FEATURE TO SECURE UNDERSEA CABLES, TAKE LESSONS FROM THE BRITISH EMPIRE’S ALL-RED LINE BY CAPTAIN DOUGLAS R. BURNETT, U.S. NAVY (RETIRED), AND KRISTIN BERDAN
[This article is reprinted with the permission of the U.S. Naval Institute and originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Proceedings. The article is copyrighted and may be reproduced only with the express written permission of the U.S. Naval Institute.]
I
n the late 19th century, Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History: 1660–1783 made a case for the importance of naval power, including a strong merchant marine to shape world events and enable free trade. His arguments have stood the test of time, in part because he also considered the role of technology. For example, he wrote that the then-new technology of submarine telegraph cables altered strategy, at least with respect to blockade.1 As Brent Sadler notes in his insightful book U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century, Mahan’s work is especially relevant to modern supply chains, distributed manufacturing, and instantaneous global communications via undersea cables.2 Fiber-optic submarine cables, like the previous centuries’ merchant ships plying sea lines of communication, are direct international communication links. Through them, a vast amount of video, voice traffic, and data flows around
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the globe 24/7. Financial services, news organizations, distributed manufacturing, and international command and control require these cables to function well. There are currently more than 500 garden-hose-diameter international cables touching 1,636 cable landing stations (current or planned)—the arteries of modern media, social, diplomatic, commercial, and military communications.3 These undersea cables route streams of data-to-data centers on land, mainly operated by large technology platform companies such as Microsoft (Azure), Google (GCP), Amazon (AWS), Meta (Facebook), and Tencent (China). The “cloud” is indeed beneath the sea.4 In 2022, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft used 71 percent of all used international internet capacity.5 Each operates its own data centers to process and store content. To deliver that content, they must ensure their data centers are well connected to each other and to other networks and interconnection locations. The demand for international bandwidth (roughly doubling every two years) drives the development of data centers and undersea cable systems.6 This global infrastructure consists of several layers: cloud regions and data centers, the network of cables