OODA Loop: Undersea Telecommunications Cables and the Seabed are Geopolitical Contested Arenas

Along with Africa and the Arctic, add the growing tensions between the U.S. and China about undersea cable deployment and seabed warfare to your geopolitical tracking, risk awareness, and strategic impacts for your business or organization. Find an overview of the core issues, tensions, and What’s Next? here.

Background

Image Source: Jayne Miller, “The 2020 Cable Map Has Landed,” TeleGeography Blog, June 16, 2020, https://blog.telegeography.com/2020-submarine-cable-map.

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“The goal…is to prevent foreign adversaries…from increasing ownership and control of this key economic and telecommunication infrastructure.”

• Undersea telecommunication cables enable consumers, businesses, and governments, including the military, to communicate with each other and access the Internet.
• Private and state-owned telecommunication and technology companies operate about 486 undersea telecommunication cables, which connect every continent except Antarctica.
• These privately owned cables carry about 99% of transoceanic digital communications (e.g., voice, data, internet), including trillions of daily international financial transactions, and serve as the backbone for the global internet. (1)
• Undersea cables are a vital part of global communication infrastructures, with 99 percent of all transoceanic digital communications transporting data like the internet through these fiber optics cables.
• This technology has added $649 billion to the U.S. economy in 2019 alone and enables transactions worth more than $10 trillion every day within the American financial sector.
• In February [2023], American subsea cable company SubCom LLC began laying a $600-million cable to transport data from Asia to Europe, via Africa and the Middle East, at super-fast speeds over 12,000 miles of fiber running along the seafloor.
• That cable is known as South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 6, or SeaMeWe-6 for short. It will connect a dozen countries as it snakes its way from Singapore to France, crossing three seas and the Indian Ocean on the way. It is slated to be finished in 2025. (2)
• In March 2023,  The U.S. House of Representatives…passed…bipartisan legislation to protect American superiority in undersea cable capabilities from China’s economic and military reach.  The Undersea Cable Control Act would require the Biden Administration to develop a strategy to limit foreign adversaries like China from accessing goods and technologies capable of supporting undersea cables and establishing agreements with allies and partners to do the same.
• The Undersea Cable Control Act aims to prevent China from acquiring American-made goods and technologies that are used in developing and supporting undersea cables.  This legislation invokes the Export Control Reform Act – specifically Section 1752 – to restrict the export of items that could prove detrimental to the national security and the economy of the United States.  The goal of the legislation is to prevent foreign adversaries, like China, from increasing ownership and control of this key economic and telecommunication infrastructure.

Seabed Warfare and National Security

“…the threat of these vulnerabilities being exploited is growing. … The threat is nothing short of existential.”

Undersea cables have two types of vulnerabilities: physical and digital. The most common threat today is accidental physical damage from commercial fishing and shipping, or even from underwater earthquakes. The U.S. government has studied the security of commercial undersea telecommunication cables in the past. A 2017 report sponsored by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) found that the majority of disruptions are caused by human activity (e.g., fishing, anchoring, dredging) and natural disasters.  However, undersea cables could also be targeted by states wishing to sabotage the economies of their rivals:

• In the past few years, as China continues to finance its state-run companies and their infrastructure projects globally as a part of the Belt and Road Initiatives, Chinese companies like Huawei and China Telecom have built undersea cables on every continent except for Antarctica.
• While the United States still has fiber optic technology that’s more advanced than China does, the prolific installments of undersea cables by Chinese companies have raised economic and security concerns globally.
• Subsea cables…are now central to the U.S.-China tech war. Washington, fearful of Beijing’s spies, has thwarted Chinese projects abroad and choked Big Tech’s cable routes to Hong Kong.  (3)
• Recent damage and threats to commercial undersea telecommunication cables have raised concerns among U.S. officials and experts over the security of commercial undersea telecommunication cables.  (1)
• Currently, more than 95% of the traffic coursing through the global internet is carried by just 200 undersea fiber-optic cables, “some as far below the surface as Everest is above it, ”  according to retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis in the forward to a 2017 report, “Undersea Cables: Indispensable, Insecure,” which raised alarms about the extreme vulnerabilities of the seabed commercial networks.
• Six years after that report was published, Stavridis told USA TODAY, “I am more concerned now than I was in 2017 about the dangers of an attack on undersea cables.”
• An all-out attack on undersea cable infrastructure would cause “potentially catastrophic” damage to the U.S. and its allies, and their ability to transmit confidential information, conduct financial transactions, and communicate internationally.
• The U.S. − and its allies and adversaries − are focusing on this potential threat from an offensive as well as a defensive standpoint, according to Stavridis and other experts, including a U.S. naval analyst. They are also tapping into the telecommunications cables as valuable sources of intelligence.
• Seabed warfare dates back to at least World War I, when Britain secretly cut German cables laid deep in the English Channel, forcing Germany to use long-distance radio transmissions that were intercepted.
• The U.S. Navy also has a rich history of deep-sea military activity. It tapped Soviet communications networks in the 1970s, according to experts interviewed by USA TODAY, including the U.S. naval analyst in Washington.
•  the threat of these vulnerabilities being exploited is growing. … The threat is nothing short of existential., including deepwater oil drilling and, more recently, mining for precious metals and other resources. (5)
• Whether from terrorist activity or an increasingly bellicose Russian naval presence, the threat of these vulnerabilities being exploited is growing. … The threat is nothing short of existential. (4)

Threats to Undersea Telecommunication Cables

Intentional Damage to Undersea Telecommunication Cables

Some in Congress have expressed concerns over intentional damage to commercial or government-owned undersea telecommunication cables by foreign adversaries and bad actors seeking to disrupt communications or gather personal, corporate, or government information.  In 2017, ODNI reported that while there had been few reported attacks on undersea telecommunication cables, some had been long-lasting and impactful. In 2007, Vietnamese pirates stole optical amplifiers, disabling a cable system for 79 days.  In 2013, a diver intentionally cut the South East Asia-Middle East-Western-Europe 4 (SMW 4) cable, affecting several service providers,and slowing internet speeds by 60% in Egypt.

The ODNI report stated that signal rerouting technologies, redundancies in cable lines, and networks of repair ships had increased the resiliency of undersea cable networks and reduced the potential that a single cut would cause widespread outages.  Further, it asserted that simultaneous attacks against multiple cables could cause “serious long-term disruption,” but are difficult to carry out. Some North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) defense officials and other foreign affairs analysts have expressed concern that Russia could cut commercial undersea telecommunication cables to disrupt communications.  In 2017, U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Andrew Lennon,  commander of NATO’s submarine forces at the time, reportedly stated, “We are now seeing Russian underwater activity in the vicinity of undersea cables that I don’t believe we have ever
seen … Russia is clearly taking an interest in NATO and NATO nations’ undersea infrastructure.”

In 2018, one media outlet, citing a Russian parliamentary publication, reported on Russian capabilities to tap top-secret communication cables, cut undersea cables, and jam underwater sensors.  According to an industry expert, “If somebody knew how these systems worked and if they staged an attack in the right way, then they could disrupt the entire system.  But the likelihood of that happening is very small.”

Cyberattacks

Global internet and telecommunications traffic is routed and transported through the undersea telecommunication cable network using advanced information and communication technologies and network management software, making the system vulnerable to cyberattacks. A 2021 think tank report notes that “more companies are using remote management systems for submarine cable networks—tools to remotely monitor and control cable systems over the Internet—which are cost-compelling because they virtualize and possibly automate the monitoring of cable functionality.”

However, these tools (e.g., software, and remote management systems) may create new risks to cable security and resilience.   Hackers could access cables through network management systems to skim personal or financial information, hold network management systems hostage until operators pay ransom, or cause widespread disruption in communications.  In April 2022, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Investigations (DHSI) reportedly thwarted a cyberattack on a network of a company that manages an undersea telecommunication cable that provides internet and mobile phone services in Hawaii and in countries across the Pacific region.

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