Underwater Internet Cables The Next Target In Tech Warfare

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How would cutting an underwater cable be any real benefit to anyone in a time of conflict? It's not like one cable controls the entire internet. Thanks to everyone that sent this one in.

Now, the US government is concerned the Russian military could attempt to sabotage these cables in a time of conflict, according to the New York Times. The newspaper reported an uptick of activity by Russian submarines near several major cables.
 
I imagine they could cut ALL of the cables, that would cause quite a pain in the ass for world economies. Granted we could still transmit market data and mission critical stuff through satellite it would still be a pretty nasty blow to the internet and everything that sits on top of it.
 
Common sense tells us that moving forward, in the very near future, 10 to 15 years that much of the network infrastructure will become smaller and smaller and a lot more efficient.

The US will be able to maintain it's network in a time of war. Many of the server farms we have today will be made redundant many times over and moved to a lot safer and more secure locations. A good example would be in bomb proof structures under ground. There simply will be no need to have these critical resources exposed.
 
Steve said:
How would cutting an underwater cable be any real benefit to anyone in a time of conflict? It's not like one cable controls the entire internet. Thanks to everyone that sent this one in.

Now, the US government is concerned the Russian military could attempt to sabotage these cables in a time of conflict, according to the New York Times. The newspaper reported an uptick of activity by Russian submarines near several major cables.
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It could help create a time of conflict by reducing a countries ability to make money which would also reduce their ability to fund it.
Economic collapse wouldnt take much.
 
It wouldn't stop the US military at all.
Money wont stop them from doing their jobs.
The Internet of today is far from the ARPANET of the past and its not a critical military resource.
Its an abused toy, made out to be more than it is and recognized for what it is not.
 
Mucking around in space as well while slim shady ignores them to go to war on police..

" Russian satellites that may be “suicide” weapons, devices that can smash into and destroy other satellites. The craft are certainly suspicious. Russia did not announce the satellites or fully register them with the UN, as launch nations generally do. The craft practically dance around in orbit. One may even have collided with another object. To be fair, the satellites could be agile spy craft or repair drones. But it’s their potential as weapons that’s worrying."


Does Russia Have War Bots in Space?
http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2015/10/does-russia-have-war-bots-space/123033/
 
erexx said:
It wouldn't stop the US military at all.
Money wont stop them from doing their jobs.
The Internet of today is far from the ARPANET of the past and its not a critical military resource.
Its an abused toy, made out to be more than it is and recognized for what it is not.
Click to expand...
Your out of your mind if you think the military doesn't use any of those cables for land communication. I know first hand they use fiber all over the place within our borders and I'm sure they have redundancy systems that use other means to communicate but to say they don't use any transatlantic fiber is ludicrous.

roma said:
Mucking around in space as well while slim shady ignores them to go to war on police..

" Russian satellites that may be “suicide” weapons, devices that can smash into and destroy other satellites. The craft are certainly suspicious. Russia did not announce the satellites or fully register them with the UN, as launch nations generally do. The craft practically dance around in orbit. One may even have collided with another object. To be fair, the satellites could be agile spy craft or repair drones. But it’s their potential as weapons that’s worrying."


Does Russia Have War Bots in Space?
http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2015/10/does-russia-have-war-bots-space/123033/
Click to expand...

Kessler Syndrome...really wouldn't take too much more to set that in motion. Great way to severely cripple a technologically advanced/reliant enemy.
 
Dirty Butler said:
It'd be a real bitch to tap into glass on the bottom of the ocean. I'd like to see that splicer.
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Well, your reading light right? I wouldn't underestimate what these nation states are capable of. They might also be looking for secret cables, or points where other nations have tapped into the cables.
 
Well, seeing as that underwater telephone and telegraph cables have been used for years without major disruptions I can't see there being any reasonable precedent for the conclusions made in this article.
 
Quix said:
Well, seeing as that underwater telephone and telegraph cables have been used for years without major disruptions I can't see there being any reasonable precedent for the conclusions made in this article.
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Except the fact that russian subs have been probing the areas with the cables recently and getting more aggressive.
 
Slightly off topic but...these cables don't lay on the ocean floor so...how do they keep sea creatures from fucking with them?
 
Cutting those cables would do massive damage economically. It would stop the most efficient route for certain types of trade. They could cut the US off from Europe or Asia pretty easily, hurting many major businesses. With the massive economic damage, there would be lower tax revenue, and therefore fewer weapons could be purchased, weakening the military. That's why the Germans had their U boats out sinking merchant ships in the beginning of WW2. Cutting off trade to your enemies is one of the main ways to weaken their military. It's the modern equivalent of a siege.
 
USMCGrunt said:
Slightly off topic but...these cables don't lay on the ocean floor so...how do they keep sea creatures from fucking with them?
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Oh man, undersea cables. Truly one of the overlooked technological masterpieces of our time. If you've got the time to spare, there's some really good articles and Youtube videos. Here's one to start, Mother Earth Mother Board by Neal Stephenson in Wired: http://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

And here's an awesome documentary about CS Long Lines, the first AT&T cable laying ship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhnblU9leIo

That's the ship that laid the first fiberoptic cables across the Atlantic.
 
Steve said:
How would cutting an underwater cable be any real benefit to anyone in a time of conflict? It's not like one cable controls the entire internet. Thanks to everyone that sent this one in.

Now, the US government is concerned the Russian military could attempt to sabotage these cables in a time of conflict, according to the New York Times. The newspaper reported an uptick of activity by Russian submarines near several major cables.
Click to expand...

From a link I posted a minute ago, "In defense of telephony people, it must be pointed out that they are the ones who really know the score when it comes to sending bits across oceans. Netheads have heard so much puffery about the robust nature of the Internet and its amazing ability to route around obstacles that they frequently have a grossly inflated conception of how many routes packets can take between continents and how much bandwidth those routes can carry. As of this writing, I have learned that nearly the entire state of Minnesota was recently cut off from the Internet for 13 hours because it had only one primary connection to the global Net, and that link went down. If Minnesota, of all places, is so vulnerable, one can imagine how tenuous many international links must be."

http://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
 
dgingeri said:
Cutting those cables would do massive damage economically. It would stop the most efficient route for certain types of trade. They could cut the US off from Europe or Asia pretty easily, hurting many major businesses. With the massive economic damage, there would be lower tax revenue, and therefore fewer weapons could be purchased, weakening the military. That's why the Germans had their U boats out sinking merchant ships in the beginning of WW2. Cutting off trade to your enemies is one of the main ways to weaken their military. It's the modern equivalent of a siege.
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While true, it won't stop a modern superpower very quickly. Even the U-Boat scourge was overcome with sheer numbers and better escorts. International commerce will be disrupted also, but the respective militaries will just keep on truckin since they have dozens of fallback methods of communication. Any country with a decent economy is likely going to be given blank checks as far as lending is concerned, both domestically and internationally. A prime example of this was WWII.

A war would have to extend many years and make little progress. Cutting undersea cables would only serve as a temporary disruption and a means to panic civilians. It would have to be combined with several other attacks to be truly effective. The end result would be disruption of services for a month while the enemy received several missiles on their front lawn.
 
USMCGrunt said:
I imagine they could cut ALL of the cables...
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USMCGrunt said:
Your out of your mind if you think the military doesn't use any of those cables for land communication...

Kessler Syndrome...really wouldn't take too much more to set that in motion. Great way to severely cripple a technologically advanced/reliant enemy.
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They very likely are installing devices to cut cables.

People forget; ALL the bandwidth belongs to the govt in a time of crisis.

There will be no civilian TV, internet, or telephone not specifically allocated for civilian use, which would probably be propaganda, given current events.

Kesseler syndrome only leads to hardened 2nd gen satellites; hopefully the guys in the space station get enough warning to gtfo.
 
DrBorg said:
They very likely are installing devices to cut cables.

People forget; ALL the bandwidth belongs to the govt in a time of crisis.

There will be no civilian TV, internet, or telephone not specifically allocated for civilian use, which would probably be propaganda, given current events.

Kesseler syndrome only leads to hardened 2nd gen satellites; hopefully the guys in the space station get enough warning to gtfo.
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You really don't know what your talking about. The United States does not own every satellite that's in orbit or the ground based stations that bounce signals off them. Dish Network and DirecTV both have a fleet of over a dozen satellites in space that deliver signals to CONUS. Additionally, most of the infrastructure for the internet has been built by corporations, its private property that the government cannot seize the use of unlawfully. While there may be times that the government has a lawful right to seize use and access to those lines, 1) The US has never been in that state, at least not since telecom lines of this nature have existed, 2) The asset losing companies would take the US to court, possibly holding up the process, and 3) There would be real riots and protesting going on all over the country, like Ferguson, MO except everywhere.

Hardened satellites...not sure what you think they're gonna do. Sending heavy armor into space is prohibitively expensive and international law prohibits the use of space based weaponry. Also, current debris in space travels somewhere along the lines of 31,000 feet per second (about 6 miles per SECOND). For comparison the Browning M2 .50 machine gun's muzzle velocity of a SLAP round....the one they use for armor penetration....'only' travels at 4,000 fps. Even if we COULD use defensive weaponry in space, we'd need a pretty robust system capable of tracking something as small as 1 cm traveling at 31,000 fps (possibly more depending on relative velocity of the satellite), AND it would have to completely destroy the incoming debris so as not to create secondary fragments. There's a reason science has given this problem a name and there's genuine worry and work in this field for a solution, it could be devastating to developed nations for it to occur.
 
To add to my previous post, let's say they manage to armor satellites to be able to withstand debris impact, those flying chunks of debris impart some of their energy when they make contact with the satellite, changing its orbit, requiring the satellite to make a correction. That requires fuel, so we have now made each satellite more expensive to launch into space due to weight and either made it even more expensive because it has to carry more fuel to maintain the same lifespan OR shortened the life of the satellite substantially requiring companies/countries to build and launch more of these costly satellites in the same time frame as the 'pre-Kessler' days.
 
Steve said:
How would cutting an underwater cable be any real benefit to anyone in a time of conflict? It's not like one cable controls the entire internet. Thanks to everyone that sent this one in.

Now, the US government is concerned the Russian military could attempt to sabotage these cables in a time of conflict, according to the New York Times. The newspaper reported an uptick of activity by Russian submarines near several major cables.
Click to expand...

You just gave Christopher Nolan an idea for the new Batman movie...
 
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