Writing for Bloomberg, James Stavridis, a retired U.S. Navy admiral and former supreme allied commander of NATO:
Mike Turner, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, warns that the US is “sleepwalking into an international crisis” by ignoring Russia’s intent to put nuclear weapons in space and use an electro-magnetic pulse to disable the constellation of satellites that underpins our intelligence, navigation and warfighting capabilities. He is right to be concerned that this capability — although not in place yet — is a serious challenge for the West. But there is an even more vulnerable Achilles’ heel that threatens global commerce, worldwide military readiness and logistics, and the internet itself: the highly vulnerable complex of undersea cables that provide the backbone of the world’s connectivity.
In a report released early this week by the highly regarded and nonpartisan Policy Exchange of the United Kingdom, the vulnerabilities become chillingly clear. The new report, which I have endorsed and recommended to US policymakers, is a sequel to a 2017 analysis co-authored by the current British prime minister, Rishi Sunak. . . .
The new report lays out the facts quite clearly: Globally, more than 10 trillion dollars of financial transactions, commercial payments, and trade transactions occur daily. Well over 95% of the world’s communications are carried by a network of roughly 500 cables laid across the seven seas. As the 2017 report says, “Undersea cables come ashore in just a few remote, coastal locations . . . [and] often have minimal protection. Most Americans think the internet is supported by satellites in space. Wrong — it is a relatively small handful of deep seabed cables that carry the system.”
As a former British chief of defense, Air Chief Marshal Stuart William Peach, says in the forward to the new report, “Moscow has already begun probing Atlantic undersea infrastructure as the weak underbelly of our national security.” . . .
Back in December, I wrote about some mysterious (or not so mysterious) attacks on cables and a pipeline in the Baltic, and noted:
As Europe’s decarbonization lurches along, the continent’s dependence on undersea infrastructure will increase. Given the extent and the location of the seabed that the new cables will traverse, it’s far from clear how they can be kept secure. There’s also another, related problem. A covert attack by unknown actors on a piece of (sometimes extraterritorial) infrastructure is a classic example of (to use the jargon) “gray zone” aggression, and a general promise of a military response is unlikely to be convincing enough to be a credible deterrent (the saboteurs will typically have long since left the scene). So, what to do?
Stavridis points to a few steps that can be taken, ranging from a toughening of cables, to the establishment of back-up classified cables (how secret would they really be, I wonder), to better data compression so that more of it could be transmitted via satellites (which, as noted above, are not free from vulnerabilities themselves). He also argues that the West should be investing more in its own seabed-warfare capabilities, whether offensive or defensive. It’s hard to disagree.
Tom Sharpe, writing in the Daily Telegraph, about some news that also caught Stavridis’s attention:
The threat to undersea infrastructure, like every other threat just now, is increasing. Only a few weeks ago the Houthis, so adeptly disrupting commercial shipping in the Bab el Mandeb chokepoint, declared that they were going to add undersea disruption to their playbook. They said they would target the submarine cables that run through the Bab el Mandeb between Asia and Europe.
Many commentators, myself included, thought that despite increasing Russian presence on the ground there — this is known from phone intercepts — the Houthis lacked the expertise to do this in a way that wouldn’t be immediately obvious while it was happening.
Reports yesterday, however, suggest that this judgement may have been premature.
As with all undersea disruption, establishing what has happened is hard. For example, it isn’t clear yet whether it was four separate cables (belonging to AAE-1, Seacom, EIG and TGN) or just one that was severed. . . .
Time will tell. As Sharpe explains, if only one cable is cut, that could be an accident. More than that, well. . . .
Meanwhile net-zero Britain is taking steps to improve its energy supply.
A project to power Britain using solar farms thousands of miles away in the Sahara is moving a step closer to fruition as its backers prepare to commission the world’s biggest cable-laying ship.
The 700ft vessel will lay four parallel cables linking solar and wind farms spread across the desert in Morocco with a substation in Alverdiscott, a tiny village near the coast of north Devon.
Once completed, the scheme is expected to deliver about 3.6 gigawatts of electricity to the UK’s national grid — equating to about 8pc of total power demand.
Morocco. Thousands of miles of cable.
What could go wrong?