NATO Considers Watching Undersea Internet Cables with a Fleet of Unmanned Boats (defensenews.com) 93
An anonymous reader shared this report from Defense News:
Following a pattern of undersea cable damage across European waters in the last year, with the most recent disruptions happening just weeks ago, top NATO officials have begun envisioning a capability that would allow the alliance to have permanent eyes above and under the waterline. In an interview with Defense News, Admiral Pierre Vandier, the alliance's Norfolk, Virginia-based commander for concepts and transformation, likened the idea to police CCTV cameras installed on street lights in urban trouble spots for recording evidence of crimes. "The technology is there to make this street-lighting with USVs," he said, using the military's shorthand for unmanned surface vessel. Vandier said his team is in the early stages of developing an unmanned surface vessel fleet so that "NATO can see and monitor daily its environment."
The first step would be to achieve this at a surface level, and then later under water... According to Vandier, the goal is to launch the drone surveillance fleet before the next NATO Summit, which will be held in the Netherlands next June.
The article notes the U.S. Navy's Task Force 59 (launched in 2021) is already "dedicated to integrating unmanned systems and AI in the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet area of operations." This prompted Admiral Vandier to say the technology for an unmanned cable-watching fleet "already exists... everything is known and sold, so it is much more a matter of adoption than technology."
The first step would be to achieve this at a surface level, and then later under water... According to Vandier, the goal is to launch the drone surveillance fleet before the next NATO Summit, which will be held in the Netherlands next June.
The article notes the U.S. Navy's Task Force 59 (launched in 2021) is already "dedicated to integrating unmanned systems and AI in the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet area of operations." This prompted Admiral Vandier to say the technology for an unmanned cable-watching fleet "already exists... everything is known and sold, so it is much more a matter of adoption than technology."
Seems like a great plan. (Score:1)
This seems like a great way to easily demark where these undersea cables are. Which will make those not intending harm avoid them, and make those intending harm have easy to follow direction-pointers available. Seems like win-win to me!
Re:Seems like a great plan. (Score:4, Informative)
Their locations are public, so that there can be no excuse for "accidentally" cutting one.
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Do they pay you in rubles or bitcoin to make these posts?
Re:Seems like a great plan. (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, there were around a hundred incidents. However, there are a bunch more cable cuts that seem to be deliberate. That includes three that happened off the coast of Yemen when we know that the Houthis have been threatening such attacks. As it is, since there's no monitoring there's no way to tell if that's 90 deliberate cuts for 10 accidental or completely the other way round, and in itself being able to know that number is a good thing.
What's more important, though, is that sometimes these cables can supposedly be tapped. Russia has dedicated spy submarines [wikipedia.org] which are designed to reach such places to intercept communications between America and her allies. If they tap one cable and cut another at the same moment then it becomes much easier for them to monitor all the traffic. This is not just about the cuts you see. It's also the attacks you don't see. Russia has long been determined to displace America and this is part of that.
Re:Seems like a great [patrol] plan. (Score:2)
Mod parent funny, but I was looking for the joke about how big the ocean is. Patrolling the ocean? "That trick never works."
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What does that mean? U-boats in the WWI and WW2 sense were not undersea boats, they were diving boats that operated primarily on a diesel engine on the surface. Even their snorkels - basically an above-water exhaust port - were detectable on the primitive radars of the day. Most were located using directional finding of radio broadcasts from the boats.
Modern passive sonar has good points, but it is not a slam dunk to find stuff underwater. There are chokepoint seabed sensors - the relatively well known
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The attackers are using underwater vehicles of some sort to make these cuts. That is the point. These aren't anchor draggings, as I experienced when I was in the Middle East. To stop them, you'll have to be able to detect the underwater craft.
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You know what a better idea is? Run new cables alongside the existing ones with sonar beacons on a 'tripwire' cable tied to it. So if someone/something get's near it, the owner of the cable knows where the damage is, the exact date and time of the tampering, and cross-reference that with shipping routes.
Or you could go the full mile on it, and instead of laying down cables that as thick as an arm, lay down multiple cables (think ribbon cables) that have cement/steel/etc armor on both sides, and design it to
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I think they pretty much have that information already. They have repeaters along the cables and can tell approximately where it was cut.
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Momoa's too busy promoting shitty phone games to protect the cables. Too bad. Capitalism wins again.
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Only thing is, why robots? Wouldn't a buoy with a solar panel and cameras on the anchor chain and starlink feed be sufficient?
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You know, it might just be! If the cable is _really_ short, say 1000m or so and as an "anchor chain".
Do you know how many deep sea cables qualify? Exactly zero.
OK, let's say they "watch" someone cut a cable (Score:2, Funny)
Re:OK, let's say they "watch" someone cut a cable (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:OK, let's say they "watch" someone cut a cable (Score:5, Insightful)
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You mean unlike the sanctions on Russia which are crippling its economy so much people are stealing butter [express.co.uk] due to high inflation? Or the sanctions which have set fear in Chinese banks causing them to no longer do business with Russian banks [newsweek.com] or industry?
Pretty much the same as the sanctions on Canada that are crippling our economy so much people are stealing butter [ctvnews.ca] due to high inflation.
Seriously though, their economy isn't wrecked to the point that they cease their military invasion of another country... so it's not wrecked enough. Now... when there's no butter to be stolen and the populace deposes its leaders and recalls the troops, then we can say sanctions are actually working.
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They might steal butter in Canada, but in Russia the situation is already to bad that the butter is put in additional plastic containers to detect theft:
https://tvpworld.com/83258059/... [tvpworld.com]
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This doesn't *necessarily* imply that the sanctions haven't impeded Russia's abilit
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The sanctions on Russia were first placed in the 2010s as they started their invasion of Ukraine, and they were escalated as Russia turned the invasion into a full-blown war in 2022. The gas pipeline and the cables were cut later, and there have been no reactions to those.
The official line on the 2023 cable cut is that the Chinese ships cut them by accident. The Chinese have admitted this, so in theory some compensation may be on its way. As for the other cases, the general line is that since we're not 1
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Both countries are under sanctions.
Obnoxious behavior makes it harder to have the sanctions lifted.
If they want to be part of the civilized world, they must act like it.
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"If they want to be part of the civilized world, they must act like it."
Spoken like you get to define what the civilized world is.
Russia and China don't recognized the west as the civilized world, they recognize it as the enemy. Sanctions are to be lifted, they are to be defeated.
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Sanctions are NOT to be lifted, they are to be defeated.
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If they are caught in the act, they can also have their ships sunk, because it's not speculation about what happened.
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Actually, there are local laws in some of these countries that say that the tool for the crime can be confiscated.
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Certain authoritarian governments want to pretend to be everyone's friend, while in practice they are de facto at war with the entire world. They want to attack everyone else's infrastructure and still be seen as friendly and cooperative. But they're *not* friendly and cooperative, and when they use phrases like "win
While they're at it... (Score:2)
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...invest in more redundancy to the global internet backbone
There's already a crapload of redundancy.
Many cables are dark because capacity exceeds demand.
internet becomes a US only thing once again (Score:2)
It looks like we are headed toward the US becoming the only place where people can internet
Probably not good for anybody
Re:internet becomes a US only thing once again (Score:4, Funny)
U.S. internet is censored
Are you crazy, man? They're not going to let you say that!
Not a bad plan but not the best either. (Score:2)
As military programs go this one seems to be reasonably economical.
What I would have preferred to see is an array of sensors along the length of the cable and built into it. Right now the cables are heavily sheathed and have active nodes at regular intervals, but those nodes don't have anything that looks outside. They get power from the cable sheath and they condition the fiber signals but that's it.
You should have a sensor network included that would give an ops center immediate what/where informati
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They may be able to get much of that from TDR already.
What I hope for is that they will find a way to make the whole system more robust against sabotage or natural disasters, maybe to the point where sabotage simply isn't worth the effort
And doing what? (Score:3)
As it stands they are unable to engage vessels in international waters without the potential to trigger international conflict. How would looking more closely at the problem solve anything?
A quick torpedo into the ship that cut the cable last time would likely send the right message, but since that is the only real solution next time as well it's not like monitoring the situation more closely will change anything.
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...operated by Leon Musk's AI, complete with overrides built in for comrade Vladimir.
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Aren't they the same guy now?
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As usual, you are without insight. It is quite sufficient a threat to catch them in the act.
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Nothing new here (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone interested in this topic should read Neal Stephenson's (yes that guy) epic essay [wired.com] about the development of the undersea cable industry. He wrote that back in 1996, and related a story where near China the operator of an undersea cable would find nodes just cut out of the cable. Clearly someone wanted one to take apart to see how it was built.
This type of thing isn't new but it sure seems to be getting stepped up recently.
P.S. if someone has a better link to that document please post it.
How About A Nice Torpedo? (Score:2)
They make some very nice bottom-based torpedo launchers these days, so I've been told. Link it in with a nearby submarine cable: if the cable gets cut, the torpedo launches toward the nearest ship dragging an anchor :-)
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"Please move away from the cable. You have 20 seconds to comply."
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Rodney Dangerfield impression: Hey you scratched my torpedo!
'Tis what my 8 yr old niece proposed (Score:1)
Did this come from Dept. of Capt. Obvious?
Sharks with lasers, obviously. (Score:3)
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Automatic counterstrike weapons (Score:2)
It is possible to detect the cut point in a cable, and it is possible to have undersea missile systems.
So what we need here is a system that reports to the scene of a cut within minutes, then traces the cable of the offending ship back to its point of origin and calls in a strike while attaching itself to the hull as a locator beacon.
Nothing lethal, maybe a warhead equivalent to a bank's exploding dye pack.
Re: Automatic counterstrike weapons (Score:1)
yeah that's kind of what this is, on a diplomatic level. we HAVE been looking at the satellite imagery and saying âoewell it sure is odd that in the four days prior, a ship from (NATION) was loitering near this location."
but think of (NATION) as being idk the wealthy frat boy child of a local politician with a seven-figure defense lawyer. they will say "well i just like loitering in that part of the ocean."
so at that point, what do you do? we either admit that law and evidence is stupid and too much tr
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fwiw i've said before that we should just MINE the fucking things with kill-drones.
the only rational objections i received were
1) "it would kill marine life": roflmao, uh yeah, maybe some (otoh if it functions as a sufficient deterrent, then it wouldn't kill anything! wouldn't that be nice?). meanwhile, the fishing industry is literally predicated on "killing marine life" on a mass scale and it makes $276,000,000,000 per year so ... uh... who cares? MAYBE it MIGHT kill a whale that happened to be there, but
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Satellites can not fly when it is cloudy.
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Yes, cutting a cable can be an accident, but in the latest case the ships speed was slown down from 10 knots to 6 knots for a long duration of time. Even if you are a blind sea captain and your whole crew has hearing and sensoring problems and you would not notice that the whole ship is shaking, you would still notice that your speed is way too slow and stop your engines to investigate the problem.
I don't think that the Chinese are involved in this. But most likely scenario is that Russians paid the crew to
Boondoggle (Score:2)
Just how many USVs (Unmanned Surface Vehicles) are we talking about? And how are they actually going to help? Sea traffic is already fairly well monitored - note that they caught the Chinese ship that cut the last two cables. What are several hundred (maybe thousand) sea-going drones going to add? Don't forget that, next to development and production costs, drone floating around on salt water are going to need continuous maintenance. Why would anything think this is a good idea?
Oh, I know! I know! Money i
CIA (Score:2)
There's no way anything will come of this because it prevents the CIA from doing it in the first place, and then blaming it on some country they want to make people hate.
That's how the CIA operate, and this would work against them...so, won't happen.
Cable sabotage is an attack on comms = act of war (Score:2)
It would be legitimate self-defense to interdict anti-cable attacks by sinking the attacker.
Comms are of course critical to modern life so damaging them as policy is an act of war no different than sinking a nav buoy or shooting down a satellite.
Countdown 3, 2, 1... (Score:2)
1.4 million robots? (Score:2)
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I suspect the "stupid budget" is the whole point or its just silly solutions to a non-problem that makes good clickbait. Even in the unlikely event these are not just examples of the normal accidents that result in cables being cut on a regular basis, they are barely more than a nuisance.
The real issue is how to defend against a wholesale attack on cables as part of a real military conflict. Then you really may need to patrol vital communication cables or find some other way to protect them from assault. Pa
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There are not 1.4M kilometers of undersea cables that are reachable for anchor chains. Those that are not require high-effort diving operations that can already nicely be monitored via satelite.
But let's assume your clueless number was correct. Lets also assume we want one check every 6 hours. A typical USV has a speed of 90km/h (50 knots). That is a number I found for armed, relatively heavy and conventional. (Obviously, hydrofoil and very light are options and so are drone-range extension and armed is not
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Lets also assume we want one check every 6 hours.
I don't think national actors are limited to the use of anchor chains. Nordstream was not broken by a dragged anchor. And having a drone zoom along at 50 knots every six hours is not very likely to deter them.
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Those that are not require high-effort diving operations that can already nicely be monitored via satelite.
I doubt that is true. But would think surface ships dragging an anchor would be even more easily monitored via satellite. If you have a drone sailing along at 50 knots to observe it you can use a drone to cut it. "He who defends everything defends nothing." What is needed is to identify the cables that are really essential to our security and figure out how to make them secure. Or accept that they aren't and make sure we have alternatives. But this discussion isn't really about protecting cables.
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But this discussion isn't really about protecting cables.
Indeed. For example, at this time, neither China nor Russia wants it clearly known and provable that they sabotaged cables. The last thing they want is _their_ cables getting cut in retaliation. What happens currently with that Chinese freighter is a nice deterrent. And should China finally admit that an accident did happen, they will still have to pay for the repairs.
Incidentally, I am very doubtful the Chinese or Russian governments are actually behind this. Maybe some (dumb) rogue operator, may be some o
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he last thing Russia wants at this time is more arguments why they are dangerous.
On the other hand western intelligence agencies do want more arguments why Russia is dangerous. I don;t think this is a false flag operation, but that isn't really any less likely than Russia or China deliberately cutting the cable. The most likely scenario is that it is just another of the many similar accidents that happen every year all over the world.
Be afraid .. be very afraid :o (Score:2)