Undersea data cables as wartime leverage

The United States has been learning some unpleasant realities about "asymmetric warfare" in which the country with the most bombers and aircraft carriers is not necessarily a guaranteed winner.

The embed above comes from an article last week in Reuters, which begins by discussing accidental damage during wartime -

"In a situation of active military operations, the risk of unintentional damage increases, and the longer this conflict lasts, the higher the likelihood of unintentional damage," Kotkin said. A similar incident occurred in 2024, when a commercial vessel attacked by Iran-aligned Houthis drifted in the Red Sea and severed cables with its anchor.

- and then the difficulties of repairing during wartime, and the impossibility of switching to satellites:

"It's not as though you could just switch to satellite. That's not an alternative," Mauldin said, noting that ​satellites rely on connections to land-based networks and are better suited for things in motion, like airplanes and ships.  Low-Earth-orbit networks such as Starlink are "a boutique solution, which is not scalable to millions of users, at this time," Kotkin added.

But it's an article in The Eurasian Times that more directly speaks to the possibility of aggressive attacks on undersea cables -

Iran sits on the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz and controls long stretches of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. These waters host all the major cable routes that link Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. This geography gives Tehran physical access to infrastructure on which the world economy depends.

In fact, disrupting undersea cables is a low-cost, high-impact option that can cause global disruption without a direct missile strike. A damaged cable in the Gulf can slow internet traffic from Mumbai to Frankfurt within minutes, delay international banking settlements, and degrade cloud services used by hospitals, airlines, and power grids.

Significantly, it could also cripple military communications for US CENTCOM, and regional partners would be forced to rely on backup satellites with limited bandwidth.

But the situation in the Middle East is such that people are not even talking about overt operations to damage the undersea cable networks on the seabed. They are apprehensive that Iran will resort to doing so openly, which it has the capacity to do, aided by its geography. This additional maritime disruption will only add to its strategic leverage against not only the Gulf countries but also America.

But for an in-your-face salty appraisal of the potential, read the post in the "I Fucking Love Australia" substack of April 26:

A few days ago, Tasnim, the IRGC’s tame mouthpiece, published what looked like a harmless technical explainer. Maps of undersea internet cables. Locations of cloud infrastructure. Landing stations in UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. A polite little observation that the southern Gulf relies on these routes far more heavily than Iran does. No podium. No death to America chant. No uniformed general doing the finger wag. Just a map. Because when you have already put drones through 3 AWS data centres and an Oracle facility, you do not need to threaten anything out loud. You publish the coordinates. You let the insurance market translate for you. You let the CEOs in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh shit their expensive trousers in private. That is how grown-ups signal escalation, and it is a mode of communication that requires a functional prefrontal cortex to receive, which is why the sunburnt Big Mac wrapper in the Oval Office has completely missed it.

So let me lay out who actually holds the cards in this pissing contest, because if you have been listening to the cable news lizards you could be forgiven for thinking it is the side with the aircraft carriers.

It is not.

Iran’s internet runs overland. Turkey to the north, the Caucasus to the northwest. If every single submarine cable in the Persian Gulf gets severed tomorrow morning, Tehran checks its email over lunch without noticing. The southern Gulf, by contrast, is a data peninsula. UAE, Saudi, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait. Every banking transaction, every AI cloud workload, every ride-share app, every oil trade settlement, every fucking everything gets to the rest of the world through a handful of fibre bundles running through one of the most contested bodies of water on the planet. 99 percent of international internet traffic travels over submarine cables. The Red Sea corridor is already effectively closed because the Houthis have made it a no-go zone for repair vessels. The Gulf corridor is now being mapped by the people who just put drones into Amazon’s racks. That leaves the entire southern Gulf with precisely 0 safe options for getting their data to Europe, to India, to Africa, to anywhere.

And here is the kicker. The cables do not need to be bombed. They do not need missiles. They do not need a full IRGC naval sortie. They need a fishing trawler dragging an anchor in the wrong place..."

Do not rely on my excerpts from sources.  Do your own research, make your own conclusions.