Chinese Cable Cutting Operations

Will O'Brien discusses China's concerning activities with undersea cables and the security implications.

"The Chinese are literally publicly advertising these cable cutters that they have. They're literally putting it in the South China Morning Post: 'China unveils powerful deep sea cable cutter.' They're not even hiding this. They're like, 'Yeah, we're just look how big our cable cutter is.'

This is just the new paradigm. Then they send these Chinese ships into the Baltic Sea on 'fishing missions.' What are they doing in the Baltic Sea on fishing missions? They're clearly just cutting cables, and then two days later, 'Oh, cable cut, I wonder if...'

These cables run between military bases as well. Let's say a hot war breaks out in the South China Sea. The first target is going to be a military base in the Pacific somewhere, like Guam. If you want to completely scramble their understanding and situation awareness, you're going to send these subsea drones down to cut the cables giving them communications and energy. You're going to scramble their airwaves with electromagnetic interference. That's how you're going to completely prevent American military responses in the Pacific.

There's not actually that many cables - there's an insane amount of data that goes over them, but there's only about 600 active. They're very difficult to lay, and you need to respond quickly."