this Government about to blunder into buying costly relics that will be left behind by the drone age?
Anyone questioning Australia's need to have submarines will be dismissed by strategic thinkers as naÃ¯ve or ridiculous.
Yet the world's military strategic thinkers have from Gallipoli to Vietnam and beyond overseen such unnecessary human loss based on their own poor judgment that the modern public demands that fighting is done from a distance.
That thinking has not been applied to submarines, or to the biggest target of all, aircraft carriers. The first of six Collins-class sub took 18 years to be belatedly delivered to the slipway in 1996. They are only now ironing out a multitude of problems, with contracts still being let to correct "legacy defects" in the fleet. Until they are replaced, the surviving three or four Collins subs will need to be kept running, to the extent that can be safely achieved, for another 15 or more years.
When the successful bidder for the new fleet is announced, sometime this year (and certainly before the election) it will cast the Turnbull Government as heroic for creating a vibrant new workforce in SA.
With that, doubts about high political price for the local build, and the viability of big subs as machines in modern warfare, will be drowned out.
Japanese bidder Mitsubishi and German bidder ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems appear to have satisfied both SA and the federal government that they would fully immerse in Adelaide for the build; while French bidder DCNS favours a model that would see two-thirds of its workforce in Adelaide.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop's warm words in Japan this week on the long future it shares with Australia on defence projects only added to hype that the Japanese bid is favoured.
The German bid requires a full development program (creating a sub from scratch); and the French bid may not stand a chance if you look at the two non-operational military helicopters they've supplied us in recent years.
The Centre for the Study of the Drone, in Washington DC, recently published an update on sea-drone advances, detailing some of the 251 "platforms" with capabilities to disable mines, attack submarines and launch weapons.
It reported on US plans to launch a squadron of underwater drones; claimed China was pouring heavy money into university research; and that Russia was developing a drone to carry a nuclear warhead.
Boeing has patented a drone that both flies and heads undersea to "perform missions that are too dangerous or expensive for manned vehicles". In 2014, the US Navy launched an underwater glider drone that can run for five years.
Defence sees subs as "a critical element in the nation's maritime security planning, with Australia's national security and $1.6 trillion economy depend(ent) on secure sea lanes." That's not how John Hunter Farrell sees it. He's editor of Australian & NZ Defender Magazine . He senses a mood within the services that the subs will prove a huge money pit from which there is no return: "The future is in cheap disposable, long-range, very destructive and always courageous digital micro systems, in other words, drones."But the decision is made. The new subs are very slowly coming our way.