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How About We Bomb the Undersea Cables?
I’m thinking about Tom Bethell’s comment:
But our military seems to be organized to deal with the Hitler scenario rather than the Islamist threat. Germans took orders, Islamist terrorists are self starters.
And I’m thinking about Peter’s question:
Even if we had a president utterly determined to destroy ISIS — posit, for the sake of argument, that Ted Cruz will take office a year from January — just how would he instruct the Pentagon to go about doing so?
I’m trying to think outside the box a bit. Undersea fiber optic cables carry 99 percent of transoceanic digital communication. The military is accustomed to thinking in terms of protecting them:
Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications, raising concerns among some American military and intelligence officials that the Russians might be planning to attack those lines in times of tension or conflict.
Perhaps we should think about this entirely differently. What would happen if we destroyed the cables?
Published in Islamist Terrorism, Military
I would add that it is imperative to look beyond the proxies (i.e., North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba/Nicaragua, Hizballah, ISIS, etc.) and make their puppet masters pay dearly for their mischief. (Obviously, we are not going to engage the USSR/Russia in all-out war, but we had and still have enough economic clout to do this.) If we fail to do so, then the puppet masters are free to resume their mischief elsewhere.
Glad to hear your dad is much better! Wow – you might have to go back to your blonde days (from your book cover) and wear a punk outfit with a few crosses…..:-)
I wish I could word this briefly, but: Unfortunately the tyrants the world over are superfocused on the Internet as the ultimate source of their undoing. They want to cut it off. Thankfully, they need it and love it too.
It was interesting to me, last summer when I reading about education reform in China, how much of their problems they attribute to the Internet, to its accessibility to children, and how much they would like to control it.
And for parents and guardians everywhere, including China, there is this new intruder into their children’s life that they can’t control. And the kids quickly become addicted to it–they have constant access to their friends. Taking it away suddenly isn’t going to go over well. It will be a big deal for a family. It is as bad any drug.
I see the problem. I don’t see a solution. But I imagine shutting off the Internet is at the top of the list of things our enemies plan to do at some point.
If we can’t communicate with each other, how do we mount a defense? “If we just keep them apart, . . . “
I’d like to clarify something.
“Bombing” the undersea cables would not shut down the Internet.
It’d severely disrupt, though likely not completely stop, intercontinental traffic. But traffic within a continent would be largely unaffected. Facebook, YouTube, etc., would still be available in North America. Most Americans would probably never know it had happened unless someone told them.
People on other continents might see more disruption, depending on how much content they access that resides only in North America. But I believe many of the largest sites such as YouTube, Google, etc., have their data replicated between data centers around the globe. For these sites, you’d probably slowdown or stop this replication for awhile, but they wouldn’t necessarily go down completely.
Taking out the undersea cables might throw a kink into attempts for overseas terror masters to give real time directions to cells in the U.S. But it wouldn’t stop folks already in the States from using the web in instructing, coordinating, or recruiting.
These cables don’t only carry Internet traffic. They also transmit voice, video, and private network data. Are you prepared to disrupt overseas telephone calls? International banking transactions? Wide area networks for virtually all the Fortune 500 corporations, plus countless smaller concerns? NATO communication? Diplomatic traffic? International news video feeds? We’d be cutting ourselves off from the world much more than we’d be disrupting the terrorists.
Finally, it wouldn’t be easy. There are a lot of cables.
Claire,
Trump did talk about it. Also, redEye had a discussion panel about it. Some guy by the name of Rob Long called Trump “grandpa”. You’ve got to take a look.
Trump suggests ‘closing’ Internet to stop terror recruiting
Regards,
Jim
Perhaps we don’t have a similar understanding of the meaning of these words? When the enemy uses civilians as human shields, utter destruction comes awfully close to genocide.
If by “utter destruction” you mean working in the only way this can really be accomplished in today’s world, it involves tactics like the 2006/2007 Iraq “surge” as opposed to obliterating everything with a gotterdammerung, and taking 10 years of up to several divisions on the ground if necessary to weed out the bad stuff root and branch and rebuild a real society. In other words, that oft disparaged term, “nation-building”.
If that is what you mean, I am right with you.
Genocide means the obliteration or attempted obliteration of a race of people. Islamic Jihadis are not a race. Our enemies in this fight are whom I would utterly destroy.
10 years seems a bit short term for the weeding. We still have bases in Germany and Japan, and that’s been much more than 10 years.
Also, who are the “civilians” when mothers strap bombs to their babies so send them to martyrhood?
I’m aware of all of this. I’m suggesting that this is still a much less radical proposal than a nuclear exchange, which is my concern about where this is headed.