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Most of the world’s Internet traffic travels through undersea fiber-optic cables that share ocean floors with oil pipelines and power lines. These critical links face growing sabotage risks as gray-zone warfare and open conflicts have become widespread. A new book by Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, titled *Undersea War*, explores this rise in suspicious incidents where ships dragging anchors have cut or damaged cables from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean.

About 60 percent of undersea cable damage is due to human error during fishing and shipping activities, while natural hazards account for a smaller proportion. Between 150 and 200 cables are damaged each year and usually repaired quickly. However, international tension has led to increased scrutiny, with governments investigating crews for allegedly causing deliberate damage. Notable incidents include the "Christmas Day massacre" of 2024, where a Russian-linked tanker named *Eagle S* dragged its anchor for about 56 miles, cutting four data cables and the Estlink 2 power cable. Earlier that year, the Chinese cargo ship *Yi Peng 3* damaged two data cables in the Baltic region; its crew was not prosecuted by European authorities, whereas the Finnish government attempted to prosecute three senior officers of the *Eagle S*.

On the other side of the world, the captain of the Chinese-owned ship *Hong Tai* was convicted in Taiwan in February 2025 for severing an undersea telecommunications cable and sentenced to three years in prison in June 2025. This followed a legislative amendment allowing up to seven years in prison for intentional damage. Other threats include Iranian efforts to impose fees on operators of cables through the Strait of Hormuz, and a joint UK-Norway-US operation confronting Russian submarines practicing new cable-disabling technology near Norway’s Svalbard archipelago.

Elisabeth Braw explains that subsea cables are incredibly attractive targets because disrupting them causes massive financial loss and operational downtime for modern economies. During the Cold War, fewer cables existed and international treaties like the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea provided a framework for rules of the road. Today, Braw notes that this commitment is declining among key countries, and nations like Russia have specialized in using non-military means to weaken others. The oceans are a global commons where cables connect countries outside territorial waters, making it difficult for any single nation to enforce protection against suspicious merchant vessels or advanced sabotage tools.