TUMULT IN THE DEEP: THE UNFOLDING MARITIME COMPETITION OVER UNDERSEA INFRASTRUCTURE
SEPTEMBER 19, 2023 GUEST AUTHOR 1 COMMENT
By Tim McGeehan
In late 2008, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) sorties flown from Balad Air Force Base in Iraq dropped from 100s of sorties per day to 10s of sorties per day.1 Most UAV flights – unable to push full-motion imagery back to Nevada’s Creech Air Force Base due to an unexpected loss of bandwidth – were grounded.2 This mission kill was not achieved by a cyberattack, electronic warfare system, or violent solar activity. A thousand miles away, dragging ship anchors in the eastern Mediterranean had damaged undersea cables, cutting off 60 percent of the combined commercial and military telecommunications capacity to the Arabian Gulf region.3 A minor undersea accident started a series of cascading consequences that rippled across cyberspace, to impact flights in the air domain, preventing them from supporting ground combat operations. This episode shows the complex non-linearity of warfare in the Information Age, where increasing interconnectedness can link seemingly isolated vulnerabilities across different domains.
With an average depth of about 4,000 meters (or about 2.5 miles), most of the ocean and seafloor are out of sight and out of mind. However, trends suggest that the deep ocean and seabed are poised to rise in importance – both physically and as a venue for Information Warfare (IW) – due to the intertwined nature of critical infrastructure, resources, and national security. Undersea infrastructure is rapidly growing and populations are becoming ever more dependent on its utility. This infrastructure growth is posing novel challenges and opportunities for competition and national security. Navies must astutely follow the development of undersea infrastructure as they may be called upon to defend, attack, or influence it.
The Booming Growth of Critical Undersea Infrastructure
Our modern way of life is dependent on critical infrastructure “considered so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination thereof.”4 Presidential Policy Directive 21 grouped critical infrastructure into 16 sectors, four of which have undersea components:5
https://cimsec.org/tumult-in-the-deep-the-unfolding-maritime-competition-over-undersea-infrastructure/
