Severed Above and Below

Strategic communications now depend on two fragile layers at once: the subsea cables that carry the overwhelming majority of intercontinental traffic and the low-earth-orbit satellite constellations proposed to back them up. This brief reads incidents across both layers as a single connected risk surface, showing how threats to cables above and below the waterline converge into a strategic communications vulnerability that neither the space nor the maritime community sees whole.

• 01Subsea and satellite risk are conventionally studied apart; the adversary treats them as one target set.
• 02Redundancy assumptions built on LEO backup understate correlated, deliberate failure modes.
• 03The cross-sector record exposes convergence that single-domain monitoring cannot.