Irregular Warfare on the Sea Floor and the Case for National Resilience
by Andrew Rolander
|
05.30.2025 at 06:00am
Irregular Warfare on the Sea Floor and the Case for National Resilience Image
The global seabed has emerged as a critical domain of strategic competition, where fiber-optic cables—the unseen arteries of modern civilization—now represent both vital infrastructure and strategic vulnerability. Since the laying of the first telegraph cables in the mid-nineteenth century, undersea communication networks have transformed from purely commercial endeavors into critical components of national security architecture. Today, with over 95% of international data traversing these submerged pathways, the security of undersea cables has become inseparable from global economic stability, information dominance, and strategic resilience. This reality demands a comprehensive approach to national resilience that integrates military capacity, civil preparedness, technological adaptability, and international cooperation. By developing multilayered defensive strategies, including enhanced monitoring systems, international security cooperation, physical cable hardening, and credible diplomatic pressure, the United States and its allies can significantly reduce both the likelihood and potential impact of undersea infrastructure attacks in an increasingly contested global environment.
Strategically, the significance of undersea communication infrastructure has evolved dramatically since the laying of the first telegraph cables in the mid-nineteenth century. Today, undersea fiber-optic cables represent a critical vulnerability in the global security architecture, one that aligns ominously with the warning in the 1986 Joint Low Intensity Conflict Report: “Our adversaries are confronting us with political violence short of conventional war to achieve their goals. If most forecasts are correct, this is precisely the form of conflict that will confront us in the years ahead.” This assessment has proven prophetic, as the character of warfare has shown itself, again, to be Clausewitz’s chameleon in its newest adaptation—a multi-domain, multi-modal conflict landscape where strategic effects can be generated on the seafloor with something as seemingly innocuous as a ship’s anchor.
The military significance of such cables quickly became clear during the Spanish-American War of 1898, when one of America’s first operational activities involved cutting Spanish telegraph cables to isolate and disrupt communications. During World War I, British naval forces systematically targeted German undersea cables, forcing communication through channels that could be more easily monitored. The Cold War subsequently saw the rise of sophisticated submarine operations targeting undersea infrastructure for intelligence-gathering purposes rather than disruption. The transition from copper telegraph cables to fiber-optic technology in the 1980s and 1990s fundamentally transformed both the capacity and vulnerability profile of undersea infrastructure. As undersea cables have grown more vital to the globalized, they have simultaneously become more vulnerable to sophisticated attacks that can achieve strategic effects without triggering military responses.
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/05/30/irregular-warfare-on-the-sea-floor-and-the-case-for-national-resilience/
