The alliance wants to have eyes and ears near its submarine cables.
When the laying of undersea Internet transit cables begin in the 90s, it must’ve occurred to somebody that these were vulnerabilities that would only become more vulnerabilities as we began to rely more and more on them.
Frankly, I am rather surprised it took so long for anyone to either use them as a weapon or for anyone to actively begin guarding them. But, clearly, that is a world in the which we now live.
However, since I am hopefully sure that I’m not the first person to realize this, especially people within virtual governments of the west, I would hope that, after all of this time of inactivity, there is at least some sort of plan to respond. Goodness knows, everyone has had plenty of time to prepare for this kind of bullshit.
It’s kind of a MAD thing. If you open up this line of attack, everyone suffers because everyone depends on this shit now.
The latest seemingly intentional cuts seems almost pointless though, since there’s so many redundancies that cutting a single cable isn’t going to cause that much of an issue. Kind of seems like a bigger game I’m not aware of.
Cutting a single cable feels like a means of probing the response. Where does the traffic get rerouted through? How long does it take to repair a cable? Which handful of crews even have that capability. Could selective sabotage be used to force traffic through a compromized node?
I definitely think there’s a bigger game at play and Russia and China are both trying to characterize communications infrastructure.
Hopefully that can really defend and deter undersea cables and pipelines being used as a form of hybrid warfare
Btw, there was this experiment with autonomous mini-submarines being far more fuel-efficient for transport than the classical big container ships. What happened to it?
