Experts Warn of Subsea Cable Risks Amid Rising Geopolitical Tensions

WASHINGTON, March 12, 2025 – Security and resilience concerns are mounting over undersea communications cables, and experts warned that sabotage could threaten infrastructure if policymakers don’t protect subsea data highways vital to U.S. government agencies.

At Tuesday’s INCOMPAS Policy Summit, panelists highlighted a shift in ownership. They noted that while telecom companies once worked closely with the government on redundancy measures, today’s cables are predominantly built and operated by private tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Meta—primarily for their own networks.

“[E]conomic security and national security are very intertwined. We are facing… an economic competition that is also very much a national security competition that we've never really sort of encountered before. And to that end, you know, our dependencies on our commercial sector very much contribute to our national security,” said Richard Harknett of the Center for Cyber Strategy and Policy at the University of Cincinnati.

Grace Koh, vice president of government relations at Ciena (and formerly a special assistant to the first Trump administration), a Maryland-based network and software firm, echoed those concerns. 

“This is a heightened period of geopolitical tensions… There may be acts of great aggression occurring undersea, where critical infrastructure can be targeted.”

Despite the growing reliance on subsea cables, Koh said that the International Committee for the Protection of Cables does not formally track cases of intentional sabotage.

“The majority of them are caused by simple things like shipping or fishing accidents, anchor drops, etc.,” she said, but added that “the ICPC has never really had a category for intentional, deliberate damage… If you're not looking for it, you're not going to find it.”

Meanwhile, Paula Boyd, a senior director at Microsoft, emphasized the importance of subsea cables but wasn’t convinced that malicious cuts occur frequently.

“[A] bank in a given day moves $3.9 trillion of traffic across subsea cables. And I think when you have more subsea cables… there’s probably more damage to those cables just because of numbers generally,” she said.

“I think [the question of intent is] a recognition of the change in the infrastructure, and the increasing importance of subsea cables as part of that larger infrastructure.”

Experts also stressed the urgency of bolstering repair speed and capability, particularly in response to a worst-case scenario.

“If somebody were to cut a bunch of cables all at once, it would be a very long time before they’re fixed,” Milo Medin, CEO of Logos Space Services, warned.