NOT LONG ago a part of the British government asked RAND Europe, a think-tank in Cambridge, England, to conduct some research on undersea critical infrastructure. The think-tank studied publicly available maps of internet and electricity cables. It interviewed experts. It held focus groups. Halfway through the process Ruth Harris, the leader of the project, realised that she had inadvertently unearthed many sensitive details that could be exploited by Russia or other adversaries. When she approached the unnamed government department, they were shocked. The reaction, she recalls, was: “Oh my god. This is secret.” When they learned that Ms Harris’s team was drawn from all over Europe, they demanded that it be overhauled, she says: “This needs to be UK eyes only.”
Western governments have been quietly concerned about the security of undersea cables, which carry most of the world’s internet traffic, for many years. But only recently has the issue come into sharp focus, owing to a series of murky incidents from the Baltic Sea to the Red Sea and a wider realisation that infrastructure, of all sorts, is a target for subversion and sabotage.
Across Europe, Russian spies and their proxies have attacked Ukraine-linked targets, hacking into water utilities, setting fire to warehouses and plotting to strike American military bases in Germany. The fear is that underwater communications could be crippled in a crisis or in wartime, or tapped for secrets in peacetime. And as America and China joust for influence throughout Asia, undersea cables have become a crucial part of their competition.
More than 600 active or planned submarine cables criss-cross the world’s oceans, running for more than 1.4m kilometres in total, enough to go from Earth to the Moon more than three times, according to TeleGeography, a data company. These carry the vast majority of internet traffic. To take one example, Europe is connected to America by some 17 cables, mostly via Britain and France (see map). More than 100 cables are damaged each year around the world, very often by errant trawlers and ships dragging their anchors.
The trouble is that it is hard to distinguish accidents from sabotage. Take the damage inflicted on the Balticonnector gas pipeline and a nearby communication cable in the Gulf of Finland in October 2023. Regional officials suspected the involvement of the Newnew Polar Bear, a Chinese-owned container ship which had earlier swapped its crew in Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave, and later turned up in Archangel with its anchor missing. Nine months later, Finnish authorities believe that the incident was probably a genuine accident. Other Western officials continue to suspect Russian malfeasance.
Below the surface
That is understandable. Russia has invested heavily in naval capabilities for underwater sabotage, primarily through GUGI, a secretive unit which operates deep-water submarine and naval drones. “The Russians are more active than we have seen them in years in this domain,” warned NATO’s intelligence chief last year. A report published in February by Policy Exchange, a think-tank in London, claimed that since 2021 there have been eight “unattributed yet suspicious” cable-cutting incidents in the Euro-Atlantic region, and more than 70 publicly recorded sightings of Russian vessels “behaving abnormally near critical maritime infrastructure”. In its annual report in February, Norwegian intelligence said that Russia had also been mapping the country’s critical oil and gas infrastructure for years. “This mapping is still ongoing, both physically and in the digital domain [and] could become important in a conflict situation.”
The problem is not confined to Europe. In February three submarine cables running through the Red Sea were damaged, disrupting the internet across east Africa for more than three months. The cause was probably a missile strike on the Rubymar, a fertiliser ship, by the Houthis, a Yemen-based rebel group that has been menacing shipping in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza. When the Rubymar was abandoned by its crew, later sinking, its anchor is thought to have dragged along the seabed and cut the cables. In March similar disruption occurred across west Africa when another crucial cable system was severed off the Ivory Coast, possibly due to seismic activity on the seabed.
American strategists worry about a potential Chinese threat to cables in Asia, too. Taiwan, in particular, is overwhelmingly dependent on undersea cables for international communications, and has a relatively small number of terminals, where they come ashore. In a war, writes Elsa Kania of the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS), a think-tank in Washington, the People’s Liberation Army would seek to impose an “information blockade” on the island. Severing cables “would almost certainly be a component of that campaign”. In February 2023 a Chinese cargo ship and a Chinese fishing vessel were suspected of cutting the two cables serving Matsu, an outlying Taiwanese island, six days apart, disrupting its connectivity for more than 50 days—though there is no hard evidence of skulduggery.
Cable-cutting may also serve broader war aims. “The best way to bring down the US drone fleet, or indeed to undermine the Five Eyes intelligence system, which is hugely dependent on internet surveillance,” write Richard Aldrich and Athina Karatzogianni, a pair of intelligence historians, “would be to attack submarine cables.” War games run by CNAS in 2021 found that Chinese cable attacks “often resulted in the loss of terrestrial internet connectivity on Taiwan, Japan, Guam and Hawaii and forced these islands to rely on lower bandwidth and more vulnerable satellite communications”. (In contrast, the same war games found that Russia, with limited specialist cable-cutting units, “could not quickly eradicate the dense cable communications between North America and Europe”.)
Western governments are scrambling to erect better defences. Their priority is to understand what is actually happening underwater. NATO states have already increased air and naval patrols near critical infrastructure, including cable routes. In May the alliance convened a new Critical Undersea Infrastructure Network for the first time, with the aim of sharing more information between governments and with the private firms which tend to operate the cables. A “digital ocean concept” in October also envisaged “a global scale network of sensors, from sea bed to space” to identify threats. A European Union initiative is contemplating a network of “underwater stations” on the seabed which might allow drones to charge batteries and transmit data on what they have seen.
Once damage occurs, repairing it is hard. The world has only 60 or so repair ships, which means that breaks may not be mended for months. Many are flagged neither to America nor one of its allies, notes Evan D’Alessandro of King’s College London who studies undersea cables. The challenge would be compounded in wartime, where Chinese cable-cutting would focus on heavily contested areas near Taiwan’s coastline.
Cable-repair ships had to be escorted by warships in the first and second world wars, observes Mr D’Alessandro. In a Pacific war, he notes, America and allied navies would have few spare ships for that task. In part to mitigate that problem, the Pentagon established a Cable Security Fleet in 2021, in which American-flagged and crewed cable-ship operators received a $5m annual stipend in exchange for being on 24 hours’ notice in a crisis and being ready to serve in wartime.
The concern is not just sabotage, however, but also snooping. America and its allies know the threat better than anyone, because for decades they have embodied it. In the 1970s America conducted audacious operations to tap Soviet military cables using specially equipped submarines that could place and recover devices on the seabed. As the internet went global, the opportunities for underwater espionage rose fast. In 2012 GCHQ, Britain’s signals-intelligence service, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables carrying phone and internet traffic, many of which handily came ashore on the country’s west coast. It also reportedly worked with Oman to tap others running through the Persian Gulf. The lesson—that the route and ownership of cables can be vital to national security—was not lost on others.
Indeed, fear of Chinese espionage is one reason why America has taken such a keen interest in Asia’s rapidly growing cable infrastructure. Between 2010 and 2023, about 140 new cables were laid in the region, compared with just 77 in western Europe. China has become an important player in the cable spree through HMN Technologies, a company which was previously known as Huawei Marine Networks. The firm boasts that it has laid more than 94,000km of cables across 134 projects.
In 2020 America, alarmed by this trend, blocked HMN’s involvement in a proposed $600m cable from Singapore to France, via India and the Red Sea, known as SeaMeWe-6, by offering grants to competing companies and threatening sanctions on HMN. These would have prevented American firms from using the cable. That was one of at least six cable deals in Asia disrupted by America between 2019 and 2023, according to a recent investigation by Reuters, a news agency.
Trouble in paradise
America’s regional allies are similarly keen to curb Chinese influence. In 2017 a Chinese effort to connect Australia and the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific was countered by Australia’s government, which established an alternative project involving Nokia, a Finnish firm. Australia is now funding two other cables to Palau and East Micronesia, a pair of archipelagoes where China, America and Australia have jostled with each other for influence in recent years. These efforts have dramatically slowed China’s cable ambitions. HMN is still a minnow compared with America’s SubCom, Japan’s NEC Corporation and France’s Alcatel Submarine Networks, the trio of firms that dominate the global cable-laying market.
Even with better undersea surveillance and more redundancy in routes, the threat is unlikely to abate. Deep-sea cable cutting once required large naval investments. Increasingly capable naval drones are changing that. “The ability to operate at extreme depths may not be the sole preserve of major powers anymore,” says Sidharth Kaushal of RUSI, another think-tank. The challenge for smaller powers, he says, will often be identifying the precise route of cables. That can take years of peacetime surveillance. It is no wonder, then, that many Western governments would rather keep such details tightly under wraps.
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© 2023, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on www.economist.com
