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The underwater cables that play a vital role supporting the international digital economy are increasingly vulnerable to attack from low-cost drones, Chinese military researchers have warned.
They said the seabed had long been viewed as a strategic “blind spot” due to the difficulty of exploration and the high cost of controlling it, but was becoming a “new arena for great power rivalry”.
“The barrier to entry for undersea warfare is lowering,” Shi Guanglei and Shi Haiming from the National Defence University wrote in Science and Technology Daily, pointing to the Aukus pact between Australia, Britain and the United States as a key driver of this change.
“In the past, underwater operations relied heavily on crewed submarines, which were expensive and posed significant risks to personnel, making it difficult for small and medium countries to conduct underwater military activities.”
They added that small and medium-sized unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) were “low-cost, easy to deploy in batches and pose no risk of casualties, allowing countries to seize control of the seabed”.
The article said undersea cables carried 99 per cent of intercontinental data traffic and played a key role in supporting online services and daily cross-border financial transactions widely estimated to be worth US$10 trillion.
It warned that underwater pipelines and optical cables had become an “easy target”, citing incidents such as the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines that transported natural gas from Russia to Germany or the disruption caused to internet services after cables in the Red Sea were cut last year.
Most of the world’s transcontinental internet traffic travels along a 1.7 million-km (1 million-mile) network of fibre-optic cables. Every year, around 150 to 200 subsea cable faults occur around the world.
The International Cable Protection Committee, a non-profit organisation based in Britain, said that while state-sponsored sabotage remained a risk, accidental damage was “the predominant cause of damage to submarine cables”.

“Anecdotally we believe that there have not been verified incidents of state-sponsored sabotage since World War II,” according to its website.
The Chinese researchers said the Aukus alliance’s agreement in May to develop UUVs to protect underwater infrastructure and carry out surveillance, reconnaissance and anti-submarine operations “paves the way for future cross-domain joint operations”.
“Under the guise of ‘protecting submarine cables’ to advance equipment development, Aukus is building a routine seabed monitoring network through uncrewed equipment to gain global underwater situational awareness and seek military strategic advantages in the deep sea,” they said.
They also said the evolution of UUVs from auxiliary reconnaissance tools into autonomous combat equipment “fundamentally rewrites the logic of underwater warfare”.
Advanced AI would also allow the next generation of underwater drones to operate autonomously for weeks without constantly receiving instructions and sending data – reducing the chances of detection, the article added.
The researchers also envisioned a future of “undersea wolf packs” formed by dozens or hundreds of UUVs that could patrol cable infrastructure but also carry out searches or ambushes.
These could also link up with underwater sensors, as well as uncrewed vessels on the surface and in the air to develop new forms of maritime warfare.


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Cables that support US$10 trillion in daily cross-border transactions could be increasingly vulnerable to attack from uncrewed vessels


Cables that support US$10 trillion in daily cross-border transactions could be increasingly vulnerable to attack from uncrewed vessels.


PLA scientists say submarine cables carrying 99% of global data could be ‘easy target’

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Cables that support US$10 trillion in daily cross-border transactions could be increasingly vulnerable to attack from uncrewed vessels

Cables that support US$10 trillion in daily cross-border transactions could be increasingly vulnerable to attack from uncrewed vessels