The underwater cables that play a vital role supporting the international digital economy are increasingly vulnerable to attack from low-cost drones, Chinese military researchers have warned.
They said the seabed had long been viewed as a strategic “blind spot” due to the difficulty of exploration and the high cost of controlling it, but was becoming a “new arena for great power rivalry”.
“The barrier to entry for undersea warfare is lowering,” Shi Guanglei and Shi Haiming from the National Defence University wrote in Science and Technology Daily, pointing to the Aukus pact between Australia, Britain and the United States as a key driver of this change.
“In the past, underwater operations relied heavily on crewed submarines, which were expensive and posed significant risks to personnel, making it difficult for small and medium countries to conduct underwater military activities.”
They added that small and medium-sized unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) were “low-cost, easy to deploy in batches and pose no risk of casualties, allowing countries to seize control of the seabed”.
The article said undersea cables carried 99 per cent of intercontinental data traffic and played a key role in supporting online services and daily cross-border financial transactions widely estimated to be worth US$10 trillion.
It warned that underwater pipelines and optical cables had become an “easy target”, citing incidents such as the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines that transported natural gas from Russia to Germany or the disruption caused to internet services after cables in the Red Sea were cut last year.
