The Seafloor Is Now a Theater of War — and America Is Not Prepared

By Mike Coté

Sunday, March 10, 2024

 

The past few weeks have seen plenty of news out of Yemen, where the Iran-backed Houthi rebels have been attacking commercial shipping and American warships in the Red Sea. But one aspect of their campaign deserves closer attention, as it may change warfare as we know it. In addition to attacking ships (one recently sank), the Houthis have destroyed four underwater cables in the Red Sea littoral. These cables, laid across the seabed, serve as key conduits between the billions of people who live in Asia, Europe, and Africa. At this time, about 25 percent of all internet traffic between those continents has been disrupted, while the companies that own the cables state that they will take months to repair. Houthi leadership has rejected the evidence of its culpability, but this is par for the course when it comes to undersea sabotage, a prime form of gray-zone activity.

 

And the world of seafloor warfare is just ramping up, given the target-rich environment. For all that we marvel athigh-tech wireless and space technology, the more mundane-seeming infrastructure that lies beneath the waves serves a much greater purpose. Undersea infrastructure is necessary for modern civilization, acting as both a source and a conduit of energy and as the nervous system of global communications. The West’s enemies realize this already, and are acting accordingly. If the West doesn’t catch up, it will lose out in a critical dimension of global security.

 

The deep oceans are replete with natural resources just waiting to be accessed by reliable technology. Oil and gas fields have been found and tapped in bodies of water as varied as the Gulf of Mexico and the Persian Gulf, while deep-sea mining of rare-earth metals such as cobalt is fast becoming a viable economic proposition. Enormous pipelines carry essential energy resources for hundreds of miles, delivering the fuel that powers 21st-century life. These pipelines can be found in nearly every major sea on the planet, from the Baltic and North to the Mediterranean and South China. Without them, hundreds of millions of people would suffer shortages, and costs would rise dramatically.

 

Most significant, however, are the undersea cables that transmit nearly all of the world’s information, allowing people and institutions to communicate, conduct business, and diffuse ideas across the world instantaneously. The nearly 900,000 miles of cables lain across the seabed carry data running the spectrum from social-media memes and family emails to diplomatic communiqués and military orders. Over $10 trillion in financial transfers cross these cables every day, allowing the smooth and frictionless functioning of the global economy that we are so used to. A map of these cables resembles an anatomy textbook, with nodes and connections proliferating across the planetary body.

 

Suffice it to say, modern life would be impossible without the proper functioning of undersea infrastructure. And therein lies the problem. That network is under unprecedented threat.

 

The danger comes not only from newfangled technology such as unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) but also from more-traditional methods. Pipelines carrying natural gas between European nations have been sabotaged by conventional means in the past few years. The Nord Stream pipelines linking Russia and Germany and the Baltic-connector pipeline connecting Finland to the wider European gas-distribution network were damaged in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Neither event has been conclusively explained. In the former case, Ukrainian special forces have taken the blame, while in the latter, a Chinese commercial vessel seems to be the culprit. The inconclusiveness of these investigations is precisely the point, as there is almost always a degree of plausible deniability behind seabed action.

 

Gray-zone activities on the ocean floor are happening with even greater frequency when it comes to subsea cables. The cable business has historically been dominated by a few large companies based in Europe, Japan, and the United States, but this is fast changing. Huawei, the Chinese Communist Party’s pet telecom company, has dramatically expanded its investment in subsea cable infrastructure and in the means to lay and manage it, reaching nearly 10percent of the global market in just ten years. Having the internal knowledge and capacity to workwith subsea cable systems given China, no stranger to dual-use technologies, greater ability to weaponize the seafloor.

 

This has already been demonstrated. The Chinese vessel blamed for the damage to the Baltic-connector pipeline also cut several key cables in the area, an unlikely accident. Chinese dual-use ships routinely disrupt subsea cables around Taiwan in preparation for their potential future invasion. The CCP’s militarization of atolls in the South China Sea puts it in excellent position to cut the plethora of cables traversing that key maritime corridor.

 

China is not the only hostile foreign actor seeking to damage undersea cables, seeing the action as a cost-effective and plausibly deniable means to hurt Western interests. Russia has long been a factor in this field, initially being fingered for the Nord Stream sabotage because of its history of undersea exploits. More recently, Moscow has sent its warships and spy vessels around the world, purportedly on regular training deployments or foreign visits. They do have a bad habit of loitering around important undersea cables, though. More concerning than these near-peer threats, however, is the danger represented by smaller actors such as the Houthis. Their intent and ability to destroy these cables has been amply demonstrated over the past few months and is a worrying sign for the future. Their attacks may seem minor, but if a terror group controlling relatively small swaths of coastline can damage this critical infrastructure, the threat has truly been democratized.

 

All is not lost, however. There is much that we can do to diminish the danger posed by our adversaries in this peculiar realm.

 

To reinforce the security of undersea infrastructure, it is important to have robust public-private partnerships. The vast majority of these cables and pipelines are privately owned, but their safety is a public interest; therefore, governments must operate in tandem with companies to secure these assets from attack. China has a leg up here, given its deep intertwining of state and corporation, but Western countries can work closely with our private sector without endangering economic liberty.

 

Areas where this infrastructure sits should be heavily patrolled, especially where the seabed is relatively shallow and accessible. It is in these littoral regions and maritime chokepoints that sabotage is most easily undertaken, given the proliferation of seafloor infrastructure there. These patrols should be a far more frequent mission for Western navies and coast guards than they are today. Novel technology, including the aforementioned UUVs, can also be used to prevent such damage. For instance, the U.S. Navy is seeking funding for a high-tech espionage submarine that would monitor the ocean floor and detect sabotage. This is an excellent start, but a lone submarine, even with a large submersible drone fleet, cannot safeguard the panoply of undersea infrastructure. More of these vessels should be built, even if they lack some of the tech wizardry of the proposed submarine.

 

In terms of the infrastructure itself, several changes can be made to reduce the impact of potential assault. Existing undersea pipelines and cables should be monitored more extensively, not simply checked for outages. The surrounding waters should be proactively observed. New subsea installations should be hardened to be made more resilient to simple damage such — as a common sabotage tactic — the dragging of an anchor. Companies and nations must develop a robust repair capability with the potential to reach any undersea infrastructure within a short time. That would require international cooperation and basing across the globe, something the U.S. is well placed to accomplish. Finally, we must build more redundancy into these crucial systems. Government communications must be spread across various cables, supplemented by space-based relays, and sent in more than one fashion. Major pipelines and cables should be laid duplicatively, minimizing the risk of a single point of failure.

 

America’s foes are rapidly increasing their ability to target and take down the lifelines that we rely on every day. If we wish to retain our capacity for modern civilization, we must meet these threats where they lie: far beneath the waves.