Securing Seabed Cybersecurity, Emphasizing Intelligence Augmentation

Of all the perils he faced during World War II, Winston Churchill said German submarine wolfpacks were his greatest concern, because their attacks on merchant ship convoys threatened to choke Britain's economic lifelines. Today, it seems there is another emerging undersea threat, one that has the potential to disrupt the global economy by severing fiber-optic lines of communication that run along the world's various seabeds. There are nearly 400 undersea cables that stretch for almost three-quarters of a million miles, the densest concentrations of them being in the North Atlantic and the North Sea, the Mediterranean, and in Southeast Asia and around Japan. They carry virtually all (97%) international communications, and their exact locations are reasonably well-known. They are also increasingly vulnerable to being tapped or even cut by advanced submarine craft of a range of types, from manned mini-subs to remotely operated undersea drones, and even fully autonomous "U-bots."