Quotes About This Report from Chair Randall Schriver, Vice Chair Mike Kuiken, and Commissioner Hal Brands:
“Undersea cables, carrying the vast majority of international data traffic, are the backbone of the global digital economy and are increasingly a matter of national security,” said Chair Randy Schriver. “This report finds that China is developing a range of capabilities to achieve ‘Command of the Deep Sea,’ with the potential to cause major disruption across these networks.”
“The cord coming into your house is the last hundred feet of a wire that crosses the Pacific,” said Vice Chair Mike Kuiken, Co-Chair of the Research Working Group. “China has built what it takes to reach that system, and it has built the cover to hide its hand while doing it. Chinese strategists write about cable networks as the spine of a seabed grid for finding American submarines. We have been treating this as a bandwidth problem, but in reality it is a warfighting problem.”
“Protecting undersea cable networks requires more than repairing cables after they are damaged,” said Commissioner Hal Brands, Co-Chair of the Research Working Group. “To protect this critical infrastructure, the report recommends new tools to identify vulnerabilities and improve monitoring, resilience, and coordination with allies before a crisis occurs, helping ensure these critical networks remain secure and reliable.”
Read the full press release here.
Executive Summary
Undersea cables are critical to national security and prosperity, but are also highly vulnerable to disruption. While the vast majority of breakages are accidental or due to natural factors, a series of suspected sabotage incidents has highlighted the ability of hostile actors to weaponize cable sabotage as an effective “gray zone” coercion tactic – whereby attacks can be discreet, non-attributable, and unlikely to escalate above the threshold of conflict. This report seeks to analyze China’s strategy and capabilities as they pertain to undersea cables, assess the exposure of U.S. trans-Pacific cable networks to gray zone sabotage, model the impact of cable sabotage on U.S. connectivity with the Indo-Pacific, and make recommendations for bolstering the resilience of U.S. trans-Pacific cable networks. To support this analysis, this paper has created a Trans-Pacific Cable Gray Zone Vulnerability Index (GZVI) to assess and rank the vulnerability of different U.S. trans-Pacific cable systems to China’s gray zone threats. This index is designed as a means to help policymakers understand the risk profile of different cable systems and to aid resource prioritization for monitoring, patrols, and other protective measures. This paper argues that China’s rapidly developing capabilities to disrupt undersea cables threaten key U.S. security and economic interests in the region, with “first-island chain” countries especially vulnerable. To meet this challenge, the United States must enhance coordination with allies and partners in the region to strengthen undersea cable protection.
Key Findings
- China aims to achieve “Command of the Deep Sea”: The undersea domain is becoming of critical importance to China’s economic and national security. China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) strategists increasingly reference undersea cables as a vulnerability to be protected, a tool to be exploited for intelligence purposes, and a possible target of an offensive action against adversary infrastructure.
- China is rapidly building capabilities to disrupt undersea cables: China is exploiting “military-civil fusion” to develop a range of dual-use technologies to enhance its ability to access and target undersea cables, with both legitimate civilian uses and potential offensive military capabilities. These include China’s indigenous operational 10,000-meter-class submersible “Striver” and “swarming” systems of linked uncrewed platforms such as the undersea glider Haiyi. Future technologies under development include “hibernating” cable cutters for pre-deployment on adversary infrastructure.
- Undersea cable sabotage is consistent with China’s “gray-zone warfare”: PLA military strategists highlight that disruption of undersea infrastructure can achieve asymmetric advantages against adversaries, without triggering the political and legal thresholds associated with overt kinetic attack.
- “First island chain” cables are particularly vulnerable to gray-zone attack: The confluence of China’s extensive maritime claims, shallow waters and dense shipping activity means that cables connecting the United States with Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines are among some of the most vulnerable in the trans-Pacific network. These vulnerabilities affect both existing and new planned cable systems. Continental U.S. connections to the state of Hawaii and the territory of Guam are also particularly vulnerable, with few redundancy options.
- Disruption to a single cable could threaten key U.S. trans-Pacific connections: Disruption to even just a single undersea cable could risk overwhelming current available capacity on direct routings between the United States, Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines, forcing data onto slower, less direct routes.
- Simultaneous disruption of multiple cables could overwhelm trans-Pacific capacity: Scenarios such as an attack on Taiwan or the deliberate targeting of several major cable networks could significantly reduce headroom and even overwhelm trans-Pacific capacity as a whole, forcing communications between the United States and the Indo-Pacific to re-route across the globe.
- Undersea cable disruption threatens key U.S. economic interests: Even minor slowdowns in communications latency can have major ramifications for high frequency traders, AI services, and other U.S. economic interests reliant on super-fast connections. More major disruption scenarios would have cascading impacts on the full range of U.S. economic interests in the Indo-Pacific, with tangible impacts likely on internet communications, financial services, and cloud services.
Recommendations
The United States must act urgently to secure undersea cable networks from gray zone sabotage, which requires bolstering monitoring and protection capabilities:
- The United States must work with its allies in the region to establish common maritime domain awareness platforms, increased cable patrols, joint protocols for incident response, and toughened penalties and exclusion zones near vulnerable areas. This both enables emerging threats to be dealt with quickly and serves as a deterrent against future gray zone aggressors.
- The United States must support allied efforts to bolster cable repair, redundancy, and resilience. The United States, partner countries, and trusted operators must work to replenish global cable repair fleets, which are aging and thinly stretched, and ensure adequate pre-positioning of critical equipment.
- The United States must aim to match China’s ambitions in the undersea domain – which has been a strategic priority for Beijing since at least 2014. Investing in undersea capabilities, both commercial and military, inside and outside of government, is the only way to ensure that the United States can outpace China’s rapidly developing capabilities.
Interactive: Gray Zone Vulnerability Index
