Experts: human damage to undersea fiber optic cables would be less severe than military warns; of ~428 cables, one is damaged every couple days, often by nature
IT MIGHT SEEM like nightmare scenario. A terrorist organization or nefarious nation state decides to derail the global internet …
Context & Ripple Effects
In early 2018, Wired's reporting pushed back against the Pentagon's nightmare scenario: experts argued that of roughly 428 undersea fiber optic cables, one is damaged every couple of days already — mostly by nature — so deliberate human attacks would be far less catastrophic than military planners warned. The piece was a rare skeptical counterweight to the emerging 'cable sabotage' framing.
Subsequent coverage has complicated both sides of that argument. Research cited by Bloomberg found around 60% of faults come from fishing gear and anchors, with repairs running $250K–$3M per incident, while the West Africa canyon incident showed natural causes can still cause major regional disruptions. Meanwhile, US officials have flagged China-owned repair ships to Google and Meta, and officials probing Baltic Sea damage concluded it was likely maritime accidents rather than Russian sabotage — yet the security buildup continues.
First-order effects
- Cable owners and operators absorb a steady drumbeat of routine damage — roughly one break every couple of days across the ~428-cable system — making repair capacity and cost ($250K–$3M per fix) the real operational constraint, not terrorism.
- Military threat assessments that emphasize catastrophic coordinated attacks sit uneasily against the evidence base, forcing policymakers to justify security spending against a fault profile dominated by anchors, trawlers, and terrain.
Second-order effects
- Hyperscalers like Google and Meta, whose traffic rides these cables, get pulled into security reviews they did not ask for — including scrutiny of which repair ships touch their infrastructure — even when the underlying damage statistics point to accidents.
- Vendors of monitoring technology such as distributed acoustic sensing find a market growing faster than the sabotage evidence justifies, because attribution ambiguity after each incident keeps the threat narrative alive.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, submarine cable governance splits into two tracks: an engineering track that treats breaks as routine maintenance economics, and a security track that hardens and monitors cables against a threat the data suggests is secondary — with budgets following the louder narrative.
- Persistent difficulty attributing undersea damage (accident versus act) becomes a structural feature of geopolitics, letting every incident be read either way depending on the audience.
The trend: Subsea internet infrastructure is being steadily reframed from a mundane maintenance problem into a securitized geopolitical asset, regardless of whether the damage record supports the threat level.