Yoselina Guevara López
This Monday, March 4, four submarine cables in the Red Sea that supply internet and telecommunications around the world were allegedly cut by Yemen’s Houthi militias. The cables in question are “AAE-1 (connects Asia-Africa-Europe)”, “Seacom (connects South Africa-Kenya-Tanzania-Mozambique-France-India)”, “EIG (connects Europe-India)” and “TGN (connects the United States with Japan)”. The damage is generally not considered critical because other data transmission devices were not affected, so there was no fatal disruption of communications, but experts point out that a new attack could seriously compromise telecommunications worldwide. Around 17% of Internet traffic is connected through the Red Sea, and at least 16 of these devices cross the sea in the direction of Egypt.
The cutting of submarine cables in the Red Sea is only the latest in a series of actions against underwater infrastructures that is growing as different war conflicts develop in different regions of the world. In addition to the notorious case of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, cables have been cut twice in the icy seas of the Arctic Circle. In mid-November 2021, some 4 kilometers of a submarine cable near the Svalbard Islands mysteriously disappeared, and a few months later, in early January 2022, one of the two data transmission cables connecting Svalbard to Norway was cut.
Communications and geopolitics
The world geopolitical chessboard also moves on the basis of communication, on the narratives that during conflicts place international relations in terms of wars to locate who is right, and therefore can come to dehumanize whoever is profiled as the enemy. In this sense, the manipulation of public opinion, which can be exercised through the mass media and one-way communication, can play a role that can be decisive in fostering hatred, intolerance and violence.
In previous years, for example, with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the international community’s attention was diverted away from what was happening in Palestine. It is interesting to note, for example, that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict occupied the front pages of the Western media for almost two years, providing an excellent opportunity for the Israeli government to silence the bombings, violence, and intimidation that the Palestinians have suffered for years in the Israeli-occupied territories without attracting the attention of Western public opinion.
But the latter is only one small aspect in the universe of manipulation from which public opinion can be susceptibly attacked. Hence the Red Sea is obviously a neuralgic point, not only because of the passage of vital commercial lines, but also because on its seabed there are important communication cables for worldwide data traffic. In other words, a communication silence could have unimaginable consequences for humanity in all areas.
Seabed warfare
The emergence of the possibility of attacking seabed infrastructures thanks to the new tools made available by technological advances has brought with it the need to defend them. In other words, what we can call “seabed warfare” is developing, which is not yet fully visible to the whole world. Existing military doctrine does not explicitly speak of a univocal definition of seabed warfare and in fact the underwater world has not yet been defined as a territory in which to exercise dominion in itself, but only as a “dimension”. But by combining the fields of energy, communication and economy, which use the seabed as a transit route, we can show that the seabed becomes a territory that would fall within the dispute for security and defense. The underwater world, due to its importance, would definitely enter into the classification of the domains currently considered by the military world: sea, air, land, space and cybernetic.
However, it must be kept in mind that in order to control and act in a domain, a military force must have complete situational awareness of it and possess the ability to act promptly within it. The ability of a maritime force to act from and in the depths of an ocean is currently very limited, if not non-existent for some naval forces. There is no doubt that we still have much to study, understand and reflect on in this convulsed global geopolitical chessboard.
Yoselina Guevara López: Venezuelan social communicator, political analyst, columnist in different international media, whose work has been translated into English, Italian, Greek and Swedish. Winner of the Simon Bolivar 2022 National Journalism Award (Venezuela), special mention Opinion; Anibal Nazoa 2021 National Journalism Award (Venezuela); I Comandante Feliciano 2022 Historical Memory Contest (El Salvador) Third place. X: @lopez_yoselina
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