Spanish media: the submarine cable is the “Achilles' heel” of the West

On October 24, the website of the Spanish newspaper Abéxé published an article titled “The Shadow of Destruction Hides the Underwater Digital Highway” by Alexia Colomba Jerez. The full text is extracted as follows:
Former French Defense Minister Florence Parly once said, “Our submarine cables could be targeted by countries trying to destroy them.” Internet infrastructure is under indirect and subtle threats. A submarine cold war is being waged over undersea fiber optic cables, influenced by corporations and nations forging a new geopolitical narrative.
“They are critical infrastructure because the civilian internet that everyone uses, the functioning of financial markets, and even some military capabilities depend on these submarine fiber optic cable networks,” explained NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. The recent destruction of the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline appears to be a powerful symbolic act, exposing the fragility of the West, and the 475 existing submarine cables are the neglected “Achilles’ heel.”
Héctor Esteban, dean of the School of Telecommunications Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain, pointed out that submarine fiber optic cables are a key part of the physical topology of the entire Internet, and more than 95% of data transmission over the Internet is carried out via submarine fiber optic cables. Using satellites for data transmission is expensive and has significant signal delays.
A month before the conflict in Ukraine broke out, an underwater fiber optic cable connecting Norway to the Arctic was cut for no apparent reason in Svalbard.
The archipelago is one of the gateways for developing Arctic oil and gas resources. In February, a Russian spy submarine was spotted in waters off the coast of Ireland as it passed over a transatlantic undersea cable linking Europe and the United States. The Irish military said the submarine's purpose was not to cut the undersea cables, but to send a message to NATO that they could be cut at any time. Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert at University College London, said that due to the high concentration of technology companies, Ireland is a major hub and could therefore become a future battleground.
José Antonio Morán, head of the Department of Telecommunications Technologies and Services Engineering at the Open University of Catalonia in Spain, pointed out that one of the first strategies at the beginning of the war was to "blind" the enemy. Simply touching a single submarine fiber optic cable would paralyze a large number of companies and cause enormous economic losses.
Pierre Morcos and Colin Wall, fellows at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, point out that cutting submarine fiber optic cables can achieve multiple objectives: disrupting military or government communications in the early stages of a conflict; cutting off internet access for target populations; causing economic disruption for geopolitical purposes; and so on. Cutting submarine cables can achieve all of these objectives simultaneously.