Submarine Cables, Pipelines, and the Benthic Front
The Fallacy: The Cloud
People say their data is in the cloud. It is not in the cloud. It is in a cable on the ocean floor, thinner than a garden hose, armored in steel, and defended by almost nothing. More than ninety-five percent of intercontinental data travels through submarine fiber-optic cables. Ten trillion dollars in daily financial transactions cross these cables. As of 2025, approximately 570 active systems spanning 1.4 million kilometers connect the global economy, and the primary legal framework protecting them, the Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables, dates to 1884.
The fallacy is that the internet is ethereal. The internet is physical. It is glass fiber encased in polyethylene and steel wire, laid on the seabed by a global fleet of approximately eighty specialized ships, most of them aging toward the end of their service lives. A TeleGeography analysis published in 2025 found that two-thirds of the world’s cable maintenance vessels will reach end of service life within the decade, and that sustaining current repair capacity will require roughly three billion dollars in new investment, covering fifteen replacement ships and five additional vessels. The industry has not funded them. The cloud is a fiber on the seafloor, and the ships that fix it when it breaks are running out of time.
The Center of Gravity: The Cable
Between October 2023 and January 2025, the Baltic Sea experienced at least nine submarine cable cuts and one gas pipeline rupture across four distinct incidents, seven of them in a single three-month window. The SIPRI investigationdocumented the pattern: in every case, the ships involved appear to have deliberately dragged their anchors along the seabed for long distances. The Chinese bulk carrier Newnew Polar Bear damaged the Balticconnector gas pipeline and a data cable between Finland and Estonia in October 2023. A year later, the Chinese-flagged Yi Peng 3 severed two cables connecting the Baltic states to Western Europe. On Christmas Day 2024, the shadow-fleet tanker Eagle S dragged its anchor for nearly ninety kilometers across the Gulf of Finland, cutting the Estlink 2 power cable and four telecommunications cables in a single transit, reducing Finland-Estonia cross-border electricity capacity by sixty-five percent.
NATO responded in January 2025 by launching Baltic Sentry, deploying frigates, maritime patrol aircraft, and naval drones across the region. No confirmed cable severings have occurred in the Baltic since. But NATO’s own commanders acknowledge the limits: the alliance monitors and deters, but coastal states bear primary responsibility for response, and the legal framework under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea does not authorize boarding foreign vessels in exclusive economic zones even when evidence of deliberate cable damage is compelling.
The Baltic is not the only theater. In February 2023, two Chinese vessels severed both cables connecting Taiwan’s Matsu Islands, leaving 13,000 residents with fifty days of degraded internet access. Between 2024 and early 2025, Recorded Future’s Insikt Group identified four incidents involving eight distinct cable damages in the Baltic Sea and five incidents involving five distinct damages around Taiwan, at least five attributed to Russia- or China-linked vessels. In February 2024, the Houthi-struck vessel Rubymar sank in the Red Sea with its anchor deployed, damaging three major cables and disrupting twenty-five percent of internet traffic between Asia and Europe.
Russia and China approach the seabed differently but exploit the same vulnerability. Russia’s doctrine is chaos. Its intelligence ship Yantar, operated by the secretive Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, has spent years mapping NATO cable routes from the Norwegian Sea to the Irish Sea to the Mediterranean. In November 2025, Britain’s Defence Secretary stated publicly that Yantar had entered UK waters to map undersea cables, and that the ship’s crew directed lasers at Royal Air Force pilots tracking it. Russia’s shadow fleet of aging, opaquely owned tankers provides the deniable platforms for anchor-dragging operations that remain below the attribution threshold. China’s doctrine is leverage. HMN Technologies, the successor to Huawei Marine Networks, has built or repaired approximately twenty-five percent of the world’s submarine cables according to a Federal Communications Commission report cited by CSIS, giving Beijing structural knowledge of where the cables are, how they are built, and how they are repaired. The United States has intervened in at least six Asia-Pacific cable deals to prevent HMN from winning contracts, but the company’s existing market penetration cannot be reversed.
The same seabed hosts energy pipelines and emerging deep-sea mining claims. The Nord Stream sabotage of September 2022 demonstrated that undersea energy infrastructure is as vulnerable as communications cables. The Iran war, now in its third week as of March 19, 2026, has provided the most devastating proof yet. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz on March 3 and the simultaneous disruption of the Red Sea corridor by Houthi forces have, for the first time in history, closed both of the world’s critical maritime data chokepoints simultaneously. Seventeen submarine cables pass through the Red Sea. Additional systems run through the Strait of Hormuz serving Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar. Alcatel Submarine Networks has issued force majeure notices halting work on the 2Africa Pearls cable extension in the Persian Gulf. Cable repair ships cannot safely reach either passage. The benthic front is not hypothetical. It is on fire.
The Gulf war has exposed precisely the convergence this paper identifies. The 2Africa Pearls cable, designed to carry data traffic for more than three billion people linking Africa, Europe, and Asia, was suspended under force majeure at the same moment that Iranian ballistic missiles struck Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City and drones hit the UAE’s Shah gas field, Fujairah oil zone, and Saudi refinery infrastructure.
The energy attacks and the digital infrastructure freeze are not separate crises. They share the same geography, the same chokepoints, and the same adversary logic. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google spent years building data centers across the Gulf, betting the region would become the world’s next hub for artificial intelligence. Submarine cables connecting those facilities to users in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa pass through the same straits now closed to commercial traffic. Strategic planning, as one geopolitical analyst noted, revolved almost entirely around energy and financial flows, leaving technology infrastructure vulnerable. The cables, the pipelines, and the data centers are all on the same seabed, in the same war zone, defended by no single authority.
The Convergence Gap
Telecommunications regulators see cable licensing. Navy planners see seabed warfare. Energy security analysts see pipeline vulnerability. Maritime lawyers see the 1884 Convention. Deep-sea mining regulators see resource extraction. The irregular warfare community sees gray zone infrastructure attack. Nobody has converged submarine cable defense, energy pipeline protection, seabed mining security, and undersea infrastructure deterrence into a single benthic warfare doctrine.
The bureaucratic fragmentation is structural. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission licenses cable landings while the Department of Transportation funds the Cable Security Fleet, a two-ship program operated by SubCom at ten million dollars annually. The Navy monitors the seabed. The Department of Energy tracks pipeline security. The International Seabed Authority governs mining. In Europe, the EU published a cable security action plan in February 2025 while NATO launched Baltic Sentry, but no single authority bridges the two mandates. The 2024-2025 Baltic incidents exposed this gap in real time: Estonia’s power regulator, Finland’s criminal investigators, NATO’s maritime command, and the EU’s policy apparatus all responded to the Eagle S incident through separate channels, on separate timescales, under separate legal authorities. The Eagle S carried a Cook Islands flag, was registered in the United Arab Emirates, was operated by an Indian company, and employed a crew from India and Georgia. Determining who had jurisdiction to act, and under what legal authority, consumed hours that the cable infrastructure did not have.
The Gulf war is now demonstrating the same fragmentation at a global scale. Energy ministries are tracking the Ras Laffan damage and Hormuz closure. Telecommunications regulators are tracking the 2Africa Pearls suspension and cable repair delays. Military planners are tracking Iranian missile trajectories and Houthi maritime operations. No single institution is tracking the convergent effect: that the same conflict has simultaneously closed two submarine cable chokepoints, halted a major cable construction project, destroyed energy infrastructure that shares the seabed with those cables, and frozen data center investments that depend on cable connectivity. The adversary did not plan this convergence. The architecture of the seabed produced it. The absence of a unified defense framework ensured nobody saw it coming as a single system failure.
The adversary faces no such fragmentation. The same shadow-fleet vessel that drags an anchor through a power cable can sever a data cable and a gas pipeline in the same transit. The same intelligence ship that maps cable routes also maps pipeline corridors. The same legal void that prevents boarding a suspect vessel in an exclusive economic zone applies equally to cable cuts and pipeline sabotage. The defenders are organized by infrastructure category. The attackers are organized by geography. This is the gap. Not intelligence. Synthesis.
Naming the Weapon: The Severed Spine
I propose the term the Severed Spine to describe the convergent exploitation of undersea infrastructure vulnerability across communications, energy, and resource domains. The Benthic Front is the contested seabed environment where cables, pipelines, and mining operations coexist under different regulatory frameworks, defended by different bureaucracies, and attacked by the same adversaries using the same platforms.
The Severed Spine operates through three mechanisms. The disruption mechanism: cable and pipeline cuts that degrade communications, financial systems, and energy supply. The intelligence mechanism: cable-laying and repair market penetration that provides structural knowledge of adversary infrastructure. The escalation mechanism: the legal and attribution void that allows seabed operations to remain below the threshold of armed conflict. The median restoration time for a damaged cable is approximately forty days. A coordinated attack on multiple cables in a region with limited redundancy, such as West Africa or the Pacific Islands, could isolate entire nations for months. The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity has warned explicitly that a coordinated attack against multiple subsea cables could have a major impact on global internet connectivity. The Iran war is demonstrating in real time what that impact looks like when two chokepoints close simultaneously.
The Doctrine: Five Pillars of Benthic Sovereignty
First Pillar: Unified Seabed Infrastructure Command. A single authority responsible for the defense of all undersea infrastructure, cables, pipelines, and mining operations, within allied waters. Not three bureaucracies defending three categories separately. One command. One operational picture. One response architecture. NATO’s Baltic Sentry is a step, but it addresses only one sea and only the military dimension. The EU’s cable security action plan, published in February 2025, addresses only telecommunications cables and only the civilian regulatory dimension. Neither covers energy pipelines. Neither covers the Gulf, the Red Sea, or the Taiwan Strait. The model should resemble NATO’s Airborne Warning and Control System: a shared multinational structure with standing authority to monitor, attribute, and coordinate response across the full spectrum of seabed infrastructure. The threat is global and convergent. The defense must be both.
Second Pillar: Repair Fleet Investment. The global fleet of approximately eighty cable ships is aging, overcommitted, and geographically concentrated. TeleGeography’s 2025 analysis projects a three-billion-dollar investment gap. When Vietnam lost seventy-five percent of its data transmission capacity in February 2023 after all five operational cables suffered simultaneous damage, repairs were not fully completed until late November, nine months later, because nearby ships were busy elsewhere. In Africa, where the Recorded Future analysis found the greatest threat lies in regions with limited redundancy and repair capacity, a single repair ship based in Cape Town served the entire continent at the time of major cable outages in March 2024. Repair capacity is deterrence capacity. A determined adversary does not need to cut every cable. It needs to cut cables faster than eighty ships, most of them committed to installation projects, can fix them. Allied defense budgets should fund a minimum doubling of dedicated repair vessels, pre-positioned in strategic regions, with guaranteed response times written into alliance commitments.
Third Pillar: Seabed Surveillance Architecture. Detection must operate at the speed of the threat, not the speed of the investigation after the cable goes dark. NATO’s deployment of uncrewed surface vessels in the Baltic and the UK’s Nordic Warden program, which uses artificial intelligence to assess vessel behavior patterns, represent early steps. Persistent undersea monitoring of critical cable corridors and pipeline routes using acoustic sensors, unmanned underwater vehicles, and satellite tracking of vessels transiting cable zones must become standard infrastructure, not emergency response. Australia, Denmark, and New Zealand have already established cable protection safety zones in their exclusive economic zones, prohibiting anchoring and bottom trawling near cable routes. The model exists. The adoption does not.
Fourth Pillar: Legal Modernization. The 1884 Convention predates powered flight. Article 113 of UNCLOS, which addresses cable damage, does not provide for universal jurisdiction. Criminal jurisdiction applies only if the cable is damaged by a national of the coastal state or a ship flying its flag. When the Yi Peng 3 severed two Baltic cables in Sweden’s exclusive economic zone, investigators required Chinese permission to board a Chinese-flagged vessel. That permission was not forthcoming. The legal framework must be replaced with a modern treaty that criminalizes deliberate interference with undersea infrastructure, establishes binding attribution mechanisms, and authorizes proportional enforcement measures including boarding, impoundment, and arrest. Finland demonstrated in the Eagle S case that firm action within existing law is possible. The law itself must now catch up to the threat.
Fifth Pillar: Market Sovereignty. Four companies, SubCom, Alcatel Submarine Networks, NEC, and HMN Technologies, hold ninety-eight percent of the global market for building and maintaining submarine cables. One of the four is Chinese-owned, placed on the U.S. Entity List in 2021, and has built or repaired a quarter of the world’s cable infrastructure. The conflict of interest is structural and unresolvable. Allied cable-laying and repair capability must eliminate dependency on adversary-linked companies for the construction and maintenance of critical undersea infrastructure. The United States has already blocked HMN from six Asia-Pacific cable deals. The strategy must extend from blocking to building: funding allied manufacturing capacity, training allied crews, and ensuring that the cables NATO depends on are not built by companies whose parent governments are mapping those same cables for sabotage. The email sent this morning, the financial transaction that paid a mortgage, the intelligence that keeps a country safe, all crossed the ocean floor on a glass fiber protected by a treaty written before the lightbulb was common. The spine of the global economy is lying on the seabed. The adversaries who would sever it are already there.
RESONANCE
Atlantic Council. (2025). “How the Baltic Sea Nations Have Tackled Suspicious Cable Cuts.” Atlantic Council Issue Brief. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/issue-brief/how-the-baltic-sea-nations-have-tackled-suspicious-cable-cuts/ Summary Elisabeth Braw reports from the NATO task force charged with protecting Baltic undersea infrastructure, documenting the evolution from the Balticconnector incident through Baltic Sentry and the operational constraints of maritime law enforcement.
Capacity Global. (2026). “Iran-US War Puts Subsea Cable Network on a Knife-Edge.” Capacity. https://capacityglobal.com/news/iran-us-war-subsea-cables-threat/ Summary Analysis of the simultaneous closure of the Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz as data chokepoints, the 2Africa Pearls force majeure, and the unprecedented threat to Gulf digital infrastructure.
CSIS. (2025). “Safeguarding Subsea Cables: Protecting Cyber Infrastructure amid Great Power Competition.” Center for Strategic and International Studies. https://www.csis.org/analysis/safeguarding-subsea-cables-protecting-cyber-infrastructure-amid-great-power-competition Summary Comprehensive assessment of the four-firm market structure, HMN Technologies market penetration, the U.S. Cable Security Fleet, and policy recommendations for allied cable resilience.
Global Taiwan Institute. (2025). “China’s Undersea Cable Sabotage and Taiwan’s Digital Vulnerabilities.” Global Taiwan Institute. https://globaltaiwan.org/2025/06/taiwans-digital-vulnerabilities/ Summary Documents the pattern of Chinese vessel cable damage around Taiwan from 2023 through 2025, Taiwan’s fourteen-cable dependency, and the gray zone warfare implications.
Internet Society. (2025). “Enhancing the Resilience of Submarine Internet Infrastructure.” Internet Society Policy Brief. https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/policybriefs/2025/enhancing-the-resilience-of-submarine-internet-infrastructure/ Summary Reports 570 active cables as of 2025 carrying 97-98 percent of intercontinental internet traffic, with approximately 200 disruptions per year, and draws on real-time Pulse platform data to assess resilience.
Lieber Institute, West Point. (2024). “The Baltic Sea Cable-Cuts and Ship Interdiction: The C-Lion1 Incident.” Lieber Institute for Law and Armed Conflict. https://lieber.westpoint.edu/baltic-sea-cable-cuts-ship-interdiction-c-lion1-incident/ Summary Legal analysis of the 1884 Convention, UNCLOS Article 113 jurisdiction gaps, and the customary international law arguments for boarding suspected cable sabotage vessels.
NATO. (2025). “NATO Launches ‘Baltic Sentry’ to Increase Critical Infrastructure Security.” NATO News. https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/articles/news/2025/01/14/nato-launches-baltic-sentry-to-increase-critical-infrastructure-security Summary Official announcement of the Baltic Sentry mission deploying frigates, patrol aircraft, and naval drones to protect critical undersea infrastructure.
Recorded Future. (2025). “Submarine Cable Security at Risk Amid Geopolitical Tensions and Limited Repair Capabilities.” Insikt Group. https://www.recordedfuture.com/research/submarine-cables-face-increasing-threatsSummary Identifies 44 publicly reported cable damage events in 2024-2025 across 32 locations, assesses the 80-vessel global fleet, and warns of median 40-day restoration times increasing as repair capacity lags demand.
Rest of World. (2026). “U.S.-Iran War Threatens Gulf AI Infrastructure as Both Data Chokepoints Close.” Rest of World. https://restofworld.org/2026/us-iran-war-gulf-ai-submarine-cables/ Summary Reports the first simultaneous closure of the Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic, the impact on seventeen submarine cables and Gulf data center infrastructure, and the inability of repair ships to reach either passage.
SIPRI. (2025). “A Legislative Route to Combat Sabotage of Undersea Cables.” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. https://www.sipri.org/commentary/topical-backgrounder/2025/legislative-route-combat-sabotage-undersea-cables Summary Interview with legal expert Pierre Thévenin on the nine Baltic cable cuts between October 2023 and December 2024, the case for coastal state safety zones, and the Australian-Danish-New Zealand legislative precedent for EEZ cable protection.
Submarine Networks. (2026). “War in the Gulf Severs the World’s Digital Arteries.” Submarine Networks. https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/nv/insights/war-in-the-gulf-severs-the-world-s-digital-arteries SummaryDocuments the force majeure suspension of the 2Africa Pearls cable project, the cascading impact on SEA-ME-WE 6 and other Gulf cable systems, and the search for overland alternatives.
TeleGeography. (2025). “You’ve Read About Submarine Cable Breaks. Now Read About the Repairs.” TeleGeography. https://resources.telegeography.com/youve-read-a-lot-on-cable-breaks-lately.-have-you-read-about-the-repairsSummary Reports 1.48 million kilometers of cable in service, projects that two-thirds of maintenance vessels will reach end of service life, and estimates a three-billion-dollar investment gap requiring twenty additional ships.
The Diplomat. (2023). “After Chinese Vessels Cut Matsu Internet Cables, Taiwan Seeks to Improve Its Communications Resilience.” The Diplomat. https://thediplomat.com/2023/04/after-chinese-vessels-cut-matsu-internet-cables-taiwan-shows-its-communications-resilience/ Summary Ground-level account of the Matsu Islands fifty-day internet outage following Chinese vessel cable cuts, including the microwave backup system deployment and implications for Taiwan’s fourteen-cable vulnerability.