Is It Sabotage? Unraveling the Mystery of Undersea Cable Breaks

Lately, I've been thinking about the movie director Alfred Hitchcock. One of his first big hits was a 1936 film called Sabotage.

We are seeing that word in the media an awful lot these days.

Cable faults were once an aspect of the industry entirely hidden from common view. Nowadays, any cable fault in the Baltic or off the coast of Taiwan is guaranteed to result in a flurry of headlines like “Another Undersea Cable Attacked in the Baltic Sea.”

Some Helpful Research

Here's what the writers of these stories may not realize: cable faults are sadly common, and it's been that way for a long time.

The International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) does great work to improve the situation. One of its members, Andy Palmer-Felgate, regularly presents a fascinating paper with hard numbers that help demystify the cable faults.

Here's one of my favorite charts from his most recent paper:

There are three really cool takeaways from this figure:

1. Cable faults are really common. On average, there are 199 cable faults each year from 2010-2023. That translates to nearly four faults per week. Four per week! (We also know from other research that roughly two-thirds of these faults are caused by “external aggression”—the scary-sounding industry term of art that basically means damage caused by fishing and transport vessels.)
   
   
2. Cable faults have occurred with remarkable regularity over the years. Since 2010, the number of faults has rarely strayed from the long-term average of 199 per year.  
   
   
3. The number of cable faults per year has remained steady even while the number of cable kilometers in the water has increased. This finding is a topic worthy of an entirely different blog post, but briefly: industry insiders attribute part of this success to new burial methods that have more effectively protected recent cables.

What About More Recent Faults?

Most individual cable faults are never disclosed to the public.

Andy collates the data for his work by collecting confidential repair histories from each marine maintenance fleet and then anonymizing and aggregating their data. His chart ends in 2023; I don't think he has yet updated it for 2024.

As part of our Transport Networks research product, we collect a subset of cable faults—those that have been publicly disclosed—and present them in a nifty, searchable dashboard. (If you’re a subscriber, you can check it out at this link.)

The dashboard does suggest a slight uptick in publicly-known faults in 2024. However, outside a few more publicly disclosed faults in the Baltic than usual, this anecdotal dataset shows nothing outside historical norms.

Hanlon’s Razor

So, what's behind the most recent cable faults? I don't really know. It's hard enough to determine a physical cause of cable damage; it's even harder to prove intent. The Washington Post reported that U.S. officials now think that some recent Baltic cable faults were not intentional, but were instead “accidents caused by inexperienced crews serving aboard poorly maintained vessels.”

Given that cable faults have hit like clockwork for at least a decade, it's helpful to recall the “Hanlon's Razor” rule of thumb:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Replace the word “stupidity” with “inattention” or “occasional bad luck,” and now we have an explanatory model for the cable industry suggesting that accidents—not an orchestrated decades-long campaign of destruction—have caused most historical faults.

I also really like this corollary to Hanlon's Razor, “Grey's Law”:

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Accident or sabotage, an anchor-damaged cable requires the same time and money to repair. If adversarial governments are indeed behind some of the more recent cable faults, their actions thus far are merely contributing to an expensive nuisance that has already plagued the industry.  

What's the Fallout From Recent Faults?

Governments around the Baltic are diligently investigating each cable fault as potential sabotage. That's a good thing.

Even if some or all the incidents are eventually ruled as accidents, this prosecutorial zeal should make mariners think more carefully about where to drop their anchors, and for how long. Greater cable awareness is something the industry has pushed for a long time.

But should we be afraid?

Let's assume for a moment that Russia and China have indeed co-opted a fleet of fishing trawlers and transport vessels, and have instructed these privateers to wreak havoc on the sea floor.

If the intent of sabotage is to send a signal, you could argue that such a campaign has failed. Severing a few cables in an industry habitually accustomed to repairing 200 faults each year is not a signal…it's just noise.