Russia Escalating Hybrid Warfare

APN misses an important point.

There is nothing in particular wrong with Anders Puck Nielsen’s analysis of Russia’s escalating hybrid warfare, but he did miss one important point on situational awareness. Not knowing in great detail what is happening at sea IS normal, but that’s NOT the case with undersea cables.

The last time I had to doctor stuff in a cable landing was just before the turn of the century. Telco equipment in those years was still TDM (time domain multiplexing) and it was normal for facilities to have a shared sense of time. The Guam landing was unique in that this was not the case, it was every device for itself. This had to do with the multifaceted nature of the services landing, the island was “Tail End Charlie” for a variety of networks on a couple continents, and there was never going to be a way to keep it all together. Knowing when things happen down to submillisecond time is the norm for telco gear.

Undersea cables are fiber optic and they’ve got regeneration devices at regular distances along their length. I’m never had cause to dig into the details, but when you run buried fiber and you’ve got a break somewhere in a run of dozens of miles, you pull out your Optical Time Domain Reflectometer. This device puts light on the fiber, measures the round trip time, and that tells you were to look for the break. An OTDR used to be an expensive, specialized piece of equipment, but in the early 2000s it became normal for matchbox sized single mode (long distance) fiber SFPs in network switches to have their own internal OTDR function. I am certain those regeneration devices include OTDR functions. At a minimum an undersea cable break can be localized to the space between a pair of regen devices and there’s a very good chance they can tell to within a few meters where the problem is.

So when an undersea cable breaks you know where and when it happens, and the Baltic isn’t a large body of water. It would not be all that difficult to get satellite imagery or dispatch a plane.

Bonus: The 1929 Grand Banks Earthquake and the subsequent turbidity flows taking out undersea cables is how we first learned of undersea landslides. Not directly related to the problem at hand, but it’s an interesting read for the last day of the year.