The World’s Digital Backbone Needs Defending
Trillions of dollars pass through undersea fiber-optic cables every day. More must be done to protect them.
Vital artery.
Photographer: Boris Horvat/AFP
Ever since the US Navy slashed telegraph links between Spain and Cuba during the Spanish-American War, countries have appreciated the strategic value of undersea cables. Today, submerged fiber-optic lines no thicker than garden hoses have become more critical to digital society — and face greater threats — than ever before. The US and its partners should make a more forceful effort to defend them.
Nearly 900,000 miles of commercially owned cables now crisscross the world’s oceans. They, not satellites, provide the globe’s digital backbone, carrying 99% of transoceanic digital communications and enabling trillions of dollars in financial transactions daily. With the explosion in cloud computing and e-commerce, more data — and more sensitive data — now travels along this underwater network; bandwidth nearly doubled from 2020 to 2022.