Most of the internet still travels through cables lying on the seafloor, and those cables are getting harder to protect.
Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who leads its Threats to the Global Maritime Order Initiative, makes the case in a new book called Undersea War. She catalogs a run of suspicious incidents in which ships have dragged their anchors for unusually long stretches, cutting or damaging cables and pipelines from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific. Those fiber-optic lines share the seabed with oil and gas pipelines and submarine power cables, and despite the growth of satellite services like Starlink, they still carry the overwhelming majority of global internet traffic. Braw's own numbers complicate the sabotage story, though: about 60 percent of the 150 to 200 cable breaks recorded each year trace back to ordinary human error, mostly fishing nets and anchors, with storms and undersea landslides accounting for a smaller share.
That overlap is the real story here. Gray-zone warfare works precisely because a dragged anchor looks identical whether it was an accident or a deliberate act, and that ambiguity hands hostile actors deniability while forcing navies and telecom operators to treat every incident as a potential threat. As open conflicts and gray-zone tactics spread, the steady background rate of ordinary cable damage becomes useful cover for a smaller number of deliberate cuts.
Cables get fixed fast, which is reassuring, until you remember that the repair crews, like the cables themselves, are sitting out in the open water too.