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Comment by srveale | Hacker News Reader

I know nothing about this topic.

How crazy is it to cover the cables with passive sonar and detect damage threats? How much crazier is it to create a sufficient number of undersea drones that can prevent damage before it happens? Maybe manoeuvre a protective barrier over the predicted impact area if there's a dragging anchor or fishing net? Pick a fight with enemy drones?

I'm increasingly impressed and terrified with air/ground drone capabilities displayed in Ukraine. The sea floor seems like the next logical step. But maybe it's more efficient to detect damage quickly and make repairs easy.

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Global connect (the company that owns and operates most data cables in the Baltic sea) is running tests with tamper detecting cables. They say they will be able to detect a whale at a distance of 80 kilometers. I assume the whale is just used as an example to demonstrate its sensitivity, since whales haven't been implicated in any of the previous cable breaks.

Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/ljusstrale-genom-kablar-k...

I hope researchers get access to some of that data. Would be cool if an unintended side effect of this work ends up benefiting marine wildlife research.

How do we know that the whales have not been implicated without these sensors? Perhaps they will reveal that whales were the issue all along.

The whales already signed an international treaty on this, and it's really unlikely they are going to violate their treaty obligations by destroying fiber optic cables.

Also, you know, whales not having sharp teeth and the ability to chew small breaks into cables that look remarkably like intentionally dragging boat anchors across them and all that.

The idea of a sabotage-whale armed with torpedoes reminds me of the book Starter Villain by John Scalzi. (It's... relatively zany.)

Submerged drone flotillas are probably the next great pursuit for armed forces, especially those lacking a large naval fleet of their own.

Ukrainian surface naval drones have proven to have superiority over naval capital ships in littoral and medium seas (which is what the Mediterranean and the Baltic Seas are like compared to the Black Sea).

Deep water naval drone superiority is probably very close, but ability to hunt, track, and kill ballistic submarines will be critical to undermining US naval dominance. Both China and EU will be heavily invested in this.

If all military naval assets can be neutered by cheap drones, then a sort of mutually assured destruction of sea trade can be somewhat enforced. Maybe.

Wouldn't it be simpler to run dummy detection lines in parallel or through certain tracks to identify negligent activity? Critical cables get hit but it's hard to investigate and take action because the vessels are flagged in the Cook Islands etc. (Lawfare had a recent podcast on this.) It's not bad luck when there is some systematic behavior detected, but that data is hard to collection. Drones are cool but there is a huge area to cover reliably and often stay undetected by the adversary.

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