American Officials Say No Sabotage In Baltic Sea

CNN reports that two American government officials say the most likely explanation for the outages is simply irresponsible behavior in the form of a Chinese cargo ship dragging its anchor. This contrasts sharply with German and Finnish officials who have insisted on sabotage. My own take is that the Americans are right. Nothing about the sabotage hypothesis is convincing. 

• There is no recorded incident of state sabotage of subsea cables since WWII's end. 
• Fishing boats and cargo ships dragging their anchors are responsible for approximately 70% of outages with the balance due to events such as debris slides in subsea canyon, loss of power, subsea earthquakes causing mudslides, etc. Historical data provides no examples of state targeting of subsea fibre optic infrastructure. 
• Most subsea cables are buried 1 to 2 meters deep to prevent damage. So locating them is difficult even for cable repair ships. Repair of the subsea cable SWM5 was delayed several weeks because the ship could not locate the cable which had drifted 17 kilometers from the original route. Currents had removed the sediment covering the cable and carried it a long distance from the original burial coordinates. Drifting is possible because there is a lot of slack in these cables to facilitate repairs. Baltic sea cables are buried because the water is shallow. Hence they are not easy targets for malevolent actors. 
• It seems highly unlikely that Russia would use a slow moving, large Chinese cargo ship for a stealth operation. It just seems too obvious. Such a ship would not have any chance to escape being intercepted by navy vessels. 
• The American view is that this is a case of simple civilian ship negligence due to the vessel dragging its anchor. I surmise the ship was dragging its anchor to steady itself because it had a heavy load. This appears to happen frequently in the shipping industry. Anchor dragging is standard procedure in bad weather or if the ship is carrying too much freight in order to prevent capsizing. 
• The US has better surveillance systems including extensive satellite coverage than the Europeans. So the information edge goes to the Americans. No repair ship has reached the suspected sites where the cables are damaged so overall American intelligence probably has a better understanding of what happened. 

A good rule in science and general reasoning is Occam's Razor. This states that the simplest theory that adequately explains the data is the best theory. The Copernican theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun actually fitted the data worse than the Ptolemaic theory that the Sun rotated around the Earth. But the Copernican model was elegantly simple while the Ptolemaic explanation was incredibly complicated. Similarly, simple negligence on the part of a ship captain is a far less complicated hypothesis than invoking a hybrid warfare scenario. It fits the data just as well. 

Link to the CNN report: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/20/world/accident-or-sabotage-undersea-cables-intl/index.html