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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

Would European nations having big fleets of submarines patrolling the waters reduce the chances of such sabotages?

Do you know how long these cables are? How many subs do you think you would need? Actually, surface ships would probably be more effective, but you would still need infeasible numbers of them.

good thinking, which doesn't refrain the cops to driving rounds every 5 minutes in every pedestrian zones of the city

Good thinking, which doesn't make the size of the Baltic Sea comparable to the size of a city, nor the costs of a fleet of cars with a single driver comparable to the costs of a fleet of ships with full crews.

It's tempting to say "if it's such a problem why don't they just monitor better?", but the ocean is vast.

i don't know about your city, but doesn't happen in any in the uk.

lucky you, i have read the UK police is mostly well behaved

and so, where are you? and how many cops does your city have?

Vienna, Austria, cops everywhere

Maybe it's because Vienna's streets are full of "doctors" and "engineers".

yay, a racist reply! i dunno come to check by yourself whether we are overrun by refugees

I would think offering rewards for information could be a good deterrent.

It takes a decent amount of coordination, equipment, and crew to pull off these missions.

I imagine many people on these ships aren’t getting paid that great.

By offering levels of rewards for information about what organizations are being used to funnel money and equipment into this, it might help bring some level of prosecution, as well as make the missions more difficult to operate as there will be a lot less trust.

> It takes a decent amount of coordination, equipment, and crew to pull off these missions.

They're dragging anchors on the marine floor; all coordination, equipment and crew are already there as a medium-sized fishing vessel is perfectly sufficient for this job.

Submarines aren't really well suited for this. You want something that can search and monitor over a wide area, and then the ability to intercept and potentially search/seize a suspicious vessel. The primary attribute of submarines is stealth, which is not relevant here.

What you want is a combination of maritime patrol aircraft and offshore patrol craft. Maritime patrol aircraft (helicopter, fixed wing aircraft, UAVs) are equipped with surface search radar and other sensors that enable them to monitor a wide area. The patrol craft are also fitted with radars and sensors, and can also move to intercept a suspicious ship. A helicopter could also potentially be used for intercept

and look for what? ships with lines out? then do what? they already track ships.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...

Many ships intentionally turn off AIS, partially because there is barely any enforcement.

https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/learning-more-a...

Yep that is exactly what I meant, thanks for providing a background source.

I refuse to believe that AIS is the only way ships are being tracked. I think it's probably more likely that nobody is using their military intelligence to track fishing boats.

There's over 100k merchant sea vessels, and that does not include ships that nominally aren't supposed to be on high seas either. It's simply infeasible to do so, unless you're stacking high definition cameras with high precision accuracy control onto Starlink satellites.

Balloons? You only need to track sea cables. I am not sure how it would be helpful though. You could drag an anchor for miles behind a ship.

Nope. Also you don't want one of these anchors be anywhere near a submarine.

We cannot prevent it, we can only detect it and (try to) identify who did it. The planet (some special interest areas) are constantly being monitored (satellites, surveillance drones) and when large ships are not being 'naughty' (switch of transponders) it's relatively easy to put two and two together.

As a side-note, Russia's playbook it to cause small and frequent sabotage(s). Small enough to not cause massive retaliation (i.e. it forces someone to destroy their railroad infra by causing thousands of derailments within one hour), and frequent enough to cause actual damage.

Basically Russia's tactic is to spread FUD, but in the real world.

Small sabotage attempts at water towers, power plants etc. Nothing actually happens but it gets in the news and people think something COULD have happened.

It keeps people stressed a bit all the time and they start wanting things to go back to "normal" at any cost - even by letting Russia keep the bits of Ukraine they assaulted.

> Nothing actually happens but it gets in the news and people think something COULD have happened.

Most likely, they prop it as a huge win domestically, so that the public keeps thinking they are winning and become easier to placate.

I wonder if any EU nation has put together a maritime warning system based on multiple inputs like transponder signals and satellite/UAV imagery. Except for imagery interpretation it wouldn’t even need AI, just check for anomalies like a ship off course or turning off its transponder.

>We cannot prevent it

Then why don't these sabotages happen in US waters if it's so easy to get away with it?

Because the US has a pretty sizable naval fleet of the US Navy plus US Coast Guard, extensive surveillance capabilities due to the "war on drugs", the jurisdiction and responsibilities are relatively clear, and outside of the 12-mile zone the cables simply are too deep to be affected by anchor dragging.

In contrast, the North and Baltic sea are a hodgepodge of individual nations' 12-mile zones, the Baltic Sea operates under an entirely different set of agreements that guarantee free passage, and it's not really deep so submarine infrastructure like cables can be hit by anything from anchors to divers with explosives.

All of the well documented cases of the past few years have occured in international waters.

Because Russia is getting the US on their side at the moment, sabotaging their stuff would damage that relationship. Russia and the US are not enemies at the moment.

If Russia and the United States are no longer enemies, then who is their enemies?

Not paying attention? Every European country except Hungary and Serbia, for starters.

It was even easier to buy the US government.

If you want to piss someone off do you go for the black belt dude carrying a shotgun or (for the same amount of damage) a 5yo kid?

So then why am I wrong when I suggest if EU's navies were stronger then sabotages would go down?

Because the EU has a very different reaction pattern and overall resources. It was never a question about downing ships that are sabotaging cables.

Neither the EU countries, nor the US have enough ships to patrol or escort every civilian ship that happens to parse over an undersea cable.

Assume that the Russian shadow fleet starts targetting US cables. What would, could, the US do? The US government could easily retaliate by simply opening the US weapons depos to the Ukrainians. Target US infrastructure and Ukraine gets whatever it wants. The EU can't really do something similar.

Technically you're not wrong, if the EU navies where large enough, they could just escort every single civilian ship, but that's not realistic.

its not about hard power necessarily, but soft power. If the EU united politically and made these harassment attacks consequential then they would stop.

E.g. perhaps something along the lines of prison for captains who were 'derelict in duty', rewards to crews who grass and seizing ships that, by dragging anchors 'by accident', have proven themselves unseaworthy etc.

I believe something like this will happen, sooner or later. For now, it's not easily to organize as the crew can always use the excuse "oh, this was unintentional" but charging them with the cost of repair plus additional penalty could be a good starting point.

> but charging them with the cost of repair plus additional penalty could be a good starting point.

Good luck enforcing that. The "shadow fleet" ships all operate under flags of convenience and ownership is hidden behind layers upon layers of shell companies.

If the fines and damages are not paid then perhaps the ship and its cargo are liquidated?

The problem is, the oil tankers are single wall, shoddily maintained, probably contaminated with all sorts of nasty stuff and with barely any history records. These things are effectively floating time bombs - assuming you can find a buyer for the seized cargo given the lack of paperwork in the first place, you need to sell the ship for scrap because it's nowhere near seaworthy (remember: single wall, no Western insurer will handle that), and that costs a loooot of money if you are a Western country and can't just haul it off to Alang [1] or whatever place and let others deal with the fallout.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-56196069

No. They just need to capture or sink one caught pulling cables up.

This is only effective because there are no real consequences for it.

I'm still praying for the future of trained whale-on-whale submarine cable offense/defense action.

Dolphins maybe

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_marine_mammal

I'm aware of the dolphins. It's become an in-joke among friends that the Crimean invasion started to get the military dolphins back for the cable attacks.

However, dolphins don't have as much depth capacity as other whales. I'd choose sperm whales for this, if they were trainable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiology_of_underwater_divin...

How would that work. You're not going to sink the ship without an environmental disaster.

Maybe, but the Gulf of Finland alone (where the incidents with the Eagle 2 occurred) is 30.000 square kilometers; the amount of ships (or planes etc) and coverage you need and the associated cost is huge.

I mean putting an officer / escort on board of each ship to make sure they're not doing anything weird would be an option, but I'm fairly sure that's against international law or anything. The issue is also that these are international waters - the Eagle went right through a narrow corridor of international waters - where it's a bit of the wild west.

There's a long-standing requirement at major ports that a local harbor pilot be on board to guide ships on their way in or out of a harbor. Requiring an observer on board when transiting areas with a concentration of critical underwater infrastructure seems at least conceptually similar -- though the logistics of making it happen would be very different.

No, because a submarine is pretty useless against an excavator.

excavators don't typically operate in international waters though...

I think this was intended as snark about how one of the recent Baltic submarine cable outages was eventually attributed to on-shore damage from an excavator.

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