Politics & Power Quote by Frank Gaffney

“Millions of Americans” isn’t an accidental flourish here; it’s the rhetorical payload. Gaffney takes a wonky, technical subject - seabed mapping, data collection, the geography of the continental shelf - and reroutes it into a domestic vulnerability story with a clear villain slot labeled “an enemy.” The sentence is built to make curiosity about information itself feel like a threat. “Could well provide” and “strategically invaluable” signal grave certainty without committing to a specific adversary, operation, or probability. It’s a security argument engineered to be un-falsifiable on purpose.

The intent is less about undersea routes than about permission: permission to treat scientific or commercial activity as intelligence gathering, to justify secrecy, regulation, or military posture by implying that open data equals open doors. The phrase “undersea access routes” conjures a covert, cinematic pathway to the homeland, even though “routes” in naval warfare are rarely so literal; it’s a metaphor made to sound like a map you can steal.

The subtext is classic post-Cold War, post-9/11 securitization: the coastline as a soft underbelly, the ocean as an unseen corridor, the public as potential victims. By anchoring the risk to people “who live on or near our coasts,” he transforms infrastructure and bathymetry into a moral obligation. The context for a writer like Gaffney - long associated with hardline national security framing - is an argument style that turns ambiguity into urgency: if we can imagine an attack, we must treat the enabling knowledge as suspect. That’s why it works: it swaps evidence for plausibility, and plausibility for policy.