Russia could chop vital undersea web cables, warns Brit military chief The head of the British Armed Forces, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach, has warned that Russia could cut off the UK by severing undersea communications cables. In a speech made to military think-tank the Royal United Services Institute last night, the air marshal said: "There's a new risk to our way of life, which is the …
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Are you absolutely sure no specialised nuclear depth charge could implode and flood the Chunnel? Remember in WWII the UK and America developed a number of specialised busting munitions like the bouncing bomb, bunker busters and the bombs used to sink the Tirpitz in its Norwegian Fjord. Some sort of piercing driven vertical torpedo would seem like the start of a tunnel buster.
I know the UK spooks had the idea of mining it from within with a nuke but that was a practical ease of use operation designed to frustrate a very hypothetical Russian invasion of Western Europe. In reality the Soviets had their hands full with their Warsaw Pact buffer nations, were happy to have a buffer zone and warmongering Germany partitioned and didn't have any particular desire to invade Western Europe and administer it.
Rather they hoped that the workers here would rise up and form Socialist paradises on their own.
It was also true that by far the biggest concentration of Soviet arms was stationed on the border with Red China with whom they did NOT see eye to eye. There is now a lot of trade flowing over that border and it is less militarised than hitherto.
That gets you to Europe, but not the rest of the world. If you want to get to south asia, you have to go through Russia or lay a cable across the Bosphorus which is vulnerable to those nasty submarines. Australia, Iceland, Ireland, and the Americas can only be accessed by submarine bait.
Maybe we need to dig some REALLY long tunnels to put the cables in.
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If you want to collapse the chunnel, wouldn't it be easier to smuggle an "ordinary" suitcase nuke onto one of the trains and blow it up from the inside?
I don't know how carefully cargo trains crossing are checked, but conventional explosives could probably do the job if you could bring a few hundred pounds of Semtex in some cargo... This would have the bonus of offering the possibility of making it look like terrorists, or Iran or North Korea, so the real perpetrator could plead innocence.
Due to non-coincident busy hours, Europe to Far East cables via Eurasia are not needed. Instead, the Atlantic and Pacific cables are connected via North America taking advantage of the fact that the three continental pairs do not generate peak traffic at the same times.
(It also makes it easier for Five Eyes to keep tabs on things.)
Keep feeding the terrorists with all the info they need. Why do we in the West keep on blabbing about everything that would do the West damage, inspiring generations of terrorists.
Does this not appear to anyone as being particularly stupid????
You mean does the first paragraph of your comment appear to be particularly stupid? Definitely.
I could try to explain to you that as an innocent bystander, you are more likely to be killed by a bee than a religious or politically motivated murderer (if that is what you mean by a "terrorist"), or I could talk about the physiological phenomenon of social amplification of risk which makes negligible risks appear important just because people talk about them, and the related concept of the availability heuristic in decision making which helps drives it, but I suspect there is very little point in trying to drag you from the world as fed to you by tabloid newspapers and Donald Trump into reality.
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It's only really the latter half of the 20th Century that beancounters have had any "real" power - bankers might hold the purse-strings but a strong enough force could come along and pry those purses from the cold, dead fingers of the bankers (why else do you really think that the Eurocrats are so determined to reduce national Armed Forces below effective strength while creating an "internal security force" that can overpower any individual member state's defences?).
Unless you really believe that all wars since history began were fought because of a few money-grubbing merchants rather than because Religious Group A and Religious Group B disagree over which deity was/is stronger or whether it is Followers or Family who inherit control when the leader dies, or because one highly charismatic man manages to convince a large number of others that one hair or eye colour is inherently superior to all others then blaming the beancounters - however tempting - is to ignore what happens when nobody tells the playground bully to wind his neck in and play nice with others.
Yes. Problematic access to cat videos, grumble sites, modest inconvenience for the leeches of the city, It wouldn't be the end of my world.
Perhaps as head of the UK's armed services, Sir Stuart should be more concerned with the vast conventional capability gaps in all three services, and the squandersome and repetitive incompetence of the MoD in all matters of procurement?
"You know what's most pathetic? The fact that I, a 45 year old bloke, gets the reference. It's Friday evening, time for a few swift ones in the pub on the way home."
Your nickname on this forum is FuzzyWuzzys. Nobody expects you to have grown up. ;)
"Yes. Problematic access to cat videos, grumble sites, modest inconvenience for the leeches of the city, It wouldn't be the end of my world"
Unless you keep your money under the bed and not in a bank and you have an allotment, the severing of these cables would most certainly affect you.
Unless you keep your money under the bed and not in a bank and you have an allotment, the severing of these cables would most certainly affect you.
Still wouldn't be the end of my world. If traders on opposite sides of the Atlantic are unable to communicate, the trades don't happen, the assets don't evaporate, the liabilities don't go away, a few option traders get burned. Big hairy deal.
Remember when 9/11 paralysed Western air traffic for the better part of a week? Or the same of an Icelandic volcano that most of us can't pronounce? And yet, despite the VITAL, VITAL IMPORTANCE of all those business class movers and shakers unable to move, no material impact on business at all. It's the same with transatlantic cables - somebody will certainly be inconvenienced, I can't see any properly run bank having any existential risk, and even food trade wouldn't be unduly affected.
"Can you imagine a scenario where those cables are cut or disrupted?"
Yes, this means that the traffic goes the backup route around the UK into the North Sea landing in Europe north of Rotterdam (if we assume the optical level backup of the same links). As a result UK can no longer snoop on them and we have to ask the Dutch for a favour. Oh my god the world just ended.
To put it bluntly, if the hostilities reach a point where cables will be cut physically there will be P800 Onix and Kalibr going one way, Tomahawks the other shortly followed by nuclear tipped Khs Radugas and AG-86M exchanges and culminating with a Bulava vs Minuteman handshake.
Simply, the navy and the military need more toys. The threat of Russia doing this does not exist. At the point where they do it, undersea cables will be the least of our worries. There will be no traffic on them anyway with the EMP knocking out all Internet exchanges and transmission huts on the cable routes.
Now, there is a very clear threat of fringe groups, terrorists, self-declared states led by bearded lunatics, etc. That is different - it is the threat of them hijacking two trawlers or just buying them on the cheap (last time I checked - under 20 grand a piece for a couple of decommissioned ones) and having an excursion around Cornwall and around the Dutch coast north of Hook of Holland on the same day. All they need is a couple of AK47s on board - the only thing the UK coast guard has nowdays are inflatables. Not sure what the Dutch have (probably nothing much better either).
That is different though - you cannot get any cool toys to deal with this. Nothing like the toys BAE will concoct to deal with an imaginary Russian threat in mid-atlantic (*).
(*)Do not even get me started about ex-Generals getting consluttant positions in companies like BAE after they have "served their country". Everywhere - Russia too.
In the early hours of 5 August 1914, only a few hours after war was declared, Britain carried out something that seemed to be minor, but was actually vital. A British cable ship severed five German overseas underwater cables, which passed from Emden through the English Channel to Vigo, Tenerife, the Azores and the USA
This cut direct German communications to outside Europe, most significantly to the United States. The British could now intercept German signals to their embassies. They were sent in code, but British codebreakers were eventually able to read them.
The comments section for this story on the BBC website is frankly hilarious. It's descended into a flamewar between a Putinbot infestation on the one hand, and a bunch of old-school Daily Mail reading retired Colonel types on the other.
My favourite comment so far has to be "Do you really expect us to believe that Sir Peach would lie to the RUSI?", as if the very suggestion of a British soldier exaggerating a threat to win more funding is a completely unthinkable smear on the reputation of an officer and a gentlemen.
The comments on the BBC are always hilarious and scary at the same time, I present another classic from the same story,
"Are the military 100% certain the cables still there? I wouldn't mind betting that the wonderful caravan travellers or EU horde from Dracula's homeland haven't lifted and stripped them of metals and weighed them in for scrap already"
Shine a fucking light, where do these people come from?
Werdsmith wrote: "BBC website comments sections are a very powerful looney-magnet."
True - but not all of them are visitors. Following a slightly dubious accident during a Formula 1 Grand Prix, I posted a comment asking if some of the posters on the BBC sports page would make their (nasty, rude and sometimes borderline psychopathic) comments if face-to-face with the driver but apparently the BBC Moderators consider it acceptable to make threats against sportsmen *and their families* but not to ask "would you say that if you were in the same room?"...
...to spend more money on infrastructure.
Lets face it, you could have a 1000 more warships and still not stop this...all it takes is a trawler.
Yet investing in a 1000 more cables would make it much harder to have a major impact.
But I guess we like the £100,000 missile to blow up a tent idea.
This isnt a new threat, I remember having this discussion and the possibility of intercept/monitoring on the repeaters with collegues. There's alarming systems and other devices of course but to be fair, dragging a ships anchor through one "accidentally" would be rather little green man style of operations.
However timing of this in reality makes It fit being a military budget inducing narrative to suddenly care and acknowledge it publically.
It would cause economic chaos and have all sorts of not immediately obvious side effects, which even someone as insular and bubble inhabiting as Ledswinger would be heavily affected by.
"This isnt a new threat, "
The "threat" is even older. Pre-Internet, the world relied on undersea voice and telex comms for much of the worlds international trade so the threat of cutting off the UKs phone cables was as "real" as this one. There would likely be more of an effect now as we depend on data connections far more than we ever relied on voice and telex, but the threat is exactly the same.
Good lord, but he's right. The US is our major trade partner! Our nearest land mass! Our special relationship!
Oh, what a thing it is to be an island with no nearby continent to communicate or trade with, forced to send our exports across 3000 miles of unforgiving ocean and forever at the mercy of the Russians snipping the phone line.
If only there was somewhere else to turn, perhaps a continent of half a billion like minded souls some 20 miles away. We can but dream of such a world.
Psssst! Don't tell anyone, but all our communications links with that there Yrup are also via under-sea cables....
Nope, they are not.
If my memory from my telco days are right, most of the capacity from the UK to the continent is dual route. One route is ALWAYS under the sea - North Sea or Channel. The other route is USUALLY the Channel Tunnel (sometimes an alternative sea route). So on that side usually only one is under sea.
Kinda. Look at the Telegeography maps for a rough idea. Some fibre is routed via the Chunnel, but there are.. wayleave issues and other complications with doing that, mostly commercial. But there are fairly widely diverse routes across the pond, and from the UK into Europe.
Challenge from a security standpoint though is I think too many people now know where cables are to too high an accuracy. Anyone who's worked on this stuff knows customers will demand high resolution routing plans in easily exportable KML form. Wet sections still have a little protection, ie cable protection zones on navigation charts are more general.. But still sometimes ignored, ie accidental cable cuts from anchor drags. That's something where in Euroland, it's often relatively straightforward to identify ships in the area so cable operators know who to bill.
Same's true for some nefariousness. So if someone cuts a cable, that's usually quickly detected, then a cable maintenance ship will yoink the cable up, or look at it with an ROV. Unauthorised taps for a Tbps system should be detectable to the eyeballs on a cable ship.
Rest is kinda prelude to brown stuff heading for the whirly thing, ie all cables get cut, and satellites start going dark is likely to mean something more serious is about to happen than losing access to kitteh pics and hentai.
One route is ALWAYS under the sea - North Sea or Channel. The other route is USUALLY the Channel Tunnel (sometimes an alternative sea route).
If the Russians want to snip the comms lines, they will, Just because some aren't underwater will be no bother, just as there have at times been a range of suspicious "accidents" and explosions on a range of strategic gas pipelines in central and eastern europe.
Even on land and in "home territory", civil infrastructure is VERY difficult to protect from a modestly intelligent adversary. This also applies to electricity, gas, water, even sewers. Our strategic adversaries (as opposed to bearded god-botherers) know this full well. I could nominate the Pareto attack points for UK infrastructure with a few minutes work - our potential adversaries will already have a list, and maybe even sleepers in place to do the work..
@Androgynous Cupboard
The US is our major trade partner! Our nearest land mass! Our special relationship!
Not with David Cameron and George Osborne batting for China.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42377177
Who knows, he may even do a deal where the Chinese refit the new carriers with catapults and kit them out with Chinese built fighter aircraft, provide extra crew and help with the running costs to keep both vessels at sea at the same time. On condition we help them out with any spats in the South China Sea that may threaten the Belt and Road Initiative.
I'd better make myself scarce pronto - there are a couple of men in white coats coming this way with what looks like to be a straight jacket
Androgynous Cupboard wrote "If only there was somewhere else to turn, perhaps a continent of half a billion like minded souls some 20 miles away. We can but dream of such a world."
I assume you don't know anyone who ever worked for a haulage company or on a fishing boat, used a ferry or the Channel Tunnel or flown on an airline affected by the "like minded souls some 20 miles away" whenever the farmers, air traffic controllers, truckers or other group decide to cause trouble....
I bet the Russians start cutting the cable just as I’m typing this mess hage ….......... ong I blobddggggggg eeekkkkk ….....…. … rrrr rrrrr rrrr rrrrr …............ erg39f883 429egjejrg390j …...... ..... schnell! schnell! kartoffelkopf! ….. htijeerg … ......... .. 293i2ergei09iereg … ...... .. . until the name Maudling is almost totally obscured.
Why not just have each plane passenger carry a handful of USB thumbdrives with them on every flight, and tell them to drop them off on their way to whereever they've going? I'm sure the airlines could get this organised, as there's bound to be someone going near most cities, and if not they can get someone else to complete the journey.
Might slow the internet down a touch, but modern life is too fast anyway. And it would give us more time for tea breaks.
So, what does Sir Stuart suggest we actually do about this Threat To Our Way Of Life then? Buy enough boats to shuttle up and down the wires at 10min intervals, looking For Bad Guys at their nefarious activities? Blockade them thar Russkies in their ports perhaps?
Or is he just asking for more funding for the sharks/lasers project?
Dear Naive,
please do not turn the Register into the commenzs section for a BBB article about Brexit.
The amount of anti-German xenophobia displayed in those comments is horrifying.
Mrs. Merkel took steps that she believed to be the right ones at a time when the EU borders were buckling, very much as a consequence of failed anglo-american policies in the middle east (iraq war etc...).
This did not leadt to optimal results, but the alternative might have been much worse.
(I am personally critical to unrestricted immigration, but a number of the stories I hear from these people are truly heartbreaking).
Germany now faces the big and difficult task trying to integrate these people. In this, it should not be forgotten that Germany has had to integrate huge numbers before; Peopleb(many of them Jewish) fleeing from the Soviet Union between the wars (which led to sentiments reflected in the UK today), 12 Million Germans fleeing from the Russians in 1945 to 1950 and 1.4 million "German"-Russians after the fall of the wall. Germany also had to refurbish and re-integrate all of East Germany in the same period. Hearing the british complain about having too many Polish plumbers and Romanian field workers is ridiculous.
While WW2 is very much celebrated in the US and the UK, Germany has all thoughts about empire building very much bombed out of them. To the Germans, the British were seen as a sane partner nation, that could serve as a counterweight to the French. How this is currently misrepresented in the UK is quite sad.
And myself; I am neither German nor British, and I live the productive life of an immigrant.
Despite the "everything will route around the break" talk, reality really isn't that simple.
Firstly, cables that are rented as dark fiber, or which have SDH and static MPLS provisioned point to point links routed over them cannot reprovision quickly. Just imagine say Hibernia having both it's Trans-Atlantic fibers cut and begging Century Link for space on it's fibers. Even the provisioning processes will be utterly different, and getting a "clean" fiber pair assigned would be just about impossible: they would all be in use on various wavelengths. The muxes or routers would probably require new dark fiber between them: fine if they are in the same carrier hotel, slow if not.. The interruptions to service would be measured in weeks or months, and in all you might be better off just waiting for the repair ships to finish.
Secondly, using IP to route around sounds easy, but it's not much better. The IP backbone of the affected carriers will be in all likelihood severely affected by the destruction of many of it's point to point links over which the IP runs. Carriers and end users do not generally have multiple transit relationships set up in advance: commit costs money, even if you don't use it, and even assuming there are available ports, capacity and all equipment in common carrier hotels (which have hopefully not also been attacked in some way!), you would need lots of planning and new dark fiber to stop these new links instantly saturating. So even assuming massive goodwill, we are talking about days or weeks to recover.
I've had personal experience of a trans Irish sea issue where one cable provider suffered a cut which caused fairly severe issues: so severe, one of our customers called to *offer* capacity on their network. Despite all sides being sincere, the practicalities (local loop install, IP peering problems) were such the offer was never taken up.
If you want to make us resilient, I think there are three things you could do. Firstly, mandate that key applications (banking, telephone/999, government functions) must be hosted within the UK. Incentivise this by making it a requirement for getting government business. Secondly, mandate that carriers must have contingency plans for rapidly increasing their transit and peering options: lit interfaces on routers between them, even if BGP is shutdown, "shadow" public peering configs held in readiness to be turned on on public exchanges, tested on occasion. Thirdly, mandate all carriers have plans to hurl neutrality into the bin in extremis, and aggressively throttle customer traffic by type on their edge, and also be willing to depeer AS's that demand the most traffic if the network is threatened by their demands.
That all sounds very sensible. Once he is made aware of the facts, I'm sure that Sir Stuart Peach will be glad to divert some funding from the MOD to beef-up the resilience of the system.
I mean, defence funding is always deployed in the most rational a cost-effective manner, after an objective analysis of the most important and most likely threats. Anyone can see that.
Protection agreements are a thing, at least at system owner/operator level. So there may be an agreement between nominal competitors to reserve some capacity on systems in a mutual protection deal.. Which can get complicated if systems have widely different capacity, and tax/revenue recognition. And then even more complicated when customers call their account directors and scream they're down. Correct answer is to check if customer ordered a protected service, or not. If not, say it'll be 3-6wks and would they like to buy protection?
But luckily with RealNetworks, a wavelength is usually a wavelength and generally compatible across systems. Like you say, IP is a whole other bag'o'nails. And smart network architects understand it's generally a whole lot simpler to swing a wavelength than 'route around the problem'.
My guess is that there's a bit of a question mark about how we can defend ourselves against submarines. We haven't had any maritime patrol aircraft since 2010 (and that was a Labour government decision). We depend on our NATO aliies, most of them in the EU. Dodgy project management is a part of the issue.
Never mind the cables, what happens if ships start getting sunk in a war? But I might just be remembering the stories of my parents, of times when we were struggling to feed ourselves and there was food rationing. But it's the internet that is sexy today.
Is that the Royal Navy will be down to something like 30 combatant vessels in 5 years or so. That is not counting the nuclear missile subs that avoid combat unless forced upon them, or those river-class patrol boats with out autocannon onboard that are mostly useful for scaring away foreign fishing boats.
That's not a great look for an island nation of 60 million people that can't grow enough food to feed itself or produce enough energy with its own resources to keep the lights on.
Which Service, Senior or otherwise and other worldly, provides UKGBNI Government Programming Lead to thwart and defeat any and all State and Non-State Enemies fully engaged in these sort of shenanigans ...... https://www.rt.com/usa/413218-us-army-cyber-attack-units/?
The Royal Navy, Royal Air Force or the British Army? Or none of those usual suspects because their limited intelligence automatically disqualifies them? Is it a hybrid Joint Forces Command with Players Rooted in the Ministry of Defence and thus unfortunately dependent upon government funding to deliver the goods for success whenever clearly both the private and pirate sectors are not so confined and restrained and limited in field performance?
And did you spot the deliberate mistake in the shared text of the Speech by General Sir Chris Deverell KCB MBE ADC Gen, Commander of Joint Forces Command delivered on: 10 October 2017 (Original script, may differ from delivered version) ....
Whilst physical attributes such as firepower, mobility and protection continue to be important, information is becoming less of an enabling function, and more the decisive battleground, especially in an era of constant competition in which the boundaries between peace and war have become blurred...... for as we know, less is more.
Will anyone know whenever jHub is stood up and fully operational in conflicted and contested fields and ..... well, non spectacularly fabulously effective and way out in front with Leading AI would be a right spooky result, methinks, which others would be hard pressed to replicate and emulate?
And that question to General Sir Chris Deverell KCB MBE ADC Gen, Commander of Joint Forces Command c/o JFC.MOD
No, it couldn't.
That isn't how the Internet works.
The Internet was designed to have MULTIPLE hubs destroyed before there is a loss of services. It was designed to survive a nuclear war. Just cutting the trans Atlantic cables would do nothing to our access or communications. Nothing.
This either shows how incredibly ignorant our leadership is or demonstrates how much they are willing to lie in order to demonize Russia.
Probably both.
Who was it that once said the best way of distracting a population from problems at home was to start a foreign war. In order to do this you first have to talk up an evil enemy that only you can protect the people from. .... Walter Bishop
Easily enough done in times with vast spaces filled with ignorance and lack of information, Walter Bishop, but impossible to do without one being personally identified as a warmonger worthy of both state special forces or non state terrorist attention whenever more intelligent souls are presenting different news and clearer views.
A life in the shadows as a dead man walking with expensive and dodgy close protection/mercenary soldiers of fortune, who may or may not remain future wedded to their task, is just the start of that particularly peculiar moronic journey of bad choice.
Just ask ex PM TB about the veracity of that observation and reality.
Stupid is as stupid does, and different times and other spaces don't change the result and the price to be paid.
Some of us are not so old that our memories are affected, but in 2008 there were 7(?) submarine cables cut - all very mysteriously. Even El Reg covered this: Egypt offline for weekend after Med seabed cables cut
But the good Air Marshall seems to be begging for more money. Seriously, Russia has very little capacity to project power, or to act at a distance - Syria is the furthermost extent of its influence.
It is worth noting that Qazaqstan is Russia's largest neighbour with a large ethnic Russian minority, and Russia is unable to protect that minority or exert any influence over the ruling elite. So, how much of a threat is Russia?
Yep, Russia could create a great deal of havoc if they cut undersea cables. Also, if they destroyed the chunnel. Even more if they nuked Parliament. There are a lot of problems Russia, and many other countries, could cause if they wanted to commit an act that was tantamount to a declaration of war.
They won't cut the cables for the same reason they won't nuke Parliament; they don't really want to die in a nuclear holocaust, which would be a distinct possibility when the situation escalated through acts of retaliation.
Some Middle East countries might be a different story, though.
As I understand it, the Internet is designed to withstand damaged cables, and simply reroutes the traffic. Unless they can cut them ALL, I can't see it making a lot of difference. It's worth noting that cables fail for many reasons, and they are simply repaired by a specialised cable repair ship.
It is also worth noting that at this time of the year, defence spending is reviewed, and I suspect this has more to do with the defence industry worrying about further cuts! A good scare story often appears at this time of the year, and apart from the entertainment they give are best ignored.
The 'threat' was originally invented by a right-wing 'think tank' called "The Policy Exchange" and seems to have been got up by a conservative MP whose name I have forgotten. He seems to be non-technical and has an MBA which according to his profile is his only qualification. I imagine the think tank is reflecting the industrial sector of the UK's military-industrial complex, with the General representing the military bit.
As threats go, this one is about as convincing as a nine-bob note!
Rather than some kind of high-tech interference, the main fear is that the Russians will simply drop anchor over a cable site and drag it through in order to sever the cable – as happened accidentally off the coast of Jersey last year thanks to the careless crew of an Italian-flagged gas tanker.Should not then Mr Peach, rather than towards the Russians who, even if they are dastardly, seem to have other fish to fry, direct his efforts towards preventing those inadvertent Italians from doing something which plunges the country into irreparable darkness, as we all recall happened last year ?...
Henri
This has been a known risk since the first cable was laid. As pointed out, a civilian accident is the most like;y source of interruption. However, acknowledging that contingency plans exist won't get increased funding. The Russians are probably trying to see if there is a rupture or weak spot emitting electromagnetic signals. Or maybe the Russians have developed a way to penetrate the insulation to either intercept or interrupt messages. In any case, it is not a threat that would be diminished by a whole new fleet of ships and planes. It would make defense contractors wealthier though.
I can’t for the life of me come up with a single reason that Russia or China would engage in a direct war with the U.K. The only way they’d bother is if they somehow managed to completely cripple the US armed forces while still retaining their own operational capabilities.
Sure, the cables are at risk. So what? Those are public wires. Every nation of consequence has communications satellites in orbit. I hardly think that the U.K. is actually using cables as opposed to sat communications with your armies.
I guess cutting the cable would me GCHQ and the NSA couldn’t see what pr0n video you are watching but that’s about it.
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