Special Operations: Cable Cutting Warfare
March 15, 2025: In the Baltic Sea, the year began with a fiber optic cable between Latvia and Sweden being damaged by parties unknown. Over the last few years more than a dozen Baltic Sea underwater cables have been damaged or cut. These cables can be repaired in a few weeks, but local Coast Guard officials consider most of these incidents deliberate and that makes them criminal.
NATO countries are alarmed at the amount of damage done to underwater power and communications cables. Worse, when the culprits were identified, they were always Chinese and Russian ships. One of these ships was boarded and searched. Evidence of cable cutting was found. Chinese and Russian officials continue to profess surprise and ignorance of these acts of sabotage. Worse, all this is not new, it’s been going on for some time under the designation of Hybrid Warfare.
Ten years ago many Western politicians, especially in the United States, were calling on the U.S. Department of Defense to pay more attention to the new hybrid warfare that Russia is practicing in Ukraine, and that Islamic terrorists seem to be using worldwide to further their goals. Calling more attention to hybrid warfare is a good thing but assuming that the Department of Defense doesn’t know about it is a dangerous misunderstanding of the situation. Since the 1970s, when the Department of Defense finally listened to its own internal critics, much more attention was paid to the lessons of the past. Not just the general history of warfare but to the American military experience during the past three centuries. This revealed the United States was born through the use of hybrid warfare and has successfully used it many times since. But this debate about new military developments has also taken place before, more than once. The missing link was an institutional effort to study, remember and use past experience.
For example in the last two decades of the 20th century the Revolution in Military Affairs or RMA was the next big thing but it glimmered in the distance, always just out of reach. To many pundits and military analysts all the new technology of the last few decades of the 20th century was seen as capable of causing a fundamental change in how wars are fought. Then came the end of the Cold War, the disappearance of the enormous Soviet army and the sudden appearance of a new military landscape. This meant there would be no clash of huge, mechanized armies in Europe, or anywhere else anytime soon. Then, unexpectedly, came the 1991 Gulf War which showed that many of the American military technologies worked quite well. U.S. troops could now see more of the battlefield, communicate better, fight faster and roll over the Russian-equipped and trained Iraqi army in record time. This was a true RMA because in the past American troops had rarely done that in the openly stages of a war against a well-armed opponent.
https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htsf/articles/2025031504422.aspx#gsc.tab=0
