by
Austin BayDecember 5, 2024
During its Baltic Sea transit, the Chinese merchant ship Yi Peng 3 dropped an anchor -- or at least dragged an anchor-like device with slicing effectiveness.
According to Reuters, the Chinese bulk carrier left a Russian seaport on Nov. 15 and "was responsible for severing the two undersea cables in Swedish economic waters between Nov. 17 and 18 by dragging its anchor on the seabed."
Undersea cables: telecommunications fiber optics cables transmitting gigabits of news, entertainment, gossip and money, regionally and globally without atmospheric distortion.
A key fact: These cables cross oceans and provide global connectivity. They are so extensive the nodes where they connect are called landing stations -- digital seaports.
This makes the landing stations targets for terrorists and foreign state enemies.
Fact: If you are an American, Communist China is a foreign state enemy.
A hard fact: Everything commercial in China is ultimately commanded by the Chinese Communist Party. That's the way dictatorships work, even those currently interested in making money. Everything within or owned by mainland (Communist) China ultimately has to kowtow to Beijing's CCP emperors.
Which means the Yi Peng 3 is a plausibly deniable CCP weapon, should the CCP emperors give the imperial wink.
Beijing has no Baltic Sea border or maritime claim, at least not yet. The Baltic Sea is bordered by eight NATO nations and Russia.
For the record, China and Vladimir Putin's Russia are allies.
Back to the cable dredge. Reuters noted a similar incident occurred in the Baltic "last year when the Chinese ship NewNew Polar Bear damaged two cables linking Estonia to Finland and Sweden as well as an Estonia-Finland gas pipeline."
Fascinating. I've written two columns in the last two years about the vulnerability of U.S. Gulf of Mexico gas and oil pipelines -- as in vulnerable to terrorist and enemy attack. The U.S. gets 18% to 20% of its daily oil and gas energy from the Gulf of Mexico. Cut the pipelines and America has an economic disaster, if not an all-out war.
On Dec. 2, Bill Gertz in the Washington Times noted, "... offshore infrastructure, transoceanic infrastructure and even seaports are very vulnerable to relatively simple types of disruptive and destructive sabotage by well-trained operatives."
Was the crew of the Yi Peng 3 well trained?
Unless the target is deep beneath the sea, an attacker doesn't need a submarine or expensive suicide robot to damage or destroy a sub-sea infrastructure target. For shallow sea targets, special operations personnel, committed terrorists or high-tech criminals with anchors suffice.
For that matter, blackmailing crooks in a fishing boat don't need a smart torpedo -- dragging an anchor can cause millions in damage and billions in losses until the targeted structure is repaired.
Deep below the waves runs the undersea cable spine of the global internet -- digital information pipelines carrying everything from bank transactions to live sports events to personal email. Currently, between 95% and 99% of all transoceanic data traffic transits undersea cables. The fiber optic cables are far more efficient than satellites, have less latency (delay) and can carry more bytes. Some can transmit 400 terabits of data per second.
Mid-ocean, cables lie deep on the seabed. But as the cables approach shore, the sea becomes shallower and ship traffic increases. This makes "landing stations" targets for sea hacking.
But this is old news. Reed Winkler's "Nexus: Strategic Communication and American Security in WWI" (Harvard, 2008) explored the first global internet -- the international telegraph cable system that began shrinking Planet Earth at the end of the 19th century. Undersea cables broke the great silence of strategic distance, establishing the first near-instantaneous global communications network.
When World War I erupted in 1914, the British raised German cables from the sea and literally "hacked" them with axes.
Apparently, the digital idiom "hacking" has a basis in cable reality.