As the U.S. Navy struggles to catch up with the People’s Republic of China’s rapid expansion as a growing maritime power, yet another frontier must be added to its responsibility for the ocean’s surface, subsurface and the sky above them. A vast undersea infrastructure, spanning the world in the form of telecommunications cables and resource pipelines, for the most part lies unmonitored and unprotected on the ocean floor. Increasingly, these assets are coming under attack.
Undersea fiber-optic cables have become the backbone of the global communications network. A report from the U.S. Naval Institute says about 97% of intercontinental communications carrying $10 trillion in transactions daily occur via undersea cables, with satellites picking up the balance. Meanwhile, about 20,000 miles of undersea pipelines carry huge volumes of natural gas and oil.
Just as satellites are no longer protected by virtue of their location in low-Earth orbit, underwater cables and pipelines are no longer safe in the deep. Infrastructure on the floor of relatively shallow seas and coastal waters is within reach of nonspecialist vessels, such as merchant transports dragging anchor chains. And increasingly, swaths of the ocean depths are coming within the range of specialist submarines and surface vessels operating deep-diving manned and unmanned submersibles.
In other words, the means for damaging undersea infrastructure are becoming more widely available. China has reportedly patented an anchor design for cutting cables, potentially turning any vessel of its vast merchant marine into a seafloor predator. Private builders and operators of deep ocean submersibles are proliferating. As undersea cables and pipelines come within reach, political expediency becomes the deciding factor in whether a hostile power will choose to attack them. And recent history has shown that sabotage of undersea infrastructure carries little if any blowback for its perpetrators.
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