Russian Subs Are Sniffing Around Transatlantic Cables (Source defenseone.com) The resurgence of the Russian navy has, among other things, jolted Western media and military leaders back to an awareness of the undersea cables that carry more than 90 percent of international communications — and of their vulnerability. Two years ago, unnamed commanders and intelligence officials told the New York Times that Russian submarines were operating worryingly close to various cables. In mid-December, Britain’s most senior military officer went public with the alarm, warning that Russia constituted an immediate threat to transatlantic cables; indeed, said the UK’s Air Chief Marshall Sir Stuart Peach, a “new risk to our way of life.” The threat to the submarine cables is indeed real, but it is hardly new to this age of strategic competition, and leaders would do well to temper their concerns about a highly redundant communications system and to increase their focus on other vulnerable undersea infrastructure. Certainly, the submarine cable network was not always so robust. The first transatlantic lines between the U.S. and Britain, laid in the late 1800s, often simply broke. Early in World War I, Britain severed all of Germany’s handful of cables. The action was repeated during World War II, and the United States commandeered the cut German cables to link to its forces in Europe. In the Cold War, special U.S. submarines tapped Soviet military cables in the Barents and Bering Seas — one of the era’s biggest intelligence coups. The Soviets took a similar interest in Western cables; in 1959, U.S. Navy forces boarded a Soviet trawler suspected of tampering with AT&T lines off the Newfoundland coast.

But to completely sever the communications coursing across the North Atlantic seabed today would be hard, if not impossible. Not because the cables are especially hardened or run along classified routes, but simply because there are so many of them that Russia’s skilled, but small, specialized submarine force would find it tough to get to them all. Still, even a partial loss of connectivity or bandwidth could prove disruptive and frustrating to both commercial and military operations. In 2008, an accidental cable break in the Mediterranean forced the U.S. military to reduce drone operations from Balad Air Base in Iraq from hundreds of daily sorties to only tens, as communications slowed to a crawl between the drones in Iraq and the operators in the continental United States.