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Ships remain anchored in the Strait of Hormuz near Larak Island, Iran. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)
By Tim Lister, CNN
(CNN) — The United States, Australia and the United Kingdom have taken a big step towards tackling growing threats to undersea pipelines and cables, which carry huge amounts of energy and data around the world.
The three governments are planning to develop new unmanned undersea vehicles as part of their trilateral AUKUS defense pact.
The agreement was announced at a meeting of the three countries’ defense ministers in Singapore, with deliveries due next year.
Western governments see a growing risk of Russian and Chinese sabotage of undersea cables and are also concerned that Iran may seek to exploit the many data networks running through the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf.
The “seabed is a battlefield” said Australia’s Defence Minister, Richard Marles, in Singapore, calling for tougher action against so-called shadow-fleet vessels.
US President Donald Trump has been severely critical of European allies for spending too little on defense and not helping restore freedom of navigation in the Gulf. But the US has continued to work with governments in Europe and Asia on new defense technologies, especially drones.
The programme will improve the three nations’ reconnaissance and strike capabilities, “and bolster superiority in anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare,” as well as mine countermeasures, AUKUS said.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the vehicles would be highly adaptable and “support undersea operations and maintain our collective advantage in the maritime domain.”
The new AUKUS project will sharpen all three countries’ ability to respond to threats, including those targeting underwater cables and pipelines, through a range of “cutting edge sensors and weapons systems for undersea drones,” UK Defence Secretary John Healey said.
Marles said undersea internet cables – “the arteries of modern civilization” – were being cut at an unprecedented rate, with island nations like Australia acutely vulnerable.
“Over the past 18 months, we have witnessed a series of attacks against subsea critical infrastructure at a scale and frequency that is historically unprecedented,” he said.
The UK government has also highlighted the vulnerability of the world’s digital highways.
“Every international payment, every cross-border trade executed in milliseconds, every flow of data between businesses here in the UK and markets overseas – all travel along the seabed,” Telecoms Minister Liz Lloyd said Friday.
A vulnerable network
Around 570 cables (plus a further 80 planned) carry between 95% and 99% of the world’s intercontinental telecommunications data. Fiber cables can carry terabits per second; satellites handle far less.
Networks of green energy cables carrying electricity are also starting to sprawl across the world’s seabeds.
Last month, the UK said it had tracked three Russian submarines covertly surveying undersea cables in the north Atlantic.
Healey warned Russian President Vladimir Putin: “We see your activity over our cables and pipelines. And you should know that any attempt to damage them will not be tolerated and will have serious consequences.”
A UK parliamentary inquiry warned last year that UK infrastructure might be targeted in a crisis, adding it was “not confident that the UK could prevent such attacks or recover within an acceptable time period.”
The UK Navy is already exploring the creation of a hybrid force that incorporates the widespread use of underwater drones to combat Russian threats in the Atlantic.
Russia’s Main Directorate of Deep Sea Research has developed specialist submarines for such surveillance missions, according to previous CNN reporting.
CNN has previously reported concerns among European intelligence agencies about sabotage and espionage activities by Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers.
Since the full Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there have been several incidents in the Baltic Sea involving damage to gas pipelines and internet cables.
The advent of huge AI data centers around the world has heightened the importance of the networks of undersea cables.
Several of these centers are being developed in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. They require physical security and ways to deliver vast volumes of digital services to customers outside the region via an array of undersea fibreoptic cables.
The Gulf conflict has disrupted plans by US tech giant Meta and its partners to develop the 2Africa Pearls project in the Gulf, an extension of a 45,000-kilometer subsea cable system.
About half-a-dozen major submarine cables run beneath the Strait of Hormuz, carrying a huge volume of global internet traffic for e-commerce, cloud services, banking and communications.
Iranian state media has highlighted the vulnerability of this corridor, with the semi-official Tasnim news agency recently publishing a map of the undersea cables passing through the Strait of Hormuz and describing them as highly vulnerable.
All fiber-optic cables passing through the Strait of Hormuz should be subject to supervision permits and sovereign tolls, wrote the semi-official Iranian outlet, Khabar Online, on Saturday.
Nearly all submarine cables pass through the Red Sea, carrying the vast majority of data traffic between Europe, Asia, and Africa.
As in the Strait of Hormuz, disruption there, whether to shipping or seabed cables or both, would have rapid and widespread economic consequences.
The-CNN-Wire
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