scte long read
“There’s an initiative called SMART (Science Monitoring and Reliable Telecommunication) that we have endorsed. We’ll soon be deploying some of these smart sensors, providing information for characterising the ocean environment. Surveillance is like early detection of seismic events, earthquakes and tsunamis. Measuring that event right at the source you can anticipate the creation of the tsunami wave itself, because you capture the root cause and not just the symptom.” It is testament to the collaborative nature of this industry that such an initiative is in place, and a topic worth revisiting at a later date.
that sort of intelligence level, we aren’t ever likely to know.”
He agrees the media are telling an overcooked version of the story, but did add, in reference to the Nordstream gas pipeline explosions, that it was easy to put two and two together. “Human beings like to spot patterns in things. The Baltics in 2024 was a perfect storm: it was a region saturated with geopolitical suspicion, where poorly managed commercial vessels and genuine Russian security concerns collided, allowing relatively ordinary cable incidents to be interpreted as potential acts of hybrid warfare.” Madory agrees but considers the motivations. “Let’s assume cutting cables is an act of war, a tactic of Russia. Why do it now? Surely you would wait; if this was an effective way to disrupt the communications of your adversary, you might wait until you need it and then use it. Because otherwise, by using it now, they don’t really gain anything from this, it just stirs up a load of attention, when everybody’s trying to prepare and do all these things. If you had some sort of advantage, you just lost it because now the cat’s out of the bag: it’s like, oh Russia’s cutting cables now.”
Conclusion
The real question is, have any European cables ever been deliberately cut by hostile state actors? Or should the question really be, does it actually matter? Within the confines of the law, it is fair to say that there have been no proven cases. At every point in the supply chain there are weaknesses available for exploitation. Throw in potentially years of litigation, plausible deniability, unreliable defendants, acts of war, those confused officials and a media desperate for attention-grabbing headlines, however outrageous, the experts I talked to all agreed that the infrastructure is changing, as it needs to, but their concerns, while valid, were all very different. From repairing the ecosystem to changing maritime law, from operational resilience to future capacity and protecting the planet, nobody felt that paying more attention to the press would benefit the industry, and their respective concerns will certainly be keeping them occupied. Ultimately, the story of the subsea cable is about human nature’s appetite for excitement. Turning the mundane into the exciting is what turns a fishing accident into political sabotage and without our appetite for it, there would be no headlines. It is also human nature to look for patterns; it is surely sabotage, it must be malicious, it has to be an act of war. The reality is actually fairly dull, but how reassuring that in an era of never- ending instability, we can depend on the infrastructure of a whole industry quietly going about the business of keeping things mundane.
critical undersea networks,” The South China Morning Post concluded pompously. The media’s politicisation and sensationalism belied a darker truth: that the terrifying new device capable of ending our connectivity forever is in fact something entirely mundane; a grapnel, a cable cutting device with a hook on the end, that marine engineers have been deploying for cable repair since the telegraph cable days of the 1860s. Indeed, grapnels have their origins in ancient Rome and Greece; they are widespread and commonplace in the submarine industry. It’s a hook. What the real threats are Our hyperscaler friend appreciates the grey areas, however. While he admits that “Poorly run vessels will do stupid things,” and incompetence is widely acknowledged amongst the Shadow Fleet vessels, he reminded me that “Russia is known for its espionage. They like to cause confusion and like to leave it open to interpretation; sending a message through different activities, for example. Countries do that all the time. Russia has a YANTAR – a research vessel – and has clearly done some hyper accurate mapping of the sea floor for things that could be beneficial to them. There are actively exploring the seabed.” He went on, “Give the Russians a little credit. They’re not going to make a sloppy job of it. We’d likely never even know. At
And now for something completely different
ASN are leading manufacturers of subsea cables based in France; Raoul Jacquand is VP Strategic Alliances & External Affairs and offered a refreshing perspective on what has seemed up to now a bleak future of escalating geopolitical tensions leading to subsea cable sabotage, a committed and professional infrastructure shoring up and an unserious media, making everything worse than it needed to be. “At ASN, we fundamentally believe that the one thing that subsea cables actually provide to the world at large is infrastructure that can do more than just transport data. It’s actually a gigantic scientific lab. Oceans play a tremendous role in climate change; understanding the ocean climate is key. Subsea cables crisscrossing the ocean is fantastic lab because the moment you start using this network to measure environmental parameters down on the seabed, at the bottom of the ocean, it enables you to understand what happens at the surface, the water column, also gives you increased information around sea life.
Volume 48 No.23 SEPTEMBER 2026
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