Bubble Trouble – It’s Often What You Don’t See that Can Kill You

We have a little home up in Puget Sound on Whidbey Island. Our house is on the southern part of the island, in Langley, Washington, and on the far northern tip, in Oak Harbor, is a Naval Air Station charged with one of the most important military missions in the country: protect nearby Bremerton, just across the Sound from Seattle, at all costs. Folks in Coupeville, halfway down the island, get annoyed at low level attack aircraft plunging down over a practice field, making one heck of a noise. I wonder if they know the mission.

You see, Bremerton is home for one of the largest concentrations of American “boomers,” large submarines (Ohio class) with an average of 24 missile silos each, capable of launching a massive nuclear attack with SBMs (submarine-launched ballistic missiles) without ever having to surface. There are purportedly no fewer than eight boomers based in Bremerton, and undoubtedly more than a few from that base are now deployed within striking range of North Korea. While each SBM is capable of carrying 12 separately targetable warhead, by treaty, they are limited to only 8. And those aren’t little tactical nukes… they are the “big kind” (bigger than what we dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the end of WWII)… so that make 192 nukes per boat, a truly scary number. Not too many countries you cannot totally destroy with 192 nukes, the payload from a single Ohio class sub.

Russia, China and looking increasingly like “sooner rather than later,” North Korea, are also able (or soon able) to launch SBMs from their own submarine forces. For details on how the rest of the world is progressing, see my June 4, 2017 blog, The Silent Service is Getting Pretty Noisy. Nukes are terrifying to most folks, as they should be. Mutually Assured Destruction kept the United States and Russia/USSR from blowing each other up, but the instability of the Trump-Jong-Un war of words is increasingly pushing us towards that horrible possibility.

But since China, Russia and the United States are unlikely to launch against each other, you might be interested in how submarines are being deployed in other nasty ways, not quite as physically damaging but fully capable of massive disruption and chaos. As submarines are capable of operating at increasing depths, their ability to access, tap and/cut undersea fiber optic cables adds some pretty dire potential consequences. And since the ability to deploy submarines for this purpose may not require the same level of technological superiority as operating those sophisticated boomers and the super-capable fast-attack companion submarines, the number of countries/terrorist groups with access to appropriate deep-dive engineering capabilities are growing daily.

The January 7^th, The Cipher Brief, gives us the background for this risk:

·         Fiber optic cables are large underwater wires that relay 99 percent of the world’s digital communications. Approximately 400 undersea fiber optic cables span an estimated 683,000 miles across oceans and seas. This privately owned physical infrastructure binds the digital world, allowing servers in Hong Kong to quickly respond to requests from a computer in Washington, for example.

·         Physical damage is the main threat to fiber optic cables. The cable industry estimates that over 150 faults in cable connectivity occur every year, with the vast majority of them being isolated or accidental incidents such as fishing boats dragging their anchors near shallow shores. Since there is an expectation of damage, the industry has built-in network redundancy, or backup “dark cables” that could quickly replace damaged cables to limit the effects of such disruptions.

·         When fiber optic cables are disrupted, they can cause significant loss in network traffic. In March 2013, the Egyptian navy detained three men for allegedly attempting to cut an undersea cable off the coast of Alexandria, a hub of Mediterranean cable-landing points. The damage caused a 60 percent drop in internet speeds throughout the country. Back in January 2008, two cables that were cut off Alexandria’s coast temporarily shut down internet access in Egypt, India, Pakistan and Kuwait. In December 2006, four major fiber optic lines were damaged as a result of an earthquake that hit Taiwan, choking data transiting to and from Hong Kong, South East Asia and China until the traffic was fully restored 49 days later.

·         Russia has sought to modernize its submarine fleet, servicing and acquiring 13 additional vessels since 2014. Estimates are that Russia has an arsenal of 60 full-size submarines compared to the U.S. fleet of 66. Russia accelerated the refurbishments and additions to its sub fleet after the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 heightened tensions with the U.S. and NATO.

·         With submarines capable of stealthy, long-distance deployments, Russia can use them in a range of potentially hostile actions, from serving as the long arm of conventional weapons in lower-level conflicts such as Syria, to tracking the long routes of undersea cables, to retaliating with ballistic missiles in case of nuclear war. “There’s a new risk to our way of life, which is the vulnerability of the cables that crisscross the seabeds,” warned Britain’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach, speaking at the Royal United Services Institute in December. “Therefore, we must continue to develop our maritime forces…to match and understand Russian fleet modernization.”

Ah, Russians are apparently furthering their ability to disrupt fiber optic cables, but the really big threat is their ability to tap those undersea transmissions and mine them for information… or plant erroneous information that will be taken as real. While we might believe that there is sufficient encryption technology at work, (1) lots of that encryption – especially addressing normal banking and commercial transactions – is not that sophisticated (blockchain systems are somewhat more robust), (2) a lot of data is not encrypted at all and (3) Russia can distort, enhance, edit or send its own disinformation along those routes as if they belonged there.

Former CIA Deputy Director, Rick Ledgett, also writing for that edition of the Cipher Brief, defines the risk a bit better:

·         The deluge of data transiting the undersea cables would be of tremendous intelligence value for the Kremlin. But tapping such cables at the depths of the ocean is a significant engineering feat, and doing so at the cable’s landing points onshore is much more feasible.

·         Cutting the cables entirely, however, would be particularly effective at depths where it would be difficult to repair them. Such an action could lead to significant economic fallout, disrupt important military communications, or divert network traffic patterns to cables that are already tapped. The U.S. military is almost always operating at the end of a long tether, and these fiber optics are its communications lifeline for high-volume data too burdensome for satellite communications. Tactically severing specific cables prior to, for example, a full-on shooting war spurred by a Russian invasion of the Baltics could significantly hinder a U.S. response.

·         Experts are unaware of any publicly known instances of intentional disruption of internet cables by Russian forces thus far, and it would take significant preparation for such a surgical operation to achieve the desired result – but the Russians are working on developing that skill. “These types of high tech, delicate and complex undersea maneuvers constitute important training and preparation for the Russian Navy,” wrote (ret.) James Stavridis, a Cipher Brief expert and former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. “The ability to tap these cables for intelligence as well as attack them with precision is a skill-based activity that requires detailed knowledge and real precision work at depth, according to many reports. Practice is vital.”

·         Should the Kremlin seek to understand the specific effects disruption could have—their own communications could be affected too—the Russian military could conduct deniable disruption by using fishing vessels, for example.

·         Russia also could attempt to breach the network-management software used to control the flow of data along the ocean floor. The software is similar to the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems used in other industrial systems, such as power grids. With access, Russian hackers could monitor data traffic, see cable faults and tinker with wavelengths that transmit data to slow it or reroute it. Russian state-sponsored hackers already have proven their ability to conduct such sophisticated operations by temporarily shutting down portions of Ukraine’s power grid in December 2015 and 2016. 

So if we cannot rely on this global connectivity, if the very signals that enable our way of life also enfold the necessary secrets to decimate us, exactly how easy is it to take down entire modern nations, their systems of commerce, electrical power grids, and military communications, exactly what can we do about it? And since everyone denies that they are even doing this, along with all the other hacking and spreading of disinformation robotically through social media, how could we even negotiate international restrictions against all this? Read the above again, and think about it! And remember, we have a self-proclaimed mentally stable genius directing our counter-measures.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you are deeply concerned with these issues, make sure you write your elected representatives and let them know how you feel!