A significant amount of the internet data between Europe and Asia is carried by a cable about the diameter of a garden hose somewhere on the Red Sea floor, in water too deep for daylight and too cold for comfort. The physical reality of it is worth pondering for a moment, even if it’s not alone down there—many pathways converge through that tight passage. At its most basic level, the infrastructure that powers global finance, communication, and increasingly AI-dependent services consists of a network of thin cables lying on the ocean floor, frequently in locations where enforcement is practically impossible and damage attribution is genuinely challenging.
Every day, these cables handle more than $10 trillion in financial transactions. Instead of using satellites, 99% of transcontinental internet data travels in this manner. Damage to a few cables in strategic locations can significantly impair connectivity for entire regions due to the volume and geographic constraints. This is not instantaneous or complete, but it is sufficient to cause communication delays, economic disruption, and the kind of uncertainty that has its own destabilizing effects. There has been recognition of the strategic importance of that leverage.
The events that have occurred in the Red Sea over the last two years have provided some of the most convincing proof to date that damage to underwater cables is not always unintentional. Commercial ships have been seen dragging anchors over established cable routes in patterns that are hard to attribute to navigational error. Some of these ships are run by what intelligence experts have dubbed “shadow fleets.” Because anchors drag cables, cables break, the vessel goes on, and proving intent in international seas requires a threshold of evidence that is rarely attainable, the method is elegant in its deniability. Insurance claims are submitted, repair ships are sent, and the damage has been completed without any formal act of hostility that would have prompted a military or judicial reaction.
The deeper issue involves more complex characters than shallow-water anchor dragging. Both China and Russia have created specialized submersibles and autonomous underwater vehicles that can find, map, and communicate with cables at previously unreachable depths. The dual-use framing—research vessels performing oceanographic surveys—offers protection for tasks like meticulous cable route mapping and, possibly, the installation of monitoring devices or the option to cut connections as needed. For years, this action has been monitored by Western naval intelligence. There is a significant difference between tracking it and halting it.
A different type of vulnerability is presented by landing stations, which are the actual buildings on beaches where underwater cables connect to terrestrial networks. They are visible, on land, and in some regions of the world, they are situated in areas where physical security is truly insufficient in comparison to their strategic significance. A chokepoint that doesn’t require deep-sea technology to threaten is a landing station located on a shoreline or in a politically unstable area.
Governments and large IT firms now respond with active adaptation rather than passive concern. Among the biggest private investors in underwater cables, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, are diversifying landing locations, adding geographic redundancy to their networks, and rerouting new cables avoid disputed chokepoints.
The reasoning is comparable to what banking organizations did with vital IT infrastructure following the 2008 financial crisis: acknowledge that no one point can be made completely secure and design around single points of failure. Although there is still a significant gap between the norm and the enforcement mechanism, the International Telecommunication Union’s Advisory Body on Submarine Cable Resilience is advocating for more robust international legal safeguards and standardized repair processes.
