Gaps in the Deep: How the Law of the Sea Fails the Undersea Kingdom
Elisabeth Braw, a journalist and the leader of the Atlantic Council’s Threats to the Global Maritime Order initiative, offers a compelling narrative of the growth of what she calls the “Undersea Kingdom”—the vast tangle of global communications and energy infrastructure lying on the seabed—and the parallel growth of threats to that infrastructure from malicious actors. As Braw notes, we all rely heavily on this infrastructure while mostly taking for granted its technological ingenuity, the expense and effort required to maintain it, and its susceptibility to attack.
The story begins with the first transatlantic cable, completed in 1858, through which Queen Victoria sent an inaugural telegraph message to President James Buchanan. Since then, the technology has evolved from slow, low-bandwidth copper wire carrying analog signals—the queen’s message took nearly 18 hours to reach Buchanan—to fiber optics transmitting digital information at the speed of light. Anywhere from 95 to 99 percent of global internet traffic now crosses some of the roughly 1.6 million kilometers of fiber-optic cables lying at the bottom of the sea.
Laying and maintaining undersea cables is no easy task. Cables must traverse difficult terrain, including the ocean’s great trenches, which drop to depths of nearly 9,000 meters, deep-sea mountain ranges, and vast quantities of sharp rocks and thick mud. Specialized cable-laying vessels play out and bury enormous lengths of wire, often on rough seas. Equally specialized repair vessels, with highly trained crews, are summoned to retrieve broken cables with grappling hooks and make sensitive splices and patches on pitching ship decks. Given the substantial costs and risks involved, the undersea cable industry is relatively concentrated, with a small number of specialized firms and consortia doing most of the work, though increasingly massive hyper-scalers, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, have taken much of the work in house.
And internet cables are only part of the Undersea Kingdom. Energy infrastructure, including gas pipelines and power lines, also transect the seabed. These energy transmission links make up a much smaller portion of undersea infrastructure, about 30,000 kilometers overall, although they are no less technologically and logistically challenging to lay and maintain.
Braw ably describes how undersea communications technology developed and how the industry works, but the real strength of her book is in her deeply reported discussion of suspicious cable-cutting incidents over the past five or so years, including ones involving cables serving Norway, the Baltic states, and islands near Taiwan. The geography of these incidents, of course, suggests involvement by Russia and China.
As to the Russian involvement, Braw provides an excellent chapter on the Russian “shadow fleet” ships that fly under false flags, under no flag, and/or without using transponders, in efforts to evade U.S. and international sanctions on oil and other goods to or from Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and Russia itself. Ships in the shadow fleet are sometimes observed hovering suspiciously above key undersea cables and have been implicated in anchor-dragging incidents in which cables have been severely damaged. They have also been observed loitering off the coast of Ireland, a key hub for European communications infrastructure proximate to a country without any substantial navy. Braw describes parallel activity likely connected with China, including from ships such as the New Polar Bear and the Yi Peng 3.
One problem with holding shadow fleet ships accountable for cable damage is whether and how they can be apprehended and whether crew can be detained for questioning. Braw offers a sound discussion of how the law of the sea, embodied in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), limits any individual state’s law enforcement response outside its territorial waters, which under UNCLOS extends up to 12 nautical miles from the coastline. Shadow fleet captains are well aware of this limitation and often remain outside territorial waters, either on the high seas or in an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) that states may designate up to 200 nautical miles from the coastline. On the high seas, the principle of freedom of navigation governs, meaning states cannot engage in ordinary police action. In an EEZ, states enjoy certain exploration and resource rights, but police action is limited. Typically, then, a state’s police or coast guard forces must try to lure a shadow fleet vessel into territorial waters in order to board the ship or detain crew in investigating suspected cable-cutting. Braw provides some compelling blow-by-blow accounts of these cat-and-mouse chases, informed by her interviews of key players in the incidents.
A second obstacle to accountability is the difficulty of distinguishing between deliberate acts of cable sabotage and damage that arises from mere inadvertence, when currents or storms cause an anchor to drag. To the extent that an investigation points to anchor damage—including cases in which snapped-off anchors were recovered from the seabed near broken cables—it is easy for a ship’s crew to claim the damage was accidental. Without a confession or some other smoking gun, the evidence is always circumstantial, but Braw does an excellent job showing that, in the high-profile incidents she covers, the timing, geographic position, length of cable-dragging, depth, and other factors point overwhelmingly to intentional damage, even if a clear link to the Russian or Chinese government cannot be definitively established.
In addition to chapters on the shadow fleets and communications infrastructure, Braw’s book includes a chapter on the Nord Stream pipeline explosion. In many ways this incident, which occurred on Sept. 26, 2022, focused global attention on the fragility of undersea infrastructure. It quickly became evident that the pipeline bringing gas from Russia to Germany and other western European countries had been sabotaged in the Baltic Sea within Denmark and Sweden’s EEZ. Early speculation ran toward Russia as the culprit, sparking fears that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine might spill over into northern Europe. As it turned out, German prosecutors have charged a Ukrainian officer with leading a Ukrainian team in the sabotage to damage Russian interests. This chapter helpfully focuses attention on undersea energy infrastructure, but it feels less complete than the chapters on fiber-optic cable attacks and interrupts the narrative flow without drawing clear connections between the communications and energy networks.
Similarly, later in the book Braw takes a detour to discuss undersea mining for polymetallic nodules, which can include rare earth minerals that are essential to the batteries that power cell phones and other devices. On April 24, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order that aims, among other things, to expedite permits for seabed mining. The polymetallic nodule story involves the Toronto-based firm The Metals Company and its CEO, Gerald Barron, whose sales pitch for nodule mining, as Braw recounts it, seems like something crafted by a team led by Dr. Evil and Bart Simpson for a middle-school science fair judged by corrupt podcast hosts.
Braw argues that this recent executive order is particularly pernicious because it violates UNCLOS’s prohibition on seabed mining outside territorial waters or an EEZ without a special license from the International Seabed Authority, an independent body created under UNCLOS. Braw is correct that the order is inconsistent with UNCLOS, but the order has a valid basis under U.S. domestic law, in the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act of 1980. Signed into law by President Carter, the act authorizes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to issue permits for mining polymetallic nodules in international waters. UNCLOS was adopted in 1982 and, as Braw notes, the United States has never become a party to the convention, even though the United States, not least by virtue of its dominant navy, has been the global enforcer of the law of the sea since World War II. In any event, this chapter also seems a bit underdeveloped and at times orthogonal to the broader narrative of state-sponsored attacks on information and energy infrastructure. The economic and environmental terrain of the Undersea Kingdom probably warrants a separate book.
At the conclusion of Braw’s book, a reader might expect some discussion of policy. Why hasn’t the United States joined UNCLOS? Even if the United States did join UNCLOS, would its provisions regarding protection of undersea cables—which Braw never discusses—provide any meaningful protections, particularly in international waters or in an EEZ? Could the law of piracy, as embedded in UNCLOS but also having a long history in the customary law of the sea, be adapted to cover shadow fleet activities over cable areas, allowing police and military forces greater room for operation outside territorial waters? (Presently, piracy covers only unflagged attacks on ships or land, which probably would not include sabotage of seabed cables.) Braw’s book leads us to the threshold of such questions but doesn’t really ask or try to answer them. Perhaps this is sensible, given Braw’s journalistic expertise, but for many readers, the most challenging aspect of the problems Braw documents is the way in which these nefarious activities fall into interstices of law and policy. Braw’s account highlights the need for a coordinated and comprehensive response that neither UNCLOS nor the law of armed conflict presently supports.
It’s interesting, as well, that Braw raises but never fully explores the question of market concentration and the growing influence of the hyper-scalers. Nearly all of this crucial infrastructure is owned and controlled by a handful of companies with self-interests that might not always coincide with the public interest, not least because there is no significant governance of their deep-sea cable activities, even under UNCLOS. Only when undersea cables come onto shore at landing stations do states, including the United States, engage extensive permitting processes in the interests of economic and national security. The hyper-scalers are building out this private infrastructure intentionally to control not only the internet backbone but also, more ominously, the backbone of the artificial intelligence (AI) technology stack. The Undersea Kingdom that will form the “body” of next-gen AI is increasingly owned with hardly any regulation by Google and Amazon, in addition to being vulnerable to Russian and Chinese attack. What could possibly go wrong?
These limitations, however, do not detract from the journalistic achievement of Braw’s book. She offers a briskly readable and well reported narrative showing why threats to the security of the Undersea Kingdom should concern us all.
