A Warning: Defend Undersea Cables

..."Cables can be broken by fishing trawlers, anchors, earthquakes, turbidity currents, and even shark bites.^[30] Based on surveying breaks in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, it was found that between 1959 and 1996, fewer than 9% were due to natural events. In response to this threat to the communications network, the practice of cable burial has developed. The average incidence of cable faults was 3.7 per 1,000 km (620 mi) per year from 1959 to 1979. That rate was reduced to 0.44 faults per 1000 km per year after 1985, due to widespread burial of cable starting in 1980.^[31] Still, cable breaks are by no means a thing of the past, with more than 50 repairs a year in the Atlantic alone,^[32] and significant breaks in 2006, 2008, and 2009."...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable

So, it is only the Russian's who are purported to doing this? The rest of the armed world is not doing this? The USA and UK , China, along with a few others are so good they would never consider disrupting the entire fibre network of other countries?

I believe the UK police force, (London), has 2 vehicles that when parked up as disguised delivery trucks, simply jams all cell phone calls for about 1 sq mile. How many of these units are in the USA or Europe?

So maybe look in your own back yard before making a big deal of others. In my opinion the biggest threat to all mankind is the USA, they even threaten their own people and their own Constitution. China just gets on with it and hacks everyone.

The Russians will only do what has been done to them. They too are vulnerable to fibre optic cable breaks, and most fibres are run with power cables or on transmission lines these days. (OPGW; optical power ground wires), And the biggest user of undersea fibre networks are the banks and money institutions, some research institutions for seismic occurrence measuring but as for an everyday user in a country there is great doubt that the loss of an undersea fibre cable would affect your Face book account, Google searches or blogs.

Having worked in the undersea cable industry for BT Marine and now in a research institute working on the technology I believe there's very little you can do to protect any cable beyond it's existing armour system, burying where possible and relying on the many Kilovolts on the 'King wire' to put off the amateur attackers.

Naval attacks from submarines or surface ships using divers or ARV's are all but impossible to stop, cutting by mechanical means or explosives in co-ordinated attacks disconnecting large sections many miles apart interspersed with further cuts so the usual end on fault location methods founder after joining the landward end cut sections back together will cause further delays in returning the cable to service.

Joining such cables in flat calm conditions takes many hours once the end has been recovered, preped, new section added then the second end recovered and jointed onto the new section, military planners know this, and if it's an Alcatel system cable you can add days for the French to send their inspector to the repair ship before it even leaves port. All the jointing will have be done with ancient Alcatel manual fusion splicers with an at best 10% success rate, rather than the 99% Sumitomo automatic splicers. Add in heavy seas and your looking potentially at weeks of down time...

Satellite monitoring and economic sanctions as punishment, would be standard procedure I should think....paired with redundant cables and alternate location switching strategy, would seem to be the best alternatives for now....these areas leave much room for improvement...I would add communication peace treaties and shared expense repair services, to level the field....on the political side....