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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

This, I feel, is along the same lines as CIA suddenly preferring the lab leak argument as soon as the admin changed [0]. Clearly the cable breaks are not accidents when previously there weren't any for years and now in the last year we've had so many that I've lost count. I think we're now up to six or seven times cables have been broken with an anchor?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42823385

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> Clearly the cable breaks are not accidents when previously there weren't any for years and now in the last year we've had so many that I've lost count.

Has there really been no other accidents like these? It feels like this is something that been happening for a long time, but not until recently the news started reporting on it.

I seem to remember some event back in 2022 already, around Bornholm I think. I'm sure there are more as well, damaged communication lines seems to happen all the time.

There have been accidents like this, but they were few and far between. There have not been this many accidents in such a short timespan, limited to such a small geographical area. There have been ships that have lost their anchors doing this, they've been shown to drag their anchors over the cables multiple times. These are deliberate actions.

> These are deliberate actions.

Have any of them actually been confirmed to be deliberate actions, or is this your hypothesis? Last time I checked on older incidents, they seem to all have been proper accidents, but I haven't checked on the last ones.

> There have not been this many accidents in such a short timespan, limited to such a small geographical area.

Yeah, ~7 events in the last 12 months (or what it is) does sound like a lot. I'm having a hard time finding some credible source listing all incidents though, so we could compare year-by-year, because I'm sure the news also reports a lot more about it, than before.

Have we gotten captains to confess as to why they dragged the anchor at specific times over the cables? No. We do have records showing that the ships have sailed across the cables multiple times, slowing down every time they have passed them.

I think it happens a lot more often than you think, and current news reporting also skews the perspective one get.

Linked from another comment: https://blog.telegeography.com/what-happens-when-submarine-c...

> Cable faults are common. On average, there are over 100 each year. [...] Unintentional damage from fishing vessels and ships dragging anchors account for two-thirds of all cable faults.

100 each year would be one every three days, but of course you don't read about all them in the news.

I'm not saying none of the cable breakages are sabotage, I/we don't know. As far as we know, I don't think we have any cases (with or without confession) where we can be 100% it's intentional, at least yet.

100 cable "faults", but only 2/3-rd are from ships. And, then, how many of those have been in the Baltic Sea in prior years? 66 incidents per year sounds like a lot, but there are so many cables and shipping lanes all over the world.

Read the linked page, and its infographic. 38% + 25% = 63% ~ "two thirds". There are another 11% caused by "human activity", it's just neither "fishing" (trawler nets) nor "anchorage", but "other", which could even be a keel severing the cable close to shore.

https://blog.telegeography.com/hs-fs/hubfs/2017/submarine-ca...

74% human caused (38% fishing, 25% anchorage, 11% other)

14% environmental (8% natural, 6% abrasion)

12% neither human nor environmental (6% component failure, 6% other)

"Deliberate sabotage and shark bites are exceedingly rare"

I always think back to the Iraq war and "WMD" intelligence that was used to justify two decades of expensive disaster. Publicly released intelligence statements are always at risk of being political. Heck, so are the internal ones; it's always risky putting out a report your boss doesn't like, even if it's true and important and done in the relative safety of being classified.

Some European countries are very aware of the Russian threat. Germany is very much dragging behind on this, possibly due to Russian money.

(also thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair - US "burned" the cover of one of their own spies as retribution for making a politically unacceptable statement)

It was a interesting project though, the attempt to "implant" a democratic state into a culture that has brought us 1.4 billion people unable to form working states and institutions. Still failed.

But why must it fail here, when it worked in germany? Why must it fail in syria, egypt, libya, over and over?

State building in Germany was competently done and the Iraq venture started off by creating a power vacuum by firing basically most competent and entrenched people from their jobs, including the Army.

Change has to come from within. Germany worked because it was a democracy before the war; arguably having the constant threat of the Soviet Union rolling over Germany forced a certain amount of unity on them.

Japan and South Korea ended up as "one and a half party states": peaceful, not a lot of overt oppression, but not exactly diverse democracies either.

I could write an essay on how Iraq failed, but I'm sure others have done a better job out there.

One difference between Iraq and the previous success of West Germany and Japan were that Axis countries occupied by the US were very aware that, if they didn't get on America's side, they were going to be gobbled up by Stalin. Their incentives were aligned to become pro-American in a very quick hurry!

It’s probably less partisan than that, just a realization that ignoring Russia’s misbehavior will not make them stop, and appeasement doesn’t help. And Europe doesn’t need the nat gas any more, and the Baltic is now a NATO lake. The geopolitics has finally aligned for Europe to be more forceful, even as the US is pulling away.

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