Hot Air About Protecting Subsea Cables
A subsea cable is like a long piece of string. Except the world's cables total about 1.5 million kilometers. Anything shaped like that is inherently indefensible. The Big Huff and Puff is that if we place sensors on or near the cables, presto, problem solved. Not a chance. All it takes is a technologically sophisticated and patient adversary to send out unmanned drones to locate the cables in deep sea where they lie exposed on the ocean's floor. Record the coordinates or drop a homing beacon. When the war is about to go from cold to hot, release underwater drones with charges to attach themselves to these cables and blow them up.
Sensors are of limited value because no country or military alliance has sufficient vessels to station them close enough to every point of possible attack. What is the point of a warning if it is too late to avert the attack? The invention of radar did not stop air strikes or render air power useless. Satellites can give 30 minutes warning of a nuclear strike, but intercontinental ballistic missiles go 7 kilometers per second or 4.3 US miles per second. Shooting them down is virtually impossible. So you just have 30 extra minutes to kiss your ass good-bye. That's all. Reagan's Stars Wars program was never able in realistic situations to use ground-based missiles to hit something traveling that fast.
In fact, the idea of arming subsea cables with sensors that can detect submarine or surface ship activity invites the enemy to consider them military infrastructure. It makes it more likely that they become early targets in a brewing. There are no final technological solutions in conflicts. Just measures, countermeasures, and then new measures. The argument against attaching military sensors to subsea cables in outlined in this article.
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