Russia and China are targeting vital underwater cables in terrifying ways that could send us back to the Dark Ages, a new book reveals

On November 15, 2024, a Chinese-flagged cargo ship called the Yi Peng 3, laden with mineral fertilizer, left the Russian port of Ust-Luga and pushed into the Baltic Sea. Two days later, the ship crossed over an undersea communications cable connecting Sweden and Lithuania. The line went silent. Less than 24 hours later, the Yi Peng 3 cruised past the only communications cable connecting Finland with Germany, and it too went dark.

European investigators soon discovered both subsea cables had been physically severed and that the Yi Peng 3 was at the scene of both incidents. It seemed like sabotage, but little could be done about it. The countries impacted could only ask China for help with the investigation, which was declined. The ship slipped away.  

Since the Yi Peng incident, insidious sabotage has only become more prevalent around the world, and the pace is picking up. Mysterious fires have swept weapon plants in Estonia, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria. On Aug. 20, Romanian air force scrambled two F-16s to blow up an intruding robotic boat loitering near a Black Sea gas platform with hundreds of workers on board. And in September the FBI charged five people working for Russian intelligence services who were soliciting arson and murder around the world, including in the United States. 

Security experts call these “hybrid attacks,” and they are getting more common and more violent. They are perpetuated in a gray zone between war and diplomacy, where shady actors are used to create deniability for a nation’s provocative actions.

Now comes author Elisabeth Braw’s new book “Undersea War: The Battle to Control the Cables and Pipelines That Connect Our World,” to enlighten readers on another vulnerability to worry about — the underwater spaghetti bowl of pipelines and cables that support the modern world.     

The globe is stitched together with a network of underwater communication cables and energy pipelines. There is an estimated 20,000 miles of subsea pipelines worldwide carrying petroleum, crude oil and natural gas, and a million miles of garden-hose size oceanic communications cables in service globally.

Braw somewhat grandiosely calls this “the Undersea Kingdom,” but makes a good case for its importance. Cables down there transmit the world’s data, including trillions in daily financial transactions, and subsea pipelines provide fuel to entire continents.

“Behind every email, credit card payment and Zoom call is an ocean worker,” Braw writes. Underwater pipelines “keep the lights on, heat the house.” 

Yet this infrastructure is reachable by any bad guy with a civilian ship and a deep enough anchor. Making matters worse, soft targets underwater are vulnerable to attacks that are hard to attribute and therefore more tempting to try. “If undersea disaster struck and life had to revert to life circa 1858, people would definitely notice,” Braw explains at one point, as close to a chuckle as the book attempts.

Braw, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, may be as dry as the topic is wet, but she’s certainly an expert. She efficiently chronicles the underwater misbehavior of Russian and Chinese ships, which have ducked behind a lack of maritime laws and diplomatic bravado to sabotage undersea cables and pipelines with near impunity.

The existing legal framework that governs these cables is rooted in paperwork signed during the 1884 Paris Convention. It authorizes virtually no enforcement options if the vessel in question is registered to another nation.  

“Undersea Warfare” provides sobering real-world examples about the adventures of repeat offenders such as the NewNew Polar Bear, implicated in anchor-attacks on a communication line and a natural gas pipe in Finnish waters, and the now-notorious Yi Peng 3.

Perhaps the most infamous attack on this sea-bound empire was the Ukrainian sabotage of the all-important Nord Stream pipeline in 2022. Braw treats this incident in a disjointed, fragmented narrative, and the book compares poorly on this topic next to other recent entries such as Bojan Pancevski’s thrilling “The Nord Stream Conspiracy.”

Still, not every book needs to “read like a thriller,” and “Undersea War” certainly won’t be confused for one. But it is certainly thorough, and the risks it presents are no doubt fear inducing.

One ship can bring life to a standstill. For example, in 2023 Chinese cargo ships severed the two communication cables that connected Taiwan’s disputed islands of Matsu to the rest of the world. In an instant, the internet went down. “Suddenly, information could only be obtained by word of mouth.” Hospitals were forced to rely on generators. “Digital payments could not be processed. The backbone enabling modern life was simply not there anymore.”

Investigators quickly determined which ships were responsible. The boats were easily located, but they had left Taiwanese waters, and, thanks to the archaic laws governing the sea, the Taiwanese coast guard “didn’t have the authority to detain them.”

The UN law of the seas says that investigations into damage to underwater pipelines and cables is the responsibility of the culprit boat’s home nation. China, unsurprisingly, was not keen to punish the boats that had cut Matsu off from the world.

Besides presenting the risks of sabotage, Braw more quietly posits solutions that could blunt the impact.

The best way to harden this infrastructure from attack is redundancy. Adding duplicate cables is the best and most common way to safeguard subsea communication lines. That’s what Braw says happening in the Baltic, around Taiwan and elsewhere.

The idea that undersea sabotage might be the start of a global war, rather than a probable casualty, comes up often in Braw’s narrative, perhaps a bit too casually. In the introduction, she even quotes Tom Clancy’s submarine thriller, “The Hunt For Red October”: “This business will get out of control…and we’ll be lucky to live through it.” 

The era of persistent hybrid war is clearly already upon us, undersea infrastructure included, and the only good news so far is that it hasn’t yet started World War Three. In August, German authorities blamed Russia for landing explosive-laden aerial drones at its airports, aiming parked civilian aircraft used to support Ukraine. Germany didn’t invoke NATO’s self-defense rallying cry, Article 13. No tanks surged to the border of Poland and Lithuania, towards Russia. 

That’s not to say there’s nothing to fret about — far from it. The subsea vulnerabilities cited in “Undersea War” certainly still exist, and the tensions seem to be spilling over the boundaries of law enforcement and hybrid war. 

In mid-September, officials told Reuters that a joint NATO operation off Norway thwarted a Russian submarine exercise aimed at disabling undersea data cables. British submarines followed three vessels from the GUGI, the Russian undersea warfare directorate, during a month-long covert operation in the Arctic to test a weapon that could cut cables without leaving telltales, NATO officials said.

Somewhere, you can almost hear Braw ringing a bell and declaring her Undersea Kingdom already under siege. And for all that modern humans have at stake in the outcome, the battle for it won’t be seen or heard, until the power goes out and the Internet goes dark. That day, Braw will be able to say, “I told you so.” Only no one will be able to hear it. 

Joe Pappalardo is an author who has covered national security and infrastructure issues for 25 years.