To Protect Undersea Cables in the Middle East, US Needs a New Hub

Undersea fiber-optic cables serve as not only the economic and communications backbone of much of the civilian world, but for military operations as well.

And while recent incidents in which cables have been cut — accidentally or not — have mostly been confined to European and Asian waters, threats to undersea cables will inevitably expand to the Middle East, too — urgently requiring more US action to protect them.

Undersea cables undergird the global commerce system, and are responsible for transmitting about 97 percent of global data traffic and roughly $10 trillion in international financial transactions daily, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The U.S. military is heavily dependent on those links, a faster and cheaper data-transfer medium than satellites. Undersea cables comprise the vast majority of U.S. military strategic communications. Though the military has built redundancy into its data networks, even one cable being cut causes vital military communications to become less effective and reliable.

US dependency on undersea cables is not lost on American adversaries, who are targeting them with troubling ease. Many undersea cables are positioned at a relatively shallow depth of less than 400 meters, and their locations are publicly available. For an example of the concern, Russia’s Yantar — ostensibly a research ship — perennially loiters near transatlantic cables, and news reports have said it carries submersibles capable of severing them.

As with elsewhere globally, threats to the Middle East’s subsea cables are growing and require greater US attention. Yemen’s Houthi terrorists could sever undersea cables in surrounding waters, including the shallow Red Sea. Already, the Houthis possess unmanned undersea vessels (UUVs) potentially able to sabotage undersea cables, particularly if abetted by Chinese, Iranian, or Russian technology transfers. Additionally, Russian and Chinese ships responsible for cable cuts elsewhere regularly transit the region’s waterways.

Cable cuts in the Middle East would have severe consequences. Just 16 undersea cables transversing the region’s waterways account for roughly 90 percent of Europe-Asia telecommunications and a significant percentage of U.S. military communications traffic.

Fortunately, unlike parallel threats in Europe — leading the European Union to recently announce a $1 billion initiative to fortify undersea cables — the United States and its partners can detect and counter threats to undersea cables at a fraction of that cost in the Middle East.

The US Navy has already spent years enhancing regional maritime domain awareness on the surface. However, threats to undersea cables represent a new opportunity for expanded partnerships, with Gulf countries heavily dependent on high-bandwidth undersea cables for economic and military activity.

The US, with its regional partners, should establish a new maritime-centric common operating picture (COP) effort modeled after the aerial-centric COP already formed at US Central Command’s Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

While there are other joint maritime projects in the region, notably including the multi-national Combined Maritime Forces’s Combined Enterprise Regional Information Exchange and its Joint Information Center, those are not structured to aggregate and disperse information in real time. Critically, key regional partners like the United Arab Emirates have left the CMF architecture, while others, like Israel, never joined it.

The United States and its partners need a regional maritime operations center that fuses its existing initiatives in order to operationalize a maritime, including subsea, COP. The new Middle East subsea threat monitoring hub should mirror NATO’s Maritime Centre for Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure, established in February 2024 to boost information-sharing to shore up undersea blind spots, enhance deterrence and cable defense, and emphasize joint technological innovation.

To complement the hub’s surveillance operations, the Pentagon should leverage industry advances and work with US partners to deploy unmanned platforms capable of monitoring surface and subsea activity near undersea cables. In addition to intelligence collection, the United States should also publicly deploy platforms capable of finding and neutralizing UUVs and sea mines used to sabotage vital cables.

These platforms should be capable of forensically recording all activity near undersea cables and generating real-time notification of subsea threats to the integrated operations center. Deploying these platforms can help detect and prevent threats and deny adversaries their cherished plausible deniability.

Washington and its partners also must publicize such an effort as widely as possible, as that too would help deter bad actors from sabotaging cable operations.

Expanding the maritime sensor network is vital for the United States and its partners — including those not currently in the CMF — to exchange key data about subsea threats rapidly and reliably.

By creating a centralized monitoring hub and vastly improving detection capabilities, the United States can advance central interests in the Middle East and signal to its adversaries that it is working to protect undersea cables more comprehensively than adversaries are working to sabotage them.