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MPs and peers start inquiry into Russian and Chinese sabotage threats to subsea internet cables
(www.computerweekly.com)
At a basic level, this isn't really a new threat. This kind of gray-zone attack maybe is, where a country is willing to attack the submarine cable infrastructure of a country when it's not actually directly at war with it.
But while it's been a long time since we've had major-power wars, when we did, countries certainly cut submarine cables. I remember reading a recent article from two US Navy people talking about the risks and pointing out that way back when we fought major-power wars against countries with submarine cables, it was standard practice for us to cut them where we could, and so it's a pretty safe bet that in any future major wars, we will also do the same and opponents will do the same to us.
Europe's geography -- lots of peninsulas with shallow seas with large population centers on each side of it -- make it a particularly acute problem: if you think about Fennoscandia, the British Isles, North Africa, Greece and Italy, there's a lot of reasons to want to run submarine cables and pipelines and for those to be particularly accessible. Most other places in the world don't have the same kind of geography, outside of some places like Malaysia.
Advances in hardware have made accessing submarine cables a lot more-accessible. I remember looking up what it'd take to buy an off-the-shelf underwater drone that could plant an explosive on a pipeline from a boat above it. You can go out and drop $20k and you've got a commercial, off-the-shelf underwater drone that can handle the depths of the seas that surround Europe. Like, in 2025, anyone who can afford to buy a new, low-end car can afford the hardware required to plant explosives to take out submarine infrastructure in international waters (and, if they wanted to do so, to do so in a way considerably less traceable than dragging an anchor over the thing). That's not a very high bar.